Last summer, on a long train journey from Mumbai to Jaipur, I had a conversation with an elderly man that I still think about. His name was Harish, and he was eighty-two and travelling alone to visit his daughter. We were sharing a compartment, and the journey took about eighteen hours.
It started when he asked me to help him open a stubborn bottle of water. Then he noticed I was reading a book about the history of the Partition, and he said quietly that he'd lived through it. He'd been six years old when his family left Lahore in 1947. For the next few hours, he told me about the journey his family made, how they lost almost everything and how they slowly rebuilt their lives in Delhi. Later, we talked about lighter things: his career as a railway engineer, his love of old Hindi films, and his opinion that young people today eat too much fast food, which made me laugh.
I learned several things from that conversation. The first was historical; hearing about the Partition from someone who'd experienced it made the history in my book feel real in a way that no textbook could. The second was about resilience. He'd lost his home as a child, yet he spoke without bitterness, and he said that the most important thing is to keep moving forward. And the third was simply that older people have extraordinary stories, but we rarely ask them. Since then, I've made more effort to talk to my own grandparents, and I've started recording their memories.