From Pakistan to India: Tracing my grandmother’s refugee journey

After my grandmother died, I turned to online tools to virtually piece together a part of her life she never discussed.

Sometime in mid-August 1947, my grandmother, Abnash Kaur, then about 12 years of age, boarded a train with her family from Lahore in what is now Pakistan. The journey would take her to Kalka, a sleepy Indian town in the foothills of the Himalayas. She would never return to Pakistan. Like an estimated 15 million others, she was a refugee – forced to leave her home as the subcontinent was divided into two separate nation-states: Pakistan and India. Millions of Muslims headed to West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) while millions of Hindus and Sikhs, like my grandmother, migrated to India. One of the largest-ever mass migrations, the Partition left as many as two million people dead and up to 100,000 women kidnapped or raped.