Maybe you’re the ghost that I think is haunting me? If so, feel free to say hi. Mama says you were a pretty bad-ass lady and I wish I could have gotten to meet you. No home, no income and no money to start a new life in a country that wasn’t technically your home. By the time you made it, you had nothing left. Mama always tells me the story of how you grabbed your kids and your husband, packed a little tin full of gold and used it to pay people along the way as you crossed the border. The only stories that have been passed down to me have been through Mama who told me you told them to her when she was growing up and would spend summers at your farm. Nani has never talked to me about what happened. The 14 million people who had to pack up and leave their possessions, homes, friends and sometimes even family behind.

Everyone always talks about the liberation of India with pride or the end of a colonial rule but they always forget about the 14 million people who were displaced. Sometimes its disheartening that something that impacted my family and 16 million other people so much isn’t really talked about. Reading it has made me incredibly pensive because the entire time I was reading it, I kept thinking that I was reading your and grandma’s story too. I recently read The Night Diary, which is currently the only book I am calling a favorite of this year and I’ve read 86 books so far. I am not the best at writing letters that are also going to be on display but you know, I am trying. (Updating my review with the letter I wrote to my great-grandma as part of the blog tour) Told through Nisha's letters to her mother, The Night Diary is a heartfelt story of one girl's search for home, for her own identity.and for a hopeful future. But even if her country has been ripped apart, Nisha still believes in the possibility of putting herself back together. The journey is long, difficult, and dangerous, and after losing her mother as a baby, Nisha can't imagine losing her homeland, too. When Papa decides it's too dangerous to stay in what is now Pakistan, Nisha and her family become refugees and embark first by train but later on foot to reach her new home. Half-Muslim, half-Hindu twelve-year-old Nisha doesn't know where she belongs, or what her country is anymore. The divide has created much tension between Hindus and Muslims, and hundreds of thousands are killed crossing borders. It's 1947, and India, newly independent of British rule, has been separated into two countries: Pakistan and India. In the vein of Inside Out and Back Again and The War That Saved My Life comes a poignant, personal, and hopeful tale of India's partition, and of one girl's journey to find a new home in a divided country

Veera hiranandani the night diary