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Reena’s memories make a departure from the conventional stories that individuals remember from their childhood. As a refugee child, her stories are exceptional, in a sense that they are rooted in the harsh reality surrounding her life. Her narration offers a rare glimpse into the lives of women who were categorised as permanent liabilities by the Indian State. It must also be borne in mind that the protracted nature of the Partition in the Bengal borderlands led to the construction of multiple camps in West Bengal. The camps accommodated the different types of East Pakistani refugees who kept migrating to West Bengal for almost two decades after 1947 [4]. The Permanent Liability Camps were designed to shelter abandoned women and their children. Reena did not remember meeting children in the camp. But, as a child, the images of women, who covered their heads, rarely uttered a word, and worked tirelessly, had remained etched in her mind. For the most part, her childhood was spent following her mother, and patiently learning skills that would come in handy later in her life.

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In her seminal work, The Other Side of Silence, Urvashi Butalia argues that the history of the Partition has very little to say about children. After all, the subject of childhood is a difficult topic to deal with. In most cases, childhood memories are filtered through the prism of the adult experience. She opines that the framework of oral history provides a unique opportunity to record the narratives of the children [5], but it has its ethical complications as well. For instance, the interviewee/narrator occupies diverse narrative positions; there exists an epistemological dilemma regarding the fact that the adult ‘I’ is speaking on behalf of the child 'I' [6]. One of the methods to negotiate with such sensitive issues concerning childhood is to acknowledge that the narrators are adult survivors of childhood trauma. Rather than authenticating the validity of the ‘facts’, it is essential to make sense of the individuated struggles of the narrators. In reference to childhood experience and oral history, Deidre Michell rightly observes that “what is crucial when it comes to listening to adults about their childhood experiences is to suspend all knowledge and understanding of the wider context and focus on the individual level; on what was going on for the child” (emphasis mine) [7].

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On hearing that I am interested in interviewing individuals who migrated from East Pakistan, Himadri Sekhar Sarkar invited me to his residence in Kolkata.  During the interview, he shared his experience of settling down at a squatter colony in South Kolkata [8]. He was just three years old when his family migrated from Comilla, East Pakistan to West Bengal in 1949. His family stayed at the Sealdah Railway Station for about a month or so. Despite being a child, he remembered seeing refugees fight among themselves to secure some ration and medicines for their families. Scarcity of space forced the refugees to sleep on their trunks. He said, “Do we not see homeless beggars sleeping on pavements or under bridges? You can say that ours was almost a similar condition. We were left stranded at the railway platform.”

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One wonders if Himadri actually remembers the exact details as faithfully as it had happened. Or are these reconstructed from the accounts of others around him? After all, the nature of memory is such that it is transient and malleable, and it undergoes a process of constant making and re-making, susceptible to forgetting and alteration [9]. However, it soon becomes clear that not only does Himadri remember specific incidents, but also accurately points out the year when they took place.

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In 1950, Himadri Sekhar Sarkar’s family could manage a place at the Vidyasagar Colony near Baghajatin [10]. On being asked about his days spent in the refugee settlement, he talked about the colony.

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Ours was not the only colony in the area. Within touching distance, there were other colonies too – Gandhi Colony, Netaji Nagar, Bijoygarh, Azadgarh, so on and so forth. But unlike the neighbouring refugee habitats, our colony had no high school for the refugee students. We had a primary school where I started my education. It was a makeshift school built in a cowshed. The roads were narrow; the area was very congested, and the houses lacked privacy.

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In the initial segments of the interview, Himadri’s was a somewhat generalised and distant re-telling of various episodes surrounding the Partition. The recollection of his life in the colony prompted him to talk about his mother and sisters. They had just two rooms in which around nine members of the family had to put up. Since they had no washroom, his mother had to take bath in public and change in the room almost before everyone: “I cannot tell you how unbearable and humiliating it was for her.” Soon he confides in me that one of his sisters died without any treatment in 1954. “It was my first encounter with death,” he said, “and I felt so helpless!” As he tried to fight back his tears, Himadri admitted that remembering those moments still made him sad and despondent: “I try not to think about them, yet the memories are still alive.”

The children of the Partition, who crossed the borders, might have failed to grasp the gravity of the unfolding situation. It does not, however, mean that they remained untouched by the sudden demise of a family member. The abrupt, chaotic break-up of the family and community had an enduring impact on their minds.

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In another interview, Uma Majumdar said, “You might say I was perhaps too small to realise the changes. Even now, I cannot comprehend how things changed so fast, so drastically!" [11]. She was talking about going back to East Pakistan in 1950 and 1952 to take her examinations. After her marriage, her father insisted that Uma must finish her schooling and pursue higher studies. She said, “The ‘curse’ of the Partition fell on me, and I had to get married at an early age.”

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Let me tell you one thing which never got recorded anywhere. Most people know about the riots. They still talk about them. But, due to the riots, unmarried women were terribly unsafe. In Brahmanbaria [East Pakistan], around a hundred young girls were married in one single day. The husbands needed to have just one qualification – they had to be from India.