Indian woman to revisit Pakistan home
WHEN 92-year old Indian citizen Reena Varma visits her childhood home in Pakistan, for the first time in 75 years, she will be the only one of her family to make it back home since they left shortly before partition divided the two nations.
‘My dream came true,’ she said, adding her sister had died without ever being able to fulfil her wish to return to the home in the city of Rawalpindi they left when Varma was 15 years old.
The family of five siblings fled to the Western Indian city of Pune shortly before partition in August 1947.
Although Varma was able to travel once to the eastern Pakistani city of Lahore as a young woman, she has never been back to Rawalpindi. Her parents and siblings have since died.
Crossing into Pakistan by road last week after decades of attempts to get a visa, she felt a wave of emotion.
‘When I crossed the Pakistan-India Border and saw the signs for Pakistan and India, I got sentimental,’ she said, speaking during a stop in Lahore. ‘Now, I cannot predict how
I will react when I reach Rawalpindi and see my ancestral home in the street.’
Varma’s family was among the millions of people whose lives were disrupted in 1947, when departing
British Indian colonial administrators ordered the creation of two countries - one mostly Muslim and one majority Hindu.
A mass migration followed, marred by violence and bloodshed, as about 15 million Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, fearing discrimination, swapped countries in a political upheaval that cost more than a million lives.
India and Pakistan have fought three wars since 1947, and relations remain tense, particularly over the
disputed Kashmir region.