When Mr Radcliffe was asked by the British rulers with tacit concurrence of the Indian leaders to draw a line of demarcation for two communities living in India, hardly a living soul could imagine the vast devastation and catastrophe it would bring upon the people of India in its wake and how the Partition tragedy would pan out.
The present volume is an anthology of twenty-four partition stories written by both prominent and lesser-known authors from West Bengal and Bangladesh. The poignant descriptions of various forms of violence, tension and anxiety at the porous border of the two countries make these stories disturbing reading. They delineate the ghastly communal riots at various places and the trauma and disruptions of memory caused by them, the exodus of the ‘refugees’ from the then East Pakistan and their fierce struggle for survival in newly mushrooming colonies at unknown terrains, and above all, the nostalgia for an imaginary desh that defies cartographic barriers.