The Discovery

2003, Toronto (Canada)

“How do you expect me to go right now?” GurNoor pleaded. “You are so unwell at the moment and I don’t think I want to leave you here like this.” She placed her hand on Biji’s,  her eyes moist with fear of losing her Biji any moment. 

GurNoor’s life was troubled due to her parents’ separation when she was barely eleven. Biji had become a foster for her all these years, raising GurNoor to be an author she was proud of. A woman of rituals, and secrets stitched into silences, Biji became the glue that held the family together when they immigrated forty years ago. All of seventy nine now, she was fragile, yet she held on. Perhaps there was still a message that she wanted to pass on to GurNoor. 

Gurnoor held the envelope Biji had asked her to fish out from her trunk. It was heavy, yellowed, and sealed with a trembling hand. She opened the envelope, amused how Biji had segregated these papers with five words handwritten in Urdu and Gurmukhi: Jhelum. Chenab. Ravi. Beas. Sutlej. These five letters were unsigned and unsent, not addressed to anyone in particular. It was as if Biji was keeping some kind of a record.

GurNoor looked at Biji and smiled. It wasn’t just because of her, but being born and raised in Canada, GurNoor never had a reason to go to Punjab. She never went, but now she knew, like always, she had to give in to Biji’s demands. 

She reasoned, this could well be her chance to give back in kind for all the sacrifices Biji had made for her. She began to read, first out of curiosity, then reverence. The letters, clearly written by Biji were unfolded memories, of places and people. These were love letters to her homeland.

GurNoor read the last line of the fifth letter—"I never returned, but I never left either."  These lines, somehow, settled in her heart like a quiet resolve.

She would go to where her grandmother’s story had once begun.

She folded the letters gently, slipped them into her backpack, and looked out at the snow-laced window.

Punjab was calling.

Jhelum – Swings and Laughter

Jhelum, Punjab, Pakistan

The first letter smelled faintly of old paper and something sweeter. GurNoor unfolded the page as the lingering scent of memory wafted from the pages. Her grandmother’s looping script seemed to rise off the paper like a whisper.

"Jhelum was where my world began. Not with war, but with laughter."

With the letter folded in her coat pocket, GurNoor headed to a quiet village not far from the Jhelum River. She had found the address on the back of the envelope which was more of a scribbled direction to a lane, a name that matched one from the letter: Feriha Begum.

Following the descriptions in the letter, she made her way to a house with turquoise shutters, and a courtyard with a grand peepul tree. 

Biji had been all of seven when Feriha and her had shared not just a common neighbourhood but also chalk for hopscotch, secret giggles, and a swing made of rope tied to a tree branch. 

"We never knew what the world had destined for us. All we saw were bangles, braids, and the same longing to fly higher on the swing."

The house had changed from some of the descriptions by Biji, as had everything around it. But when she knocked, an old man with soft eyes opened the gate. 

She introduced herself, explaining who her grandmother was, why she’d come here, and the letters. He listened, quietly. Then, broke into a smile, looked up at a small framed faded picture and said, “Ammi! She’s come.”

She was welcomed by the family with tea served in floral china and whatever little they had at home to eat. The house erupted in laughter that came easy, and stories that filled the gaps between them.

“Ammi would always narrate this story of how she and your Biji had once stolen mangoes from a neighbour’s orchard and gotten caught.” The man’s eyes reflected nostalgia but also affection that comes from reminiscing about someone your love dearly. He continued, “to escape the wrath of the orchard owner, Ammi had to sing a folk song.” Saying this he started singing the folk song-

Ve laggi tor ve dhola, shawa. 

Mera dil mor ve dhola, shawa.

“Indeed they were inseparable,” he said. “Even after the Partition, Ammi never forgot your Biji. She told us about the mango tree, the swing, the songs…”

GurNoor felt tears prick at her eyes. She’d traveled halfway across the world, only to find a home that opened without suspicion.

The man walked her down to the wide and quiet waters of the Jhelum river. She sat on the banks for a while with the letter in hand, watching the village urchins jump in and out like fish, laughing as if today was the only day gifted to them to live.

That night, in her journal she wrote, ‘how natural joy could still exist here, how children still didn’t ask who you prayed to before offering a game or a grin’.

Back at the house, she handed a copy of the letter to the man. “This belongs with you too.”

The man touched the paper to his forehead. “She’ll be so happy… wherever she is.” She looked up at Feriha’s picture on the wall.

GurNoor stayed with the family that night, unable to leave just yet. That night, beneath stars older than borders, she listened to Feriha’s son hum songs as old as folk songs were from both sides of the border. She realised how it wasn’t just memories her Biji had left behind. It was a shared inheritance of love that had defied time.

Writing in her journal, she expressed:

‘Jhelum didn’t feel like a stranger. It felt like someone who had been waiting for me to come. Biji once said childhood doesn’t know division. She was right. It took politics, violence, and fear to separate us. But here, on this soil, under the same sky, I felt her again. And maybe… I found a little of myself too.’

The night closed peacefully and spilled into the next day when she picked the second letter, marked Chenab, and readied for the next stop on her journey.

Chenab – The Promise

Wazirabad, Pakistan

The second letter felt heavier, as if it had been written with the weight of what might have been. Biji’s father, a fruit merchant, had to move base to Wazirabad where mangoes were more in production and would help his business immensely. 

As sweet were the mangoes here, the teenaged girl, who had not yet become GurNoor’s Biji, restarted her journey with stars in her eyes. GurNoor unfolded the pages of the letter and scanned the lines of youthful longing penned decades ago by Biji. 

Ayub, the boy who was a quiet joy, loved the river. Always found with a pen and notebook by the banks of Chenab, Biji  had found camaraderie in him, as she was looking forward to making new friends around.

“Why do I always find you sitting here?” She’d asked. And he had simply said, “The river knows how to wait. It is calm on the surface, but deep with feeling.” And both had smiled to each other, deciphering the unsaid words in their eyes.

There were no dramatic confessions, or florid poetry. They only exchanged tender hesitations of first love, spelled out in shy phrases. Biji had written about stolen glances at riverside, fingers brushing when passing notes, and Ayub’s promise, “If there’s a river left between us, I’ll wait there.”

When the whispers of Partition began, they had promised to meet at their usual spot. 

If the world tore us apart, we’d meet again someday at the Chenab.

That line stayed with GurNoor as she journeyed further, toward Chenab. She found herself in the riverside town of Wazirabad, asking around. She didn’t know what she was looking for, perhaps just a trace, a name, a story.

It was a shopkeeper who pointed her to the outskirts, where an old man lived alone in a small house facing the river. 

“He used to be a schoolteacher,” the man said. “Very quiet. No one knows why he has no family or kin.”

GurNoor walked to the house, her heart thudding. A frail, silver-haired man answered the door, his eyes clouded by age but sharp with recognition as she spoke her grandmother’s name.

“Shabnam?” he asked in his trembling voice.

She nodded. “I’m her granddaughter. I found your name in her letter.”

Sitting by the Chenab in silence, as the river moved slowly beside them, she handed him the envelope marked Chenab. Ayub’s fingers trembled as he unfolded the pages.

He didn’t speak for a long time. His eyes scanned the letter once, then again. When he looked up, they were brimming with satiated tears.

“She remembered,” he whispered handing the letter back to her. “All this time… I didn’t imagine it.”

GurNoor felt his words. “She never forgot.”

Ayub smiled, a cracked, sorrowful smile. “I used to walk here every so often. In case she came. I kept thinking… maybe one day…”

He reached into his coat and pulled out a small tin box. Inside was a tiny yellowed photograph of a young girl with braided hair, smiling beside the riverbank.

“She gave this to me the day we made our promise.”

He told her how he had never married, never left. How his life had become a quiet vigil beside a river that knew how to wait.

They spoke into the evening, sharing memories of a love that had never been allowed to bloom. It was not a tragic tale, Ayub insisted. It was sacred, untouched, unspoiled by time.

Before leaving, GurNoor placed a copy of the letter in his hands. “She wrote it for you. You should keep it.”

He nodded, holding it to his chest. “Now I can stop waiting.”

As she walked away from the Chenab, its waters shimmering beneath the dusk, GurNoor felt both hollow and full. Love, she realised, had also been partitioned. It had been split, scarred, and buried in silence. But some hearts had held on, unshaken by distance or time.

She scribbled into her journal that night:

“The Chenab didn’t flow just with water. It carried promises, grief, and hope. Ayub waited not for closure, but to honour what once was. In him, I saw a love that transcended outcome. And in my grandmother’s words, I heard what courage it took to remember rather than forget.”

Then she unfolded the third letter, marked Ravi.

Ravi – The River of Fire and Silence
Lahore, Pakistan

The third letter had no poetry in it. It did not have any memories of mango trees or secret meetings. It bled pain.

GurNoor opened the envelope with care, as if her fingers were brushing the ink-smudged paper like it was touching a wound. This letter wasn’t of longing, but a survivor’s record.

"It was the Ravi that heard us scream," the letter began. "The river ran silent while our world burned."

Biji described the nights before and after the news of the ‘Partition’ erupted. Her father in a bid to stay close to his relatives gathered his family back to Lahore from Wazirabad. The future was indefinite, but at least they would be closer to people who could lend support.

But when calamity strikes no one really knows who is a friend and who is a foe. A Hindu boy was dragged out of their home and beaten as she hid in a grain basket with her younger brother. Another Sikh neighbours’ house was set ablaze the same night. It was Biji’s uncle who did it. “He used to bring us sweets,” the letter said.

The tone of the letter was almost fragmented, as if writing it reopened wounds long buried. She wrote of the ghostly silence that followed the violence in her neighbourhood. She could only discover her father, listless under a pile of mangled heap of bodies, while her mother and brother were nowhere to be found. 

The Sikh family that survived, urged her to join them untill the madness died and then she could return to look for her mother and brother. What she witnessed from hereon was even more gruesome: trainloads of blood-drenched bodies, train stations filled with people struggling to leave but no laughter, homes turned into ash, temples and mosques shuttered, not out of reverence but fear.

"That night, the Ravi flowed crimson like a mirror that shattered but didn’t make a sound."

GurNoor read it again and again, tears rising each time. She could feel Biji’s horror, the way her teenaged years had ended not with age but with fissures in her heart.

She traveled to the village that Biji last lived. She expected bitterness, maybe silence. But what she found was something else entirely.

The village had built a modest memorial, flanked by a gnarled banyan tree. It bore no names, only this inscription in Punjabi, and Urdu:

"To the lost, regardless of name, faith, or flag. May their memory teach us peace."

The air was still as GurNoor approached. A small crowd gathered, elders with turbans and skullcaps, young girls and women with dupattas of every shade. A soft prayer was being read. Then a Sikh elder stepped forward with a Muslim imam. Together, they lit lamps.

GurNoor learned this had become some sort of a ritual. Different communities, common grief.

“It began ten years ago,” said an elderly woman standing beside her. “Our parents never spoke of that night, but they carried it in their hearts. One day we realised, we’d all lost someone. And we were all still bleeding alone.”

As the lamps floated into the Ravi, GurNoor felt the weight of what Biji had lived through, and what this village had chosen to do with it.

She placed a copy of the letter under the memorial stone, whispering, “She carried it alone. But you don’t have to.”

That night, in her journal, GurNoor wrote:

"Grief doesn’t wear a religion. A child’s scream, a mother’s silence, a lover’s wait, they all sound the same in every language. Today I saw how mourning, when shared, becomes healing. Not forgetting, but forgiving. Not moving on, but moving together."

When she closed her journal, she reached for the fourth letter. It was marked Beas, and smelled faintly of jasmine.

She wasn’t sure if it was a letter of return or of repair. But she had come to this conclusion that the rivers weren’t just water. They were memory, blood, and hope, braided together, still flowing.

Beas – Sheltered

Beas Village, Punjab, India

Gurnoor realised that the next letter seemed like it had been read often. Its folds were softer than the others. It did not begin with fear or loss, but with a single line that was striking.

"In our worst hour, strangers became our saviours."

The letter told the story of how Biji had been rescued by the Sikh family during the Partition exodus. Forced to flee Lahore amidst the rising violence, they had crossed into what would become India, walking for miles barefoot, terrified, and without a definite destination.

One night, near the banks of the Beas, she had collapsed near a small village. Lala Ramesh Lal, the patriarch of the family had relatives in Gurdaspur who promised them shelter. But, knowing the risk of having a Muslim girl along, he decided to stay put. Lalaji’s wife had always liked Biji and so she became the daughter the woman never had, and rechristened her as Shabbo.

I remember the woman’s eyes more than her face, her grandmother had written. They looked at me not as a Muslim, not as a refugee, but as a scared young girl who was grieving the loss of a family she would never meet.

GurNoor sighed as she finished the letter. The river Beas, her grandmother wrote, had been the only witness to that night, a river that didn’t ask where you came from, only where you needed to go. How surprising that GurNoor had never even bothered to know of Biji’s past which held so many of these stories and her history.

She made her way to the village near the river, now more developed but still echoing its old soul. With the help of the local panchayat records, she found the descendants of Lala Ramesh Lal and his family, some of whom were still in the village.

Meena, Lalaji’s grand niece, opened the door to a stranger’s face but a familiar story. GurNoor introduced herself, and held out the letter. The older woman stared at it as if she could already feel its words.

Meena held her hands tightly in her lap, as she went about narrating whatever she knew of the story.

"My father told us once," Meena said, "about how a Muslim girl was adopted by Lalaji’s family, but the danger of having her around was immense. There was a sudden fire in their house one night and so Lalaji decided to have her sent to Amritsar, at the Golden Temple, until things settled. He said helping her was the only time he felt God standing beside him. After that I never asked what became of her and so I have nothing more to offer."

They sat silently for a while after, as if the silence seemed sacred.

Before leaving, GurNoor placed a copy of the letter in Meena’s hands. “So it’s never forgotten,” she said. “Not just what they did, but who they chose to be in the given circumstances.”

Meena held the letter, then touched GurNoor’s head in blessing.

The Beas sparkled like it had been watching all along. GurNoor’s journal was quickly filling in with the traces of Biji’s life, even though a lot seemed to be missing.

"There are moments when the heart breaks, and someone who is unrelated, unknown, builds a shelter over it with their hands. That’s what the Beas became for Biji. Not a river of escape, but of grace. That family didn’t just protect her life, they protected her belief in goodness."

She looked at the last line of the letter that brought proud tears to her eyes.

"Humanity is the only shelter that doesn’t collapse. It’s what remains when fire takes everything else."

It was almost time to go home. But not before one last crossing.

She stared at the last envelope. Sutlej. The final river.

Sutlej – The River That Remembers 

Amritsar, Punjab, India

The final letter seemed more like scattered journal entries written across years. The handwriting changed slightly across the pages, as if it had aged with Biji. It didn’t begin with a date or greeting, just a line underlined twice:

"I have lived most of my life on one side of the border, but my soul always sat with a foot in both Punjabs."

GurNoor held it gently, sensing this was not just the end of Biji’s story, it was also a map of her life that GurNoor had not been able to completely trace yet.

The entries described how she found shelter at the Golden Temple, Amritsar, where she met her husband. Biji never returned to Pakistan, but in her heart, she never left. Her days here were lived outwardly with resolve raising children, tending to a kitchen garden, cooking for the family. But in quiet moments, her mind wandered to the fields along the Jhelum, the stone walls of the mango grove, the banks of Chenab, where Ayub had once placed a yellow ribbon in her hair.

She wrote in one entry, borders are lines we’re told to obey. But memory has no passport. It swims, it soars, it returns.

She had written of a bridge over the Sutlej River, the Hussainiwala bridge, where, she had once noticed a passing train and imagined people waving back from the other side. The bridge had remained with her, a symbol of what could connect two lands even when politics severed them.

GurNoor knew, instinctively, where she needed to go next.

The Hussainiwala bridge was nothing like she had imagined. It had been rebuilt and trains no longer plied on it. But below it, the Sutlej flowed on, indifferent to boundaries.

Standing at the edge, wind tangling her hair, GurNoor pulled out a few dried flowers that were encased in the letter and dropped them in the water. They vanished into the Sutlej, just as stories vanish into time, except they don’t, not really.

They stay in bridges. In water. In letters.

In us.

As the current carried the flowers, GurNoor sat down on a nearby rock and pulled out her journal.

"She never returned to the land of her birth. But she never left it either. She lived in two places at once, not in confusion, but in connection. Maybe that’s what home truly is, not soil or flag, but memory. A longing that keeps bridges alive, even if trains no longer cross them."

She closed her eyes, imagining her grandmother as a young girl, laughing on a swing in Jhelum, stealing mangoes in the sun, falling in love by the Chenab, escaping near-death in Ravi, hiding from fire in Beas, and dreaming by the Sutlej.

Five rivers. Five memories. One life.

And now, one granddaughter who sat here not just to retrace the past, but to gather it, hold it, and return it to the rivers that never forgot.

The journey was complete. But the story had just begun.

The Sixth Letter

Back in her small apartment in Toronto, the air smelled of familiarity, everything around seemed comfortable. Biji remained waiting for her return but GurNoor was not the same as she was when she left. 

She sat at her desk, the five letters spread before her like sacred scrolls. They felt less like remnants of Biji’s past now, and more like seeds of memory, truth, and something deeply human.

She picked up her pen.

"To my future children," she began.

"One day, you may hear stories that paint people as ‘other.’ You may see borders drawn in textbooks or maps that divide us by religion, country, or history. But I want you to know about rivers."

She wrote of Jhelum, where Biji once shared mangoes and giggles with a friend; of Chenab, where a teenage promise outlasted Partition; of Ravi, where grief was communal and language universal; of Beas, where humanity took the form of a sheltering home; and of Sutlej, where memory made a bridge out of longing.

"I walked the land your great-grandmother once knew by heart. I met those she left behind, and those who carried her kindness forward. I learned that pain may be inherited, but so can healing. So can love."

She folded the letter gently, tucked it beside the original five, and tied them all with a red thread. She took them to Biji and told her what this was.

This was not just preservation. It was a continuation.

Biji had carried five rivers in her soul. GurNoor added a sixth, not a river, but a voice.

That which refused to forget. That which chose unity over history’s noise.

And she knew, someday, someone else would open that bundle and remember too.