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Border stories: Brexit Britain as seen by a witness to the scars of India's partition

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As someone whose family fled their homes for England’s Midlands 70 years ago, how do I embrace my own Britishness in a time of imperial nostalgia?

On 14 August 1947, my grandparents fell asleep in one country and awoke the following day in another. While they slept, the ground under them, the plains between the Chenab and the Ravi rivers, where they and they families had lived for hundreds of years, became Pakistan. But until that moment, what had their homeland meant to them? Theirs was not a country but a colony. Home was on the rural edge of Lyallpur, a town near Lahore named after a lieutenant governor of Punjab, conquered by a country they had never seen: Britain. Even if they wished to forget their rulers they could not. Lyallpur was modelled on the British union flag. From a central panopticon-like clock tower, eight thoroughfares unfurled, divided and ruled.

When notice of partition was given, a British civil servant quietly drew up western and eastern national borders with little compassion for their citizens’ sense of history or their memories. Some of my grandparents’ neighbours, Hindus and Sikhs, loaded their homes on to their backs or oxcarts and walked east, fearing violence. My grandfather, an English teacher and farmer, stood on his roof and watched in disbelief as riots began. As houses around him burned, he refused to leave.

A ghostly absence fills the space where we feel unable to return

Related: National borders cross a line of decency: we should all be citizens of the world

When you sense that you are alone, it does not mean that you feel inferior, but rather that you feel you are different. Also, a sense of inferiority may sometimes be an illusion, but solitude is a hard fact. We are truly different. And we are truly alone.

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