The visit to India by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s school friend from Pakistan, Raja Mohammad Ali, brings a poignant issue to light. Ali thought of no better gift for his friend than the soil of his native village from across the border. I remember that the grandmother of one of my friends in Pakistan always requested me to carry a handful of Bombay soil whenever I visited her house.

Both India and Pakistan have a generation of 70 and 80-year-olds who migrated to either side at the time of Partition. They still retain fond memories of their childhood spent in a village or city across the border. Many of them have an overwhelming desire to travel to the place where they were born, before they die. The grandmother of Gauri Khan, wife of film actor Shah Rukh Khan, has been longing for many years to visit her ancestral house in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) in Pakistan. Mehmoodal Haq Alvi, a real estate tycoon in Islamabad, wants to visit his ancestral home in Karol Bagh in Delhi one last time.

As a humanitarian gesture, governments of both countries should launch a special initiative to facilitate these people to see their native places. NGOs on both sides can take up the task of identifying the childhood homes of this generation. I discussed the idea of starting an NGO for this task with Pakistan MP Kashmala Tariq a few years ago. Governments on both sides can gift heartwarming moments to a generation whose lives were changed forever by Partition.

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