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During my first trip to Lahore in 2014, I visited Sitara Faiyaz Ali and heard the story of the home she had left behind in Dalhousie during Partition, a cottage with green shutters that her father had built with his own hands. She had shown me a photograph of the house in 1947 1/
Today, August 17, marks 73 years since their departure. In all these years that I have been doing this work, this particularly unique story of a cottage abandoned by one family and then adopted by another is one of the most serendipitous things I have ever recorded. 2/
In the year 1932, Khan Bahadur Muhammad Afzal Husain, purchased land in Dalhousie for the construction of a summer house. By 1943, the cottage with green shutters – Kehkashan, meaning a galaxy – was standing on the eastern aspect of the Upper Bakrota Hill. 3/
The house, accented with stars carved into the ceilings, and a round sun-room, was inspired by Husain's daughters - Sitara, meaning a star and Surya, meaning the sun. In the summer of 1947, Husain's entire family was holidaying in Dalhousie, when Partition was declared. 4/
For three days from August 14, 1947, there fluttered in Dalhousie’s Gandhi Chowk, the flag of Pakistan, for it was rumored that Gurdaspur District (of which Dalhousie was a part) had been awarded to the new Muslim state. 5/
But on August 17, the Tricolour took its place, and all the Muslim families that had gathered for their summer breaks in the hill statio, had to migrate across the border. Sitara Ali, along with her husband and daughter, left with great difficulty for Mianwali. 6/
Afzal Husain, half brother of Sir Fazl-i-Hussain, a founding member of the Unionist Party, could not imagine his Hindustan being divided and was the last to leave Dalhousie. The house was abandoned, until 1953, when it was bought by Baba Surinder Singh Bedi. 7/
In 2017, contacted by the Bedi family after they read a chapter on the house in my book, I traveled to Dalhousie to visit Kehkashan cottage, and found it exceptionally unchanged. On that trip, 70 years after she had left, Sitara Ali was reunited with her home over skype. 8/8
You can read the full piece of their reunion here https://scroll.in/magazine/856901/how-my-book-brought-together-two-families-divided-by-partition-and-united-by-a-house
And view more photographs of the house, the two families and my research here https://www.aanchalmalhotra.com/work/remnants-of-a-separation/
