When I watched Main Vaapas Aaunga with school friends recently, it felt almost as if my ancestors were asking me to come back home to Lahore.

A young couple sitting next to me were asking one another whether the story was based on fact or fiction. My answer to them: regardless of the details, the movie did capture the texture of some lives affected by Partition, such as those of my father and mother.

In many ways my parents’ story is quite different from that of Keenu and Afsan in the film. Unlike Keenu and Afsan, they were able to find a life together after Partition. They were both Hindu. And neither of them expressed a wish to return to the Lahore they had grown up in.

For my mother it was fear; for my father it would be like visiting a ghost.

But there were other resonances. Like Keenu, my mother developed severe dementia late in life, and in that phase, she became lost in Lahore. One day she looked really busy. I asked her what she was doing. She said, “I have a lot of work to do. Everything is all over the place. Taji’s clothes have to be put back in the cupboard”. (The family always referred to her father as Taji, short for Pitaji.)

A few days later she said, “Are you coming with me to Lahore?” I tried to explain that she needed a visa. She got really upset. “You are always so negative,” she said. “I am driving with William [her driver] to Lahore. I will go alone if you don’t want to come.”

Some months later, I told her I was going shopping for a sofa. “Don’t buy one. I have one at home,” she said. “You can take it.” The sofa she had in mind had been left behind in Rattigan Road more than 60 years ago.

Alok Sarin, our wonderful psychiatrist, told us that we should not contradict her. She died in June 2019 with memories of Lahore firmly etched in her mind.

My mother was a grandchild of the well-known public figure, Professor Ruchi Ram Sahni and grew up in a large compound on 22 Rattigan Road, adjoining Bradlaugh Hall. By June........

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