All the women in my family were displaced all their lives: the two partitions and then marriages. For the last two years, I have been looking for the houses they left behind.
1. My mother always talks about her girlhood home. My grandmother does the same. They talk about their paternal homes with a longing I have never heard them bring to any other subject. They talk about a leisure that was theirs.There are almost no photographs of my mother as a young woman. I have searched. There is a wedding photo—stiff, formal, her eyes looking past the lens. There may be one or two others, but they are either lost or destroyed, like her girlhood home.My grandmother often tried to remember the days before the war, the days of her first happiness, when she played in the courtyard without a worry of the world; my grandfather then was still a distant night’s mirage. A year ago, when I finally managed to traverse across the barbed wire to find her home, it cannot be proven anymore; my grandmother has no use for her old happiness. But now, I have come to see it as that. I can see clearly how it happened when my grandfather offered his hand and said, “Nothing will be any different. Take my hand, nothing will ever harm you now.”Whenever I asked about her marriage, my grandmother always said, “I cannot forget my home”. Whenever I asked about the Partition, my grandmother always said, “I cannot forget my people!”The riots and wars always came like a flood. Men and houses died like flies. But my grandmother didn’t. Some women didn’t, and for them, only a week has passed since.After her marriage, my mother never saw the sky as blue again. So, from then on, she made kites, as she did in her girlhood terrace, and buried them between her petticoats. For her, they never ceased to be not. For her, when they were marrying her, she could still fly, or become spring blossoms, or hope, or an upheaval.
Sree is a Kolkata-based writer and inter-disciplinary artist with a Master’s in Film Studies from Jadavpur University and five years of writing experience for commercial films, web series, and documentaries. Her artistic practice explores memory, queerness, and displacement through photography, text, and archival materials, weaving personal experience into socio-political landscapes.
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