Of late, I fear the blush of dawn, The day it yields is a rash – Of wild stories, For the fingers to gouge and scratch. Dusk is bloody...
Of late, I fear the blush of dawn,
The day it yields is a rash –
Of wild stories,
For the fingers to gouge and scratch.
Dusk is bloody therefore.
Night gives no respite”
The visceral unease of these lines, a poem by one of Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s characters, is a rather accurate summation of the sense of discomfort that Lahore forces the reader to confront. India’s partition, that moment of political, cultural and social rupture that irrevocably fractured a land and its people, is the subject of Someshwar’s Partition trilogy.
Lahore, the first book in the series, takes a close look at the partition of Punjab. It moves between ordinary lives in Laur (Lahore) and the political manoeuvrings of those at the forefront of the independence movement. With surprising ease, the narrative shifts between the lanes of a city caught in the grip of communal tension and rioting and the world of Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Lord Mountbatten, and other heavyweights forging new corridors of power in Delhi.
The narrative opens in early 1947, with the British Empire in decline post WWII and willing, or browbeaten enough, finally, to relinquish its hold on India. With an interim government in place, a promised transfer of power was scheduled for mid-1948. Jinnah’s call for Pakistan drawn...
