Partition refers to the formation of India and Pakistan as independent nations, following Great Britain’s departure from India in 1947. Although they were supposedly divided along religious lines—India as majority-Hindu and Pakistan as majority-Muslim—the violence and displacement that followed on account of religious strife left more than a million people dead and fourteen to fifteen million people as refugees. Boori Ma was one of them, telling the building’s residents that she “crossed the border with just two bracelets on my wrist” and lost her husband and daughters to the “turmoil.”
Partition Quotes in A Real Durwan
The A Real Durwan quotes below are all either spoken by Partition or refer to Partition. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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A Real Durwan
Quotes
In fact, the only thing that appeared three-dimensional about Boori Ma was her voice: brittle with sorrows, as tart as curds, and shrill enough to grate meat from a coconut.
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“Have I mentioned that I crossed the border with just two bracelets on my wrist? Yet there was a day when my feet touched nothing but marble. Believe me, don’t believe me, such comforts you cannot even dream them.”
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Knowing not to sit on the furniture, she crouched, instead, in doorways and hallways, and observed gestures and manners in the same way a person tends to watch traffic in a foreign city.
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Partition Term Timeline in A Real Durwan
The timeline below shows where the term Partition appears in A Real Durwan. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
A Real Durwan
Boori Ma is a Bengali woman, a refugee who crossed the border during Partition years ago for Calcutta. As she cleans, she recounts what her life was like prior...
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