family reunion

Love Across Borders: A Family’s Journey in Time and Traditions—Part Two

Azam’s memoir explores the complexities of partition, highlighting loss, reunion, cultural exchange, and the power of human connection in a family’s journey across borders, exclusively for Different Truths.

Read More here https://www.differenttruths.com/love-across-borders-a-familys-journey-in-time-and-traditions-part-two/

BAD-DAD AND UNCLE Choudhry Mohammed Hussein, his boss, weren’t just content with a sumptuous tea party to reset our emotional equilibrium. They took the necessary steps for us to be able to claim a semblance of partial victory over defeat for the sake of our life-long mental health.

Cashing in favours, they cajoled and bullied an exit and entry visa for one-mum and two children for India, though not Kashmir. The family from Kashmir would come down to Indian Punjab. Although we would not be able to visit one-mum’s parental home on Residency Road, Jammu, we would be able to meet our blood relatives. It was some sort of a bureaucratically paranoid one-parent-two-children type exit visa, also ensuring that Bad-dad and bhaijan staying back would guarantee against any hanky-panky us three might get up to in India. Or, if it was all five of us, we might just cross the border and announce our defection!

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Love, Hope and Heartbreak: A 1960-Journey Through History—Part I,

by Azam Gill

In 1960, the Indo-Pakistani conflict impacted Azam’s family reunion, highlighting the enduring bonds of family across borders and the human cost of political strife. An exclusive

WHEN my mother, sister and I went to India, it was still five years short of the ill-thought out and unnecessary 1965 war which ensured that cousins reeling from the fratricidal madness of the 1947 massacres, topped by the 1948 Kashmir War, would remain mired in deadly squabbles over self-identification, self-image and real estate. And ‘sir jee,’ the now ubiquitous cross-border, visa-free form of address linking vernacular Urdu and vernacular Hindi speakers in a sycophantic doublet had not even been conceived.

In 1959, General Ayub Khan, the President of Pakistan, had promoted himself to Field Marshal, not because of any laurels in battle field generalship, but only because he could. There was nobody to oppose him and, if there had been, he was sure that the result of the impending 1965 war predicted by his ‘son’ Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, progeny of a ‘Sir,’ brought up by an English nanny and, groomed by good old Berkley and Oxford, would take care of it.

We all know how that went down!

Read More here https://www.differenttruths.com/love-hope-and-heartbreak-a-1960-journey-through-history-i/