The Crossing

ALESHA FARAZ

****

Daastan Publishing 2025

First Published in Pakistan by Daastan PVT LTD

House # A-41, Madni Street, Lala Rukh, Wah Cantt, Punjab 47040

www.daastan.com

www.meraqissa.com

Text copyrights © Alesha Faraz

Book Design Copyright © Alesha Faraz

Edited By: Mariam Rizvi

The moral rights of the writer, illustrator, and editor have been asserted.

All rights reserved

This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or -distributed in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This novel is set during the Partition of the Indian subcontinent and reflects the experiences of families affected by displacement and loss.

Print: 978-627-526-068-4

E-Book: 978-627-526-069-1

*****

For the families who lived through 1947,

and for the generations that came after.

****

CONTENTS

1. Innocence. 1
2. Counting Doors. 14
3. Three Knocks. 30
4. Instructions. 54
5. The Rupture. 65
6. Absence. 82
7. The Road. 88
8. Arrival Without Rest. 93
9. Fever on the Road. 99
10. Names. 103
11. What Was Held. 111
12. Stopping. 117
13. Far Enough. 123
14. How Days Are Made. 128

15.Names That Answer. 134

16. Evening Work. 140
17. Living With It. 150

Vocabulary. 164

Note from the Author. 169

About the Author. 170

CHAPTER ONE:

Innocence

Triplicane woke up to the smell of rain and cardamom. The first August shower had left the lanes bright and trembling, each mango leaf beaded with water like tiny glass bangles. Steam rose from tea stalls and curled into the sky. A child’s kite lay sodden on a roof, folded like sleep. For a brief hour the neighborhood moved with the gentle care of people tending something they loved.

Yasmeen woke with the feeling the town had been paused. At eleven she carried a private pocket of certainties: how Ammi liked her tea, how Abbu whistled soft and low when he read the paper, the exact way the grocer measured turmeric with two fingers and a theatrical bow. The world had a rhythm; she had learned its beats. That morning the rhythm felt thinner. It tugged at her like the single string of a broken kite.

She padded across the cool flagstones to their sitting room. The radio sat on its small wooden table, a heavy machine that filled the house with the distant cities’ weather. The announcer’s voice usually arrived like a friendly uncle. Today it was brittle and clipped. “…unrest continues in various provinces. Curfews extended. Reports of casualties in multiple districts…”

Ammi turned the dial down as if closing a window in a storm. Her fingers stayed on the knob. They trembled a touch. Yasmeen watched the tremor without a name for it. Adults kept danger like a secret, she had learned; they wrapped it in ordinary things so it would feel smaller.

Outside, the lane seemed unchanged but something in it had shifted. It kept its neat thresholds and drying laundry, but the silence was too careful, as though the morning were trying not to draw attention to itself. Vendors called prices in low, clipped voices. Mothers held their children close, their arms an armour that felt more protective than tender. Rain puddles gleamed like mirrors no one wanted to peer into.

Near the corner, the rickshaw pullers clustered, not trading jokes but passing news in small urgent bursts. Hands made quick, sharp shapes as men spoke in the language of worry. Among them was the tall Sikh with the bright blue turban who used to pretend to roar for Yasmeen when she was very small. He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. When he smiled at her it reached only halfway.

Yasmeen had no words for the change. She did not know that far to the north, trains were already beginning to arrive with more bodies than luggage. She only felt the lane holding its breath, an unnamable hush settling like dust.

A small clay diya sat on the Ansari doorstep, looking out of place in the morning light. It was the kind of little lamp children painted for fun before Diwali: saffron along the rim, maroon circling the sides, a thin line of gold trying to be neat. Yasmeen picked it up gently. The paint was still sticky in places, as though the hands that made it hadn’t waited for it to dry.

“Arre, you found it,” Sehgal Saab called from his shop, leaning on the half-door with his towel over one shoulder. His smile softened the lane the way warm chapati softens butter. “Lata brought it yesterday. She said you admired hers in school, so she made one for you too.”

That made sense. Yasmeen and Lata spent hours drawing in the same patch of shade at school, trading colours and secrets. The little lamp carried the quiet sweetness of a gift made by a friend.

For a moment everything felt ordinary again. Boys argued over marbles, the milkman shouted prices, and the mango tree shook its wet leaves like bangles on a dancer’s arm. Yasmeen imagined the diya glowing on the terrace at dusk, a tiny light shared between two families who had always lived as neighbours, not lines on a map.

Inside, she set the diya on the shelf near the hearth. It looked small there, but certain, the way children’s promises feel certain.

Ammi, stirring the tea, touched the lamp’s rim lightly. Her fingers paused on the cool clay, and something flickered across her face: affection, fear, or maybe memory.

“Keep it safe, beta,” she murmured. The words carried more weight than a simple warning about fragile clay. Yasmeen didn’t yet know why. She didn’t know some things would soon be too precious to carry and too painful to leave behind.

But Ammi knew. Adults always know before they admit it.

Her voice tried for steadiness and found a quiver beneath. Yasmeen saw the tremor but did not ask. Children invent courage by not naming the cracks adults hide.

She busied herself with small, concrete things. She threaded a paper star for Lata and pressed it flat to dry. She practiced the looping letters her teacher insisted on, writing them until her wrist ached. She arranged the diya again, though it did not need arranging. There are ways to keep panic at bay: tidy things, repeat rituals, fold memories into neat corners.

By late morning, the market had opened to its familiar blaze. Turmeric sat like little suns. Chilis rose in red cones. The cardamom seller, with his theatrical cough, boasted that his spice could wake the dead or at least rouse a lazy husband. Women laughed, but their eyes darted to the edges of the crowd.

Even in the brightness, the day felt unsettled. People moved with a hidden quickness. Smiles were offered like coins, easy to drop and retract. Abbu kept his grocery list in his pocket like a shield. Usually he stopped to remonstrate about mango prices or to joke with the baker. Today his gaze left the paper every few seconds as if he were scanning the sky for storm clouds.

At the newspaper stall, a crowd had gathered, the colour in their faces drained by the news. The headline spread across the paper in brutal black.

CALCUTTA IN FLAMES. THOUSANDS DEAD.

The words hit the market like a slap. Within seconds, men crowded around the newspaper stall, voices vibrating with shock and anger.

“Ya Allah, they’re killing families in broad daylight.”

“They didn’t start today, bhai. This has been simmering for months. Muslim League kept warning them, nobody listened.”

“Haan, Jinnah kept saying, give Muslims our rights, our security. But Congress thought they could rule the whole subcontinent alone.”

“More work, look at the result now! Bengal is burning, and Muslim homes are the first to be attacked!”

“My cousin from Howrah wrote last week. Dead bodies in the drains, children running barefoot, no one to help!”

“Congress leaders don’t care! Delhi is far away; we are the ones who suffer.”

“The British made this mess. Divide-and-go policy! Light the fire and pretend they didn’t strike the match.”

“More work, their hands are red as chilli powder. They leave us to fight for scraps.”

A man lifted the newspaper with shaking fingers. “They think it will stay in Bengal? This kind of hatred spreads faster than fever. Bihar next, then Punjab…then Delhi.”

Someone asked quietly, “So what do we do now?”

A sharp reply came from the front, “What choice do Muslims have? Pakistan is the only safety left for us.”

“Haan, Pakistan is not about politics anymore. It’s about survival. Without our own country, we will always be at someone’s mercy. And mercy disappears first when mobs rise.” The youngest man in the group, barely eighteen, spoke with unexpected firmness. “My father always says, ‘Pakistan is our insurance.’ Without it, we are tenants in our own land.”

The older men fell silent for a beat, struck by the truth of it.

Then another voice rose, rough and exhausted, “May Allah give Jinnah strength. He’s the one fighting for our dignity.”

Someone else muttered, “When the British leave, only God knows what will happen. Better to be ready before the storm comes.”

A final voice cut through the chatter, low and urgent, “If this is what the world looks like before freedom, then God knows we need Pakistan before freedom reaches us.”

No one dared break the truth in his voice.

Yasmeen watched her father’s jaw straighten, a small movement she had learned to read. That look meant change. It meant plans shifting without a sound. She went home with the sudden knowledge that the house might be different tomorrow.

That evening the lane felt smaller. Lamps glowed early. Where roofs usually rang with shouts and songs, today the terraces were muted. Women called greetings in half-voices. Men lingered in doorways as if the threshold itself were a border not to be crossed.

Then a sound broke the quiet. Steady, measured footsteps. A stranger was walking the lane with the patient confidence of a man who had practiced pretending to be casual. He paused at each Muslim house and took his time, pretending to inspect pots or perfume a cloth, but his eyes were cataloguing. He adjusted his shoulder-cloth and counted softly, almost as if to himself.

One. Two. Three.

He hummed a little tune that did not belong to the mood he carried. When he reached the Ansari door he lingered longer than before, letting his gaze move over the courtyard, the drying lantern, the clay pots, the neat board where Abbu had painted their name. His eyes tested the seams of the place.

A coldness ran through Yasmeen, quick and precise. She felt the moment sink into her bones. “Ammi, who is he?” she whispered.

Ammi stole a look at the window, and pulled Yasmeen back so fast the curtain fluttered like a small startled bird. “He is someone who should not be counting our houses,” she said, adding softly, “may God keep him away.”

The man adjusted his cloth and walked on as though satisfied. The lane held its breath long after he left.

The days that came after folded into one another like pages a hand flips too quickly. The papads still dried on terraces, round and pale, but the women who laid them out no longer hummed old film songs. The mosque’s call still rose five times a day, but even the azaan sounded tired, as if the sound itself were holding an anxious secret.

People swept their courtyards without cheer. Men at chai stalls let their cups cool while their hands worried a small, invisible knot. Children played cricket but their rhythm was off; the ball bounced wrong, bats met air, and whenever the ball hit a shutter everyone flinched as if the sound were a slap.

The stray dog that used to follow Tariq like a second shadow disappeared one morning. Someone suggested it had run off with another pack, someone else said it had been taken. No one asked too loudly. Animals, many believed, felt storms before people did.

Even the mango tree lost its leaves early, sending down flurries of yellow that looked like small, private warnings. Someone remarked that even the tree seemed to be protesting the British, and the laugh that followed was thin.

After Friday prayers, the imam’s voice had a different weight. “These are days that test the heart. Hold to patience. Hold to faith. Hold to one another,” he urged. He did not need to explain. People left the mosque moving closer, drawing their families in like folds of cloth.

That night Yasmeen lay awake to the quiet voices below, the house carrying sound the way old wooden homes do, softly at first, then all at once. Her parents spoke in low, cautious tones, but their words rose through the staircase and settled in her ears like falling dust.

“What if it reaches here?” Ammi asked. Her voice had the tremble of someone trying to fold fear into a small, polite shape.

“It will not,” Abbu replied, though his assurance thinned exactly where certainty should have lived.

“And if it does?”

Silence followed. Not the peaceful kind. This silence pushed against the windows, filled the beams, made every small noise in the house sound like a rumor that had grown legs.

Yasmeen pulled her blanket tighter, wishing her heartbeat would quiet itself.

Then Ammi spoke again, lower this time, “That man who walked through the lane today, the one pretending to look at pots…” Her words hovered, unfinished but heavy.

Abbu exhaled. “I saw him. He wasn’t looking at pots. He was counting.”

“So it’s true then?” Ammi whispered. “People are making lists?”

Another pause. Then, reluctantly, “Yes.”

Ammi let out a soft, aching breath. “Lists of whom? For what?”

“For us,” Abbu said quietly. “To know which houses belong to Muslims. To know who lives where. To know how many.”

Yasmeen felt her throat tighten though she didn’t fully understand. She imagined the man’s lips moving. One, two, three. Counting people like ingredients in a recipe.

Ammi’s voice came again, threaded with worry. “If something happens…where will we go?”

“We won’t wait for it to happen,” he said. “If trouble reaches Madras, we’ll leave before it touches our street.”

“Leave this house?” Her voice cracked around the edges. “Your father’s house? Our children’s home?”

Abbu took a long breath, the kind men take when they’d rather break than speak the truth aloud. “A home can be rebuilt.” His words were gentle but unyielding. “Lives cannot.”

Ammi was quiet for a long moment, then said, “What will we take? We cannot fit a life into two trunks.”

“We will take the children,” he answered softly. “Everything else can be lost.”

The weight of those words settled over the house like dusk returning.

Yasmeen pressed her face into the pillow. She didn’t understand politics. She didn’t understand lists. But she understood packing. She understood leaving. She understood her parents were afraid in a way they had never been before.

Downstairs, her mother whispered one final question, so soft it almost didn’t rise up the stairs, “Do you think we will have to run?”

And he answered with the quiet honesty of a man who could no longer pretend. “I think we should be ready.”

The lantern flickered. The night held its breath. And Yasmeen clung to her blanket as if it might hold the world together.

Yasmeen finally slipped into sleep, but her dreams did not offer refuge. The mango tree in the courtyard, the one that had shaded every summer of her life, stood engulfed in colours no real fire carried; blue at the tips, green in the middle, a cruel white at the roots. Paper stars sagged and melted into threads of ash. The diya she had placed so carefully on the hearth fractured in her hands, falling cleanly into two pieces that refused to meet again. And somewhere far beyond Triplicane, a train screamed, a long, metallic cry, and it tore her awake.

Tears clung to her cheeks like the last drops of rain on the mango leaves. She did not go to her mother. Children learn early which truths make adults shatter.

The morning before everything changed came with the small gestures of ordinary life. The okra seller called his price. Rice was rinsed and the milky water let out into the street. Someone argued loudly about the cricket score. A boy ran past with a bright blue kite that flirted with the temple wall and made two crows complain.

But warnings braided through the everyday. A damp paper lay in the gutter:

DIRECT ACTION DECLARED. PROTESTS EXPECTED.

Two men painted slogans on a wall, Haq and Azaadi, glancing over their shoulders with every stroke. Abbu sharpened the large kitchen knife, the metal singing in a rhythm that made Yasmeen uneasy. Ammi wrapped dates and biscuits into a cloth bundle and tied the knot twice, then once more as if knots could stop what was coming.

Across the lane, neighbours moved differently. The Patel family loaded a cart at dawn, folding blankets and stacking brass in precise order. Old Iyer Aunty swept her courtyard with tears running free. The Sikh rickshaw puller held his little son so tight that the child squirmed.

And on the terrace that night, the family sat together for dinner in an ordinary way that would, later, feel like an impossible luxury. Ammi had made dal thick with jaggery for sweetness and mustard seeds crackling in oil. There were rotis, tangy mango pickle, sliced raw mango dusted with chilli and salt that made Abbu make his usual exaggerated face. Tariq refused to eat more than half but cleaned his fingers with the corner of his kurta and asked a dozen questions between bites.

“Abbu,” he said suddenly, voice loud with the confidence only a little brother has, “What is a curfew? Will it stop us from going to the market? Will it stop me from flying my kite?”

Abbu looked up from his plate and smiled, the smile of a man trying to make fear look like a story for children. “A curfew is when everyone goes to bed early,” he said, “And we pretend the world is sleeping. We will sleep with our shoes on and dreams ready.”

Ammi gave Tariq a look that tried to be light. “Yes, beta. Sleep with your shoes on and dream of kites.” The joke fell flat; all three of them knew it.

A woman in the next house began to bang a metal pot to summon someone and the clanging sounded stranger than usual. Someone laughed somewhere, but it was a laugh with edges.

After the meal, while Ammi washed the plates and Abbu lit the lantern, Sehgal Saab leaned in the doorway to exchange a few words. He asked about a recipe, offered to return a borrowed bowl, and then, with the softest of voices, asked if they had seen any trouble in the market. They spoke in the coded politeness neighbours used to share news without naming it.

Little comforts multiplied. Ammi tucked Yasmeen’s hair behind her ear and said, “Finish your homework tomorrow and I will get you a fresh sheet of paper.” Abbu traced a faint scar on the wall with one finger where Tariq had once fallen. These small things were anchor points in a life that suddenly felt unmoored.

When Yasmeen finally went to bed, she pressed her face to the cool plaster and listened to the rain apologizing to the houses. It fell softly, like someone knocking politely on every roof, asking forgiveness for what it could not stop. Shadows gathered on the ceiling, stretching and folding like questions she did not yet know how to ask.

She did not know then that the house she had grown up in, Ammi’s embroidered curtains, Abbu’s books lined in neat rows, the mango tree that had measured every inch of her childhood, would not belong to them for much longer anymore. She did not know that a knock would come in the small hours, loud enough to split the night, frantic enough to split her life into before and after.

She did not know which neighbours would leave first, or which would stay until staying became impossible. She did not know which familiar faces would become unrecognizable, not because they changed, but because the world around them had. Partition rewrote people faster than it rewrote borders.

She did not know that the men arguing about cricket today would be arguing about safety tomorrow. She did not know that lists were already being muttered about. Lists of Muslim homes, Muslim names, Muslim doorways. Lists that could turn families like hers into entries on someone else’s map.

She did not yet understand why Abbu spoke Jinnah’s name with the same reverence others used for saints. She did not yet understand why her uncles insisted Pakistan was not a demand but a shield. She did not yet understand why Muslim men everywhere walked with their shoulders slightly forward, ready to guard the lives behind them.

She only knew that something in the air had grown heavy, and that heaviness sat inside her chest too, pressing quietly even when no one spoke of danger.

A part of her sensed it, the gathering of something vast and unstoppable. It hummed beneath the silence like a low note under a song, the kind a child hears without knowing she hears it. It felt slow and certain, like the monsoon tide pulling back before it breaks, leaving the shore exposed in a way that makes the world hold its breath.

It felt like the beginning of a story she would spend the rest of her life trying to understand.

And somewhere in those whispers, her father’s tight jaw, her mother’s double-knotted bundles, the hurried conversations in chai stalls, the prayers of men who feared being counted, something else was forming. A promise. A shape. A homeland not yet drawn on maps, but drawn already in the hearts of those who wanted a place where their safety did not depend on someone else’s mercy.

She did not know the word for it yet. But Pakistan was already rising around her, not as a border, not as politics, but as a shelter being willed into existence by millions who were tired of running, tired of being listed, tired of being asked to prove they belonged.

All she felt was the shift, slow, steady, inevitable, like a truth gathering itself, a story preparing to open its jaws.

And then nothing, not the mango tree, not the papads on the terrace, not the sky that smelled of rain and cardamom, nothing would ever be the same again.

CHAPTER TWO:

Counting Doors

The next morning, the rain smelled sharper, as if the world had been washed too clean. Triplicane stirred awake slowly: a broom sweeping a courtyard, a kettle boiling somewhere out of sight, a rooster crowing as if nothing had shifted overnight. But Yasmeen felt the difference in her bones. The lane seemed lighter in the wrong places and heavier in the right ones, as though someone had shaken all the sounds and put them back incorrectly.

Ammi moved around the kitchen with distracted hands. Even the clink of metal bowls felt louder, hollow. Abbu drank his tea without opening the newspaper, a small omission that made Yasmeen uneasy. He always read the paper.

Across the lane, the Patel family’s door was open, but the usual morning sweeping had not begun. The rickshaw pullers were already gathered, earlier than usual, leaning into one another with tight shoulders, their voices low and urgent. The mango tree dropped leaves steadily, each one spiraling down like a reminder.

Yasmeen stood barefoot at the threshold, the cool cement grounding her. The lane felt like a page waiting for its first words.

Then it came.

Three knocks. Quick, nervous. A pause. Two more.

Ammi froze mid-step. Abbu set his cup down with a clatter. The knock came again, louder. Not demanding, but frightened.

Abbu opened the door only a sliver before recognizing the elderly neighbour outside, the one who always smelled faintly of sandalwood and carried advice like spare coins. Today his face was drawn tight, sweat clinging to his temples though the air was still cool.

“Rafiq bhai,” he whispered urgently, “I came before the rumours do. Something happened last night.”

Ammi stepped closer. “What happened?”

The old man looked over his shoulder before speaking. “Muslim houses were marked in Mylapore before dawn. Someone went door to door, counting. Making sure of who lives where.”

Yasmeen felt a chill crawl up her spine. The image of the stranger, the humming, the counting, the too-long pause at their door, flickered in her mind. “He came here too,” she whispered. “Yesterday evening.”

Both parents turned sharply toward her. “He counted our house,” she added softly.

The neighbour nodded grimly. “Then you must decide quickly. Tension is rising everywhere. Some families are preparing to leave Madras altogether.”

“Leave for where?” Ammi asked, her voice small.

“For safer areas,” the neighbour replied. “Some talk of Coimbatore, some of Bangalore, and some…” he lowered his voice, “Some are thinking of going north. To Lahore. To Karachi. To the new country that is coming.”

The word hung in the doorway like a held breath.

Pakistan.

Abbu’s jaw tensed the way it had the night before. “Is it wise to think of Pakistan now? Before anything is certain?”

The neighbour shrugged, a helpless gesture. “Certainty is a luxury these days. People want safety first, borders second.”

Ammi’s voice trembled. “But leaving everything we know…is that truly the answer?”

The neighbour touched the doorframe gently, as if steadying himself, “Zainab baji, sometimes staying becomes the bigger danger.”

Abbu looked down at his hands, then up at his children. “If things worsen, we may have no choice. Pakistan may be far, but safety has never felt closer than the promise of it.”

“But is it a good idea?” Ammi whispered.

“It is the only idea many families have left,” the neighbour said. “A place where Muslim names don’t need explanations. A place where no one needs to count our doors at night.”

The words settled over them like dust, soft but impossible to shake.

Outside, a crow shrieked and flew across the lane, scattering loose leaves. Inside, Yasmeen felt the world tilt again, sharper this time.

The knock had come. The choice had entered their home. And nothing was standing still anymore.

Later that morning, the lane filled with the quiet choreography of women doing chores that no longer felt like chores. The sun had not yet dried the earth, and the scent of last night’s rain clung to everything, the walls, the steps, even the laundry that refused to flutter.

Ammi stepped outside with her dupatta pulled tightly around her shoulders. Yasmeen followed, pretending to sort small pebbles while keeping close enough to listen. Children always listened, even when adults thought they didn’t.

Outside Iyer Aunty’s gate, a small circle of women had formed. Not the leisurely circle of normal mornings, this one was tighter, their faces angled inward as if guarding the words spoken within.

Iyer Aunty was the first to speak. Her broom lay forgotten at her side. “I heard someone marked houses in Luz yesterday,” she said, her voice thin. “Muslim households first. Names scraped onto walls in chalk.”

Zainab’s breath caught. “Chalk washes off.”

“Intent doesn’t,” Iyer Aunty whispered.

Another woman joined in, her bangles clinking nervously as she adjusted her sari. “My cousin in Bengal writes that people are leaving overnight. Whole streets empty by morning. Without a word.”

A silence settled. In that silence, every woman imagined her own street emptied.

Zainab spoke softly, almost as if admitting a secret to herself.
“A man came here yesterday too…counting houses.”

A few women gasped. One placed a hand over her chest. “Counting? Why would he count?”

“For the same reason they counted in Noakhali, in Bihar,” murmured an older lady. “To know who belongs on which side of the fire.”

The circle tightened.

Another woman, younger, eyes reddened from a sleepless night, said quietly, “My brother says Pakistan will be a place where we don't have to live like this. No counting. No fear. Just our own people holding the laws.”

Some women nodded slowly. Some lowered their eyes.

Iyer Aunty exhaled shakily. “And you…will you go?”

Zainab hesitated, not because she didn’t know the answer, but because saying it aloud made it real. “If we must,” she said. “If safety lies elsewhere, then one must follow safety.”

A murmur rippled through the group. Some agreeing.
Some grieving. Some weighing the price of leaving a home before they had been asked.

“But the journey is far,” another woman whispered. “The trains…they say terrible things about the trains.”

Zainab clenched her hands. “Staying may be worse.”

And every woman understood exactly what she meant. A moment of soft, painful unity passed between them, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh, women bound not by religion, but by fear for their children.