Shan scrolled a little lower to a heading entitled “Delhi.” It listed several photos with names and links to testimonies. A Kavita Grover stood against a wall in cotton pants and a long, loose blouse. A casual salwar suit. Her hands were behind her back, her legs crossed at her ankles. Shan magnified the photo. Her mouth turned up at the corners in a slight smile. Her wide-set eyes stared off to the side. She had a short forehead, thick eyebrows.

She was young, and familiar. Her profile matched Deepa’s, Vijay’s, and even Shan’s—a perfect continuity of gene dominance. This was her grandmother.

Shan tapped on the link. Deepa’s life story appeared. She had submitted it in late 2014, less than three years ago. Which meant she could still be alive today.

Deepa had written about her home in New Delhi, her parents’ medical clinic, her father’s political views, his marches alongside Gandhi for a unified India. She described the increasing hostilities in their neighborhood as Independence approached, the raging fire that had consumed their medical clinic, the moment she realized both of her parents were trapped inside.

I regret, some days, that I didn’t force my way into that building, not so much to rescue them, but to die with them.

Shan gasped. She knew her great-grandparents had died tragically. She had no idea how or why, that Deepa, their only child, had witnessed their horrific end. She wondered whether her own father had ever known this.

At the end of her statement was her bio.

Kavita Grover teaches poetry at Amsterdam College, the Netherlands.

Gertrude was right. Deepa had moved out of London. And now Shan knew exactly where she was.

She took screen shots of the entire passage and returned to the organization’s home page. Over the past three years, the Partition Project has collected over 2,000 testimonies from people in their seventies, eighties and nineties. Time is running out to record as many surivors’ stories as possible.

She clicked on the header, Map. It listed all of the regions of the subcontinent. Her cursor moved over Bangladesh, Pakistan, India. The numbers reflected how many stories the Project had collected from each region to date.

What if her grandfather’s story lingered here in the database alongside her grandmother’s?

She clicked on Delhi. Typed Amir Rahim in the search bar.

0 results.

She remembered, then, her father’s box and the trip he planned on taking to Lahore.

She clicked on the Pakistani city, typed Amir Rahim.

3 results. None of the survivors had a birth year that would have made them a teenager during Partition.