In February 2020, I was sitting in my neighbour’s living room, recording the story of her family’s migration from Lahore to Delhi during th...
In February 2020, I was sitting in my neighbour’s living room, recording the story of her family’s migration from Lahore to Delhi during the 1947 Partition. Raj Suneja is ninety years old, but both her storytelling skills and attention to detail are things to marvel at. Once deep in the conversation, she effortlessly recalled anecdotes about her father, Amolak Ram Kapur, one of the seven lawyers defending Bhagat Singh and twenty-seven others in the trial for the Lahore Conspiracy Case in 1929.
She spoke fondly of their home on Fane Road, the akhara, the garden, their two cars, cows and a tanga, and how they were the first family in their neighbourhood to get a Godrej refrigerator. She told me how unable to catch up to the curriculum of her new school in Delhi, she ended up writing the story of their migration in her exam paper. She took out old newspapers and journals written in longhand, books mentioning her father’s cases, and proudly showed me the framed photograph of him on the side table. It was evident that for those few hours of our meeting, she remained suspended in the memories of a pre-partitioned childhood.
This is what I do as an...
