She walked out of her bedroom a few minutes after I arrived, the pallu of her sari draped, as always, across her right shoulder, Gujarati in style. Shireen smiled at me as she slowly made her way to the couch, her short grey hair resting on her neck. For the next few hours, we sat in the lounge, surrounded by remnants that each told their own story. An over 60-year-old grandfather clock from England, her father’s rocking chair from old Lahore, a table carved by woodworkers in Bombay (now known as Mumbai) several decades ago. Shireen rested her hands, etched with fine lines, in her lap and I noticed her fingers. I could picture a young version of her joyfully playing the piano, a career abruptly halted by the partition of British India in 1947.
“We really belong to both places,” she began. “We belong to the undivided subcontinent. When I was required here, I was here. When I was required there, I was there and I would keep coming and going.”
“Although it wasn’t ever easy to come and go,” Amy added from beside her. “No, it has never been,” Shireen agreed softly.
In November 2012, I sat with Shireen and Amy, two sisters, in their home nestled in an affluent neighborhood in Lahore. I was researching for my first book, The Footprints of Partition. Ever since I had first heard about Shireen and Amy’s story, I had wanted to learn more about their experiences in 1947 and the subsequent decades. Shireen, then in her early 80s, and Amy, 12 years younger, were from the Zoroastrian community, commonly also referred to as the Parsi community.
I had first met them a year prior, as part of an oral history project for The Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP), a non-profit dedicated to cultural and historical preservation. With a dwindling population in Lahore, Shireen and Amy were two people my colleagues and I interviewed to document the history and traditions of Zoroastrians. Since then, we had kept in touch. They were warm and hospitable, introducing my colleagues and me to other members of the community, inviting us to partake in community festivities and opening their home to us.
It was during one of these interactions that I had learned that while Shireen was Indian, her sister, Amy, was Pakistani. Born decades after the partition, amid rising animosity between India and Pakistan, it was difficult for me to imagine two sisters divided by hostile notions of nationality. But such was the reality for families that had been separated in 1947 when the British carved the subcontinent into two, drawing lines haphazardly, slicing villages and towns in half.
Partition had led to one of the largest migrations the world had ever witnessed, with approximately 12 million people crossing the newly established borders of India and Pakistan: Muslims moving west and Hindus and Sikhs east. In official history though, little attention was paid to what happened to the communities caught in between. What were the lived implications for people like Shireen and Amy? What did it mean for one to become Indian and the other Pakistani? What did it mean to have a sisterhood partitioned?
As is described in the book, A White Trail: A Journey into the Heart of Pakistan’s Religious Communities, by Haroon Khalid: “It is believed that upon the spread of Islam to Persia in the seventh century CE, a small band of Zoroastrians – a dominant religion in the region until then – set out from Persia and found their way to Sanjan, a city in present-day Gujrat, India. Upon arriving, the leader of the community sent a message to the ruler and asked him for permission to live there. When the request was declined, the leader asked for a bowl of milk and some sugar. He mixed a handful of sugar into the milk and sent it back, with a message that the Parsi community would be like sugar in the milk: invisible yet present. He promised that his community would blend in, adopting local customs and culture, while never preaching or converting others to their religion.
“The king was impressed and the community was allowed to settle. They were eventually given the title of “Parsi” – the people who came from Persia. Upholding the promise made by their leader, the community took on the Gujarati language and culture, including traditional Gujarati clothes, food and songs.”
Shireen’s sari, tied in Gujarati style, with the pallu on the right as opposed to the left, as it is worn in other parts of India, was reminiscent of this promise made far away from Lahore, a long time ago. Back in that room, she told me that at the time of partition, her family was already long settled in Lahore. “Our father would have never shifted anywhere as this was where he had lived, his forefathers had lived; this was his home. He also believed that the politics of the state had nothing to do with us; that whether a Muslim or Hindu government was in place, we Parsis would remain unaffected.”
This belief was shared by others from the community too. As violence broke out between Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, Parsis remained neutral, and convinced that they would continue to live in Pakistan regardless of who came to power in the region, blending in again as they had once done before. But the events of 1947 and thereafter would soon leave an impact on the community.
In the post-partition subcontinent, as religious and national identities blurred – with India being perceived over time as a Hindu nation and Pakistan as a Muslim nation, religious minorities have faced social, political and economic repercussions. Over time, the Parsi community has shrunk significantly. In 2013, it was reported that there were only 35 Parsis left in Lahore. Across Pakistan, there are fewer than 1,000. While some married outside of the community, converting to other religions, others migrated to countries in North America or Europe.
In Shireen and Amy’s case, the repercussions of partition were felt even more personally and rather soon after 1947. Born in 1930 in Bombay – where her mother was originally from – and raised in Lahore, Shireen spent her early years familiar with both cities. She completed her education in Lahore, studying with Hindu, Muslim and Sikh classmates at the Cathedral School. But come summer, she and Amy would board the Frontier Mail with their mother to visit her maternal home in Bombay.
“Our mother was never able to let go of her emotional ties with the city…whenever we would go there, she was so much more at ease, so relaxed over there,” Shireen told me. After partition, however, Shireen believed that her mother felt “a wedge had been built between her early life in Bombay and her life here in Lahore. Of course, she eventually reconciled with living here but emotionally she was always there, in Bombay, even until she died in 2004.”
Shireen, though, did not feel the same rupture as her mother, not initially. Lahore, after all, was where her school, friends and immediate family were. She thought she’d still have a chance to visit Bombay, even if it now strangely lay in another country, across the freshly carved border. As a 17-year-old student passionate about the piano, she was more preoccupied with gearing up for her music examinations, scheduled to take place in Lahore right around the time of partition. But with Punjab being one of the two provinces cut in half in 1947, the city of Lahore was marked with violence and unrest and the…