BY NEERA BURRA

I don’t know how my mother dealt with the trauma. Was she so numbed by this experience that she couldn’t share it? She was often awake the whole night. Once or twice, she told me that she had continued to hope that what she saw was just a bad dream and if only she could have gone back to Lahore she would have seen her father sitting in his basement office, proof-reading his newspaper. For several years in later life, she would talk about driving to Lahore to sort out her father’s clothes and if I told her that Lahore was now part of another country and she couldn’t just “drive” there, she would get very upset with me. On another occasion, a few years back, when I was telling her that I was planning to buy a new sofa, she said, “Why do you want to spend money? Let’s go to Lahore to the house and get the sofa. No one is using it”.

Link: https://thewire.in/169607/mothers-trauma-partition-shaped-i-view-pakistan/