The Line They Drew Through Us

Award winning author Hiba Noor Khan is a British Muslim woman of Pakistani heritage whose debut middle grade novel Safiyyah’s War shone a spotlight on the hidden history of the Paris Mosque.

Her new novel also explores untold stories, its dedication remembering ‘everyone who lost a piece of themselves when India was wrenched apart’. She describes her latest book as, ‘a love letter of sorts, to the vast subcontinent that is my motherland. A mother whom I have felt disconnected from and conflicted about for much of my life. Yet her unheard stories run deeply within me.’

Told through the third person voices of miracle babies Lakshmi, Jahan and Ravi, whose lives change forever on their twelfth birthdays, when their world implodes, the narrative explores these unheard stories. Inspired by post-colonial and political writers like Arundhati Roy, Amitav Ghosh, Neel Mukherjee and Khushwant Singh, Khan gives insight into a turbulent time.

Drawing on a myriad of sources, she includes fond family memories as well as accounts from the 1947 Partition Archive, Memories of Partition Project, and the writing of William Dalrymple on the East India Trading Company. Meticulously researched and vividly realised, her characters take the reader on a journey through the ravages of colonialism and the heinous practices of the British East India Company. The older generation are still haunted by their experiences while their grandchildren are bewildered at the unrest and politico-religious conflicts setting neighbour against neighbour.

The novel opens with a trip from the busy city of Lahore to a rural Punjabi village for a family wedding. Khan infuses this idyll with the magic realism and symbolism of the Banyan tree. Here Muslim, Hindu and Sikh co-exist in peace cocooned from the upheaval of the outside world. Here they celebrate diverse traditions. Sadly, their existence is under threat from the complexities of geopolitics and the violence that approaches. A character forewarns that ‘India is not a potato’ as the British move to divide the states.

Khan’s well-crafted plot sings with authentic voices and is a celebration of artisan crafts, diverse cultures and family life. She provides a map at the start, displaying those fateful partition lines which still reverberate today, and a detailed author’s note and a language glossary inviting further study at the back. Offering a different approach from previous books for young readers on the topic including Swapna Haddow’s Torn Apart The Partition of India 1947 and Veera Hiranandani’s epistolary novel The Night Diary, Khan presents divergent intergenerational perspectives as each child is afflicted by the terrible legacy of the past imposing itself upon the present and their future is thrown into turmoil.