Celebrated the Law School graduation of a good friend of mine today. So proud of her accomplishments, and I'm always so excited to see my beautiful, brilliant friends doing such amazing things in the world. These young women are also so talented at balancing and maintaining the intricate relationships that desi and Muslim family life brings along with it while accomplishing new levels of education and career-hood.
I also got the rare but much coveted opportunity to speak at length with an elder relative of the graduate's family who recounted her vivid memories as a 7-year-old having to rush away from her home in Hyderabad, India during Partition in 1947. She told of the memory of seeing her empty house left behind, seeing her English mother crying and not understanding why as they waved goodbye to her Indian Muslim father from the boat, seeing bloodied hands reaching up to the train windows to try to seek space inside, the bodies on the tracks, the new home in England. Such a horrific time in our people's and this world's history, and so many still traumatized by it. A whole sub-continent still disoriented by it and struggling with it I think.
But it is this woman, who is now seeking to write a novel about her experiences, and her young relative just graduating from Law School, who show how far our people have come from that terrible time and the years of displacement after. The sub-continent has in many respects come far away from 1947, and the incredible heights its native and diaspora populations are reaching now in various fields is optimistically promising.
Congratulations to all those of you graduating this year!
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