Publisher Ritu Menon writes about living in Delhi with her parents after the Partition

When my mother left Lahore to join my father, now posted to Delhi, she didn’t know that she would never see her hometown again. She didn’t know that our house in the Purana Qila barracks is where various members of her immediate family would arrive, in August 1947, including my grandmother, who walked out of her home, leaving behind a year’s supply of grain, jars of pickles, all her clothes and household goods, and her house keys, with a neighbour, saying she’d return soon.

She never went back. In time, the family dispersed and she divided the rest of her days between her two sons, staying with each by rotation. Independence, she would say bitterly, had rendered her homeless. That wasn’t the whole of it, though. In Lahore, she lived in the midst of an extended family in the family home compound, and although widowed, ran her household as she chose, independently. Her married daughters visited, had their children in her home (I was the only one of my siblings to have been born in a hospital, after Independence), and she made sure that her youngest son had enough resources to be able to study in England.

Now, she lived intermittently with this same...

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