What I learned from Veera Hiranandani’s The Night Diary
By Annavajhula J C Bose, Shri Ram College of Commerce*
November 9, 2021
I knew very little about the partition of British India into India and Pakistan, which lasted from about July 14 to November 10, 1947. In the early 1980s, when I was an M.Phil. student at the Center for Development Studies, in Kerala, India, I had heard that the late I.S. Gulati, a teacher I revered, had fled with his family from Pakistan. The family spent their early years in India living in a refugee camp in Delhi. But I had never chatted about the partition with Gulati, who earned a Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics.
During the partition, an estimated 14 million people crossed the India Pakistan borders, with Hindus fleeing Pakistan and Muslims fleeing India. At least one million people died, mainly killed in attacks by gangs from the other religion.
This is the historical context for Veera Hiranandani’s The Night Diary.The story, narrated in the form of letters written by Nisha to her deceased mother, skillfully weaves the journey of Nisha’s family as refugees with the largest mass migration in history.
Nisha, 12-years-old, is half-Muslim and half-Hindu. Her father Suresh, a doctor, is a Hindu and her mother Faria is a Muslim. Suresh and Faria married in secret and moved, from the villages where they were born, to a far-away city. Their families, who were against the marriage, had ostracized them.
Nisha and her twin brother Amil came into this world on the day when their mother left it. One day Suresh confides to his children, “Even though we had many Muslim friends and neighbours, it never matters when it comes to marriage…If someone comes into the hospital, I treat them no matter who they are or what religion they are. When I open a body up, I see the blood, the muscles, the bones, all the same in every person…Jinnah and Nehru, they are secular men, yet we need two countries instead of one because of religion. They are leading us toward this—this slicing, this partitioning of India.”
The family makes the long and dangerous journey, by foot and train, from Mirpur Khas, in the Sindh province of Pakistan, to Jodhpur in India. Nisha and Amil feel helpless, struggling to make sense of what they are suddenly forced to face. They wonder what to be free from the British means. One day Amil, exhausted from their walk towards safety, explodes in anger, “If Gandhiji was walking with us, could he tell me why we have all been sent into the wild like a bunch of starving goats?” Nisha too has lots of questions: “Sometimes I don’t really feel anything, not Hindu, not Muslim. Is that a bad thing to feel?”
In the midst of all the chaos, fear, and uncertainty, Nisha turns to cooking, finding wisdom in her father’s belief that making food always brings people together. And Amil, following his mother who was a painter, starts drawing. These activities bring them moments of happiness.
The twins feel fortunate to have the loyal and caring company of their Muslim cook Kazi, and their maternal uncle Rashid, who helps them during their journey out of Pakistan. Rashid tells Nisha that she has her mother’s mouth and he tells Amil that he has his mother’s eyes. He also tells them that their mother loved them, before they were born. This was what Nisha had always wanted to hear. As she says, “It almost made everything we had been through worth it. The tearing of India…Then opening of something new, of this. You loved us, Mama.”
One day, during the journey, the twins observe the brave way their father tackles a potential murderer by talking to him about the gospel of Gandhiji—“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
After reaching Jodhpur, where nobody is trying to kill them, Nisha writes to her mother, “Maybe the gods were watching over us…men, women, and children—have been killed in unthinkable ways…trains pulled up to stops filled with dead people from both sides of the border…Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, they have all done awful things…I want to know who I can blame, Mama, for the nightmares that wake me up every night now.”
In his 1971 book, Beware, Soul Brother, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, rattled by the war in Biafra, published a poem called “Refugee Mother and Child.”
“in her eyes the ghost of
a mother’s pride as she combed
the rust-coloured hair left on his skull
and then—singing in her eyes—
began carefully to part it…
In another life this would have been
a little daily act of no consequence
before his breakfast and school; now
she did it like putting flowers
on a tiny grave.”
This is indeed the harsh realities faced by many refugees, including those in Afghanistan and Yemen today. Hiranandani’s story though has a happy ending.
When Kazi escapes from Pakistan to unexpectedly unite with her family, Nisha is delighted, “As I went to sleep that night, I felt peaceful in a way I never had before…Sometimes I think about why we get to be alive when so many others died for no reason walking the same walk, crossing the same border…I will never understand, as long as I live, how a country could change overnight from only a line drawn.”
Veera Hiranandani was raised in a small town in Connecticut. Her mother is Jewish-American and father a Hindu immigrant from India. She is a graduate of George Washington University and studied fiction writing at Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, a New York City suburb, where she now teaches creative writing. Earlier she was an editor at Simon & Schuster publishers in New York.
Hiranandani’s first book, The Whole Story of Half a Girl, was published in 2013. In September this year, her historical fiction book How to Find What You’re Not Looking For was published. Both these books feature young girls from mixed heritage families and their challenges of identity and belonging.
Hiranandani has dedicated The Night Diary to her father. The experiences of the fictional family, depicted in the novel, are loosely based on that of his family. During the partition, her father, together with his parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, travelled from Mirpur Khas, Pakistan, to Jodhpur, India, just like Nisha and her family in the novel.
“My father was very young and his memories (of seeking refuge during the partition) are very childlike; which is why it made such sense for me to try to see this story through a younger person’s eyes,” Hiranandani told the National Public Radio. “It was always this very compelling frightening thing that my father went through. And I wanted to fully understand it and I never could just from talking to him.”
Today, there are about 83 million children, women and men who have fled from violence, war, hunger and extreme poverty. This number of refugees, around the world, does not include the millions displaced for similar reasons within countries.
Reading The Night Diary, I was able to grasp some of the physical and emotional traumas faced by them, and perhaps Gulati, while trying to hold back my tears.
