“But every night, without fail, after shutting the bookshop, he would stop at India Gate and buy flowers for my hair on his way back to the camp. He would present me with a jasmine gajra, and I would sleep with it tied in my hair, and in the morning, my hair would be fragrant.”

Delhi-based oral historian Aanchal Malhotra savoured her grandmother Bhag Malhotra’s every word as she narrated her love story with Aanchal’s grandfather, Balraj Bahri Malhotra, the name synonymous with Delhi’s iconic Bahrisons Bookstore. Theirs was a love born out of the Partition of 1947, which saw British India divided into two independent dominions: India and Pakistan, an event marked by bloodshed, violence, and the displacement of millions of people.

But Aanchal never fails to be amazed by how the contours of some of the most beautiful love stories of that time could be shaped by such a tragic event.

Proof lies in the story of her grandparents.

The intervening decades hadn’t blurred any details; Bhag recounted the nitty-gritty of her love story as if it were only yesterday that she and her to-be husband, Balraj, locked eyes for the first time at the social service camp where Bhag volunteered. Balraj’s adoptive sister, Swaran Lata, played cupid.

“Sometimes we would meet in the camp after work. But it was not like the couples of today, not so direct, not so candid. That was a courtship where we spoke far........

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