Azra is a young girl in India in 1947. She plays with Gurya, a hand-made doll that her paternal grandmother has made for her. She has a little brother, Chotu, whom she loves but who annoys her with his drooling.
She hears shouting in the streets. She can sense changes going on around her, but she does not have any idea really what it means for her and her family. So opens Shiri Shamsi’s The Moon from Dehradun: A Story of Partition.
All of a sudden, her father tells the family that they must leave. They have tickets on a train to Lahore. They have to go without even eating the warm dinner that Azra’s mother Amma has just made. They are leaving Dehradun, which has been home to them for generations of their family. With the new borders, theirs is a one-way journey to a newly founded country, Pakistan.
Azra thinks: “When Ammi (mother) makes halva, she cuts it into pieces. Can that happen to a place?”
The story is based on Shamsi’s mother’s lived experiences in the time of partition. Tarun Lak’s illustrations are poignantly memorable, drawn in a deft and expressive hand. Lak skillfully captures the powerful moments and the mixed emotions of the family.
In one scene, crowded humanity is seen from an aerial view. Each person has their own social connections and personalities and circumstances. That scene evokes the privilege of the family, with funds to buy limited train tickets, a comfortable house that they must leave behind, a truck to carry the family to the station, and the foresight to know when to move. Theirs is a time of shared turmoil, but the turmoil affects people differently.
There are references to Islam and the family’s Muslim faith. Historically, religious identity played an important role on people’s decisions of whether to stay or go, and which side of the border to be on: India or Pakistan.
This picture book intertwines English and Urdu, as the story unfolds. This is written for children’s sensibilities but is also serious and historical. This book shows how geopolitical decisions—the departing British dividing India along religious lines, with Hindus mostly in India, Muslims mostly in the newly formed Pakistan—can have potent impacts on people. Macro events inevitably affect all, children included.
Shamsi and Lak’s The Moon from Dehradun: A Story of Partition is an important picture book which can open the way for conversations about a life-changing event for so many generations ago and peoples through the present, on the Indian subcontinent. This book is ultimately still a positive and hopeful work, which celebrates the strength of families in times of mass-scale change.
The afterword is a must-read given the backstory and historical details.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
