One afternoon, I selected a book and handed it to my grandfather. He looked at it, hesitated ever so slightly, and then announced its name Phundne, which meant ‘tassels’, he said. He told me it was a collection of short stories by Saadat Hasan Manto—and the story he chose to read to me was called Toba Tek Singh.

By way of backdrop, my grandfather explained that this story was set in a lunatic asylum, a few years after the Partition. It began with the governments of Pakistan and India having decided to swap their lunatics along religious lines, just as they had done with the rest of their people—so that all Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims ended up on the ‘right’ side of the border. I remember thinking this a rather silly plotline, but there was little else to do, so I listened. Manto’s dark satire as to who then were the real lunatics was lost on me, of course.

I can still recall my grandfather’s voice, assuming different intonations as he read. He had me in splits as he muttered the well-known rant of the story’s protagonist: ‘Upar di gur gur di annexe di be dhiyana di mung di daal of di Pakistan and Hindustan of di durr phitey munh.’ I had no clue of its context, but it sounded nonsensically amusing. Between peals of laughter, I looked up to notice that my grandfather had stopped reading. He sat slumped forward, his hands covering his face, his shoulders convulsing as he sobbed.

I had never seen my grandfather cry before—or ever after—but that day, my otherwise fearless grandfather, who had braved lathi charges and prison in the fight for independence, wept. At a loss for what to do, I went to call my grandmother. In stunned silence, I watched her comforting him as if he were a little child, murmuring ‘Chhado, mitti pao’—let it go, bury it. And then I quietly left the room. Later that evening, I remember hiding that book behind all his other books, so I would never happen to take it out again. And never have to see my grandfather cry.

What I didn’t do was ever ask him what caused those tears. The regret still leaves me feeling empty.

As the years went by, my grandparents shared countless anecdotes about their early days in undivided India. The pranks they would get up to with their friends at school and the trouble it got them into with their teachers and parents. The uncooked legs of lamb that they would sneak into the kitchen garden to be slow-roasted overnight in the tandoor pit, without my strictly vegetarian great-grandmother’s knowledge. The street plays they would stage to protest against British rule. Their stories were peppered with fond anecdotes of their neighbours—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsis—who had lived next door for generations. I would listen, enraptured, piecing together the fragments in my head, imagining the people and places that once made up their world.

Yet, what they never spoke about was the events surrounding the Partition itself. Perhaps it was just too painful to reopen the wounds. Perhaps, as refugees, grief was a luxury they could ill afford. Or perhaps, gaining independence had demanded centre stage instead. I sometimes wonder, on each Independence Day, did they also quietly mourn who and what they’d lost in the aftermath?