I have to pay a debt of honour and write something for him,” Tahirah Butt says in a cassette recording made shortly after the death of her husband, Shahid Hamid, in 1993. “I keep thinking to myself, what can I do to make him come to life again?” The couple had occupied a front row seat for the partition that remade the Indian subcontinent, spectators to history. “I can hear him say … ‘You owe it to your children, you owe it to your country, to write.’”
Tahirah never finished her memoir, but 30 years later, her granddaughter, BBC journalist Mishal Husain, has written something much broader in scope – a sweeping history of partition through the lens of her grandparents, all four of whom relocated to the new state of Pakistan: wise Tahirah; selfless, fiery Mary Quinn, the daughter of an Irishman and his much younger Hindu wife; Shahid, who trained at Sandhurst in the 30s and went on to set up Pakistan’s intelligence service; and Mumtaz Husain, a doctor and eyewitness to the brutalities of 1947.
