The Line They Drew Through Us
Following the success of Safiyyah’s War, a remarkable story about the co-operation of Muslims and Jews in World War 2 Paris (see HNR 106), Hiba Noor Khan’s second novel explores the partition of India and its effects. An Author’s Note makes clear her feelings about the way ‘the subcontinent was torn into three new countries: India, Pakistan and Bangladesh’ with arbitrary invisible lines drawn by the British who, as the story later demonstrates, ‘sowed the seeds of division between communities, then watered them for decades.’
This history forms the backdrop to the lives of three children, born on the same day in 1935, who are destined to become best friends, although they are from varying religious backgrounds. Jahan is Muslim, Ravi is Hindu, and Muslim Aisha is ‘given the affectionate nickname of Lakshmi … after the Hindu goddess of good fortune.’ We are told that ‘By their twelfth birthday, one of them had disappeared, one of them had fled, and the last was left only with their memories and a belief in miracles.’
We pick up their collective story in 1946, when they are eleven. We see the warm relationships within and between their families and the respect for each other’s religions and culture, much of which is held in common. We experience the sights, sounds and smells (especially in the mouth-watering descriptions of food!) of the city of Lahore and of the village near there where the families spend time and the children first meet.
This is a significant addition to the slowly growing number of novels that examine the colonial past from the viewpoint of the subjected people. Some do this through an imaginative alternate historical fantasy lens focusing on the 19th century, while others, like this one, realistically bring alive the confusion and violence perpetrated by partition.
