On a mid-October afternoon, I walked on a quiet, dusty street behind the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi. Hundreds of men and women lined up behind the few grilled windows opening out of the forbidding walls - mostly the elderly applying for visas to see an ageing parent or a sibling separated by history and politics when British India was divided into India and Pakistan in 1947. After the counters closed for the day, several spread out bed sheets on the footpath behind the embassy, turned their bags into pillows and prepared to sleep in the open - squatters for a night.
Early morning, they would queue at the grilled windows, shuffle their piles of documents - invitation letters, copies of identity cards and address proofs of their relatives in Pakistan - and pray the visa officers didn't turn down their request to visit a dying relative or attend a niece's wedding. “My brother is sick. I haven't seen him for five years. Maybe I will get to meet him once again,” said a woman from Gujarat.
I had been hearing similar stories for the past few months in Delhi, while interviewing families divided by Partition. Athar Abbasi is a metal worker in his late fifties based in Delhi's Muslim quarter. In 1947, his brother was taken to Karachi and grew up to become a mechanic with Pakistan International Airlines. The brothers met four times in their lives - each time when Abbasi's Pakistani brother would fly to Delhi. “He would call me from Delhi airport and I would take my wife and children with me and we would meet him in a hangar.” A few years back, Abbasi's brother was killed during a robbery. Abbasi couldn't make it to the funeral. His visa would have taken months. “The Partition never ceases to be over,” he told me.