She shut the laptop, slid her feet back in her slippers, swung the door open to her house. She scanned the kitchen, the living room. Shan’s copy of Exodus by Kavita Grover was sitting at the end of her piano bench. Shan had lent it to Chandani a few days earlier. The horror, the despair, the fragility, in the years since the British drew a line that ruptured a people embodied every verse of Exodus. Deepa had put in words so much of what Chandani had heard from her relatives who were old enough to remember that time.

She moved to the sofa, folded her legs underneath her, opened her laptop again. She pulled up the Partition Project website and Harjeet’s photo.

Deepa and Harjeet had one thing in common. They eventually felt compelled to come forward and tell her stories. Deepa had taken a more circuitous route. She first adopted a pen name and published a poetry collection anonymously, but it was still all there, years before she submitted her story to the Partition Project. Harjeet had held it all in, where it festered, ate him alive before he finally gave himself permission to release it in the form of a video right before his death.

She opened her browser, ran her fingers along the keyboard. When Chandani was still living in Jersey City, she used to read “Missed Connections” on Craigslist for the New York area. Oh, the poems, the haikus, the romantic monologues written from one stranger to another! Those smitten by chance encounters had taken such pains to personalize their searches, to fashion particular details of their brief, magical exchanges. In Shan’s search for her grandfather, Shan had not considered how he might have gone looking for Deepa.

What would Amir’s search have looked like?

There was something in the way people communicated their feelings in a blossoming love. On his good days, Harjeet used to leave Chandani post-it notes stuck to the refrigerator every morning before he left for the office. She’d come across them when she made coffee. Back by 6, My Love. Or, Low on milk. Will pick up more on my way home. They brightened her every morning, but she hadn’t saved any of them. What she wouldn’t give to have some of those notes back, now that he was gone.

Chandani removed her glasses and wiped them with the bottom of her shirt. She set them back on her face.

The paper crane. Shan had shown it to her when she returned from Amsterdam. Amir used to write love notes to Deepa hidden in origami.

The origami was the means for their communication, the medium for their love. If Amir was looking for Deepa, perhaps that’s how he would have gone about it.

Chandani typed, Amir Rahim Partition Origami.

The third entry caught her eye. She clicked on it. It was a newspaper article published in the Lahore Daily only four days ago.