Talking of Films and Other Little Things:

Partition and the Geography of Memory

Whatever was around me Grass and pebbles Reptiles Broken temples Whatever was around me Exile Folklores Solitary sunsets Whatever was around me Destroyed. — Shankha Ghosh, Punarbashan (Rehabilitation)

A Self-Generated Poster of the Essay

How do we define home, and how do we define the absence of one? You had to run away from what you had known as home since childhood because soon enough, you learnt that this home had nothing left to give you. This whole place was too small to create something new of its own; your hometown was too old to grow into itself.

My Hometown

All it could do was keep. It could keep your childhood, it could keep your old school shoes, your first bicycle, the sweaters that had lived through all the winters of your life until they lost their colours. Is that what home is? You come to some faraway place.

You live in a room in that faraway place. Every day, at the end of the day, you walk back to it. Every day, you make it look a little more like yourself — is that what we call home? Then you close your eyes and see the home you have always dreamt of in your memory, the home that has been absent everywhere and yet has always lived within your history.

…there is a memory of that home, a memory that has no roots, a memory that wanders like a refugee.

You know how that home looks when sunrays rain all over it. You know how the mango tree by the gate grows with you. You know the order in which the cups and plates are kept in the kitchen. You know your way to every room in the dark.

You know where your cat sleeps on the veranda. You know where, on the rooftop, the bird you last heard in your childhood has made a nest. You know the sound of the stairs when someone walks up to your door and yet, you have never been in that home, and yet, that home exists nowhere. There is no road that takes you there.

An Early Winter Dawn in Kolkata, from the Room I once Lived In

We’ve never seen the Partition. Rightfully so, the Partition is not something that belongs to us. It has always belonged to those who lived through it. It will find its place beside them on their deathbeds. They have carried their memories the way I carry the geography of a home. But do memories die when people die, or do they outlive us and linger in everything?

The Welsh people have a word for the nostalgia of a home that exists nowhere, that has never existed anywhere at any point in time, nor ever will. Yet there is a memory of that home, a memory that has no roots, a memory that wanders like a refugee. The homes that people left behind during Partition slowly became refugee memories.

Bangladeshi Refugees After Bengal’s Partition

The geography of their lost homes has long been buried in some faraway place. The memory has been scattered, torn apart, fenced off, rebuilt, and remapped, and yet it remains. Like some untraced branch of a river, it lingers everywhere with the hope of finding its place.

Agha Shahid Ali writes, “…this stream has branched off from the Indus, in Little Tibet, just to find itself where Porus miles down (there it will join the Jhelum) lost to the Greeks. It will become, in Pakistan, the Indus again.”

“Ijaazat hain toh, jaau?”

When Roohdar finds a random Kashmiri man standing by his door, yet not entering, he searches him the way the military does, asks him for his documents of citizenship, and then orders him to come inside. Only then does the man slowly walk into his home.

Roohdar later explains that Kashmiris suspected of participating in separatist movements, picked up and detained for long periods without trial, become so accustomed to surveillance that they will not even enter their own homes until they receive an order to do so.

Refugees On Their Way To India After Partition

The people who had to run away from their homes to refugee camps because borders had to find their place, the ones who were soon handed passports and legal documents that required them to seek permission to visit their own land because governments had placed a border between their homes and their existence — they became so accustomed to the act of seeking permission to visit their homes that even at their last breath they had to ask for an ijaazat to leave and be with the ones they loved in another world. Perhaps they never truly discovered how far the borders stretched. The history of refugees still had to ask for permission to find its own soil.

A Palestanian Family in the End Credits Scene of the Film

Yet the geography of memory remains unfenced. Refugees, like folklores, travel across generations and find themselves relevant in some part of the world every time. Punjab, Bengal, Syria, Palestine; the fences keep finding a voice of power. The refugees, like some undying hope, almost like fiction itself, keep marching as centuries go by.

Movie: Main Vaapas Aaunga Dir: *Imtiaz Ali Photo Credits: Youthkiawaaz, Blind Magazine*

This essay is an original work by the author. Kindly do not reproduce or republish without permission. First published on Medium, 2026.