Bringing alive painful memories from both India & Pak, The Speaking Window is a rare collection of 47 first-hand memoirs of Partition survivors

They were joined by Ritika, then an English teacher in Ludhiana, who volunteered to edit stories for them, an effort that led to the published volume. Despite being separated by distance and time, the team has strung together stories from 52 cities in five countries. What’s painful is that, of the 47 survivors (aged 75 to 109) featured in the book, 24 died during the six years of the book’s production.

What inspired Dutt to create Bolti Khidki was the story of his Urdu teacher Prem Singh Bajaj, a Sikh migrant from Sargodha who kept his love for Urdu alive after migrating to Ludhiana and volunteered to teach it for years in Punjab languages departments. Bajaj, too, died before the book came out. A chapter, The Light Preserver, has been dedicated to him.

Also included is The Wounded Flower, the memoir of Pushpa Rani, who, at the age of five, was thrown out of a train with a heap of corpses on the way to Ferozepur from Okara (now in Pakistan). So is Fatimah Noreen who migrated from Delhi (and was found selling clothes on a handcart in Rawalpindi when interviewed) and legendary Pakistani actor Sajjad Kishwar who migrated from Ludhiana.

“We are just not hearing them enough. Our elders still have the images of their childhood homes which float like a dream every night in their eyes with the longing to go there someday,” says Dutt. “After six years of working on 200 real stories, we can say, it is we who did this to our own. We killed our own, not the British.” Hayat says, “I am glad that some heartwarming stories from Pakistan would reach Indian readers. Khidki bula rahi hai, aaja, ghar pados ka dekh le (the window is calling, come, see your neighbour’s house.)”