ŷ������

“Goodbye, old India.��

A friend of mine recommended this to me since I’ve been wanting to read more middle grade.

It’s a story about a 12-year old, dealing with the loss of her mother through writing letters to her. Amidst the normalcy of her life, things are slowly starting to change in the political sense and Nisha and her family are forced to leave and cross the border to find a place to call home.

It talks about the 1947 Indian partition and these children belonging to both countries as their mother was Muslim and their father is Indian. They weren’t so much of an outcast in society then but as they’re being forced to move, their identity comes into play. They don’t know where they belong.
This got hard to read at times. You are reading about how just over a million of people lost their lives due to the partition and children seeing things they have no right to see. You see her worldview changing from the innocence all children possess to having her reality altered and she deals with it by noting down her experiences to her mother who she very much keeps alive in her heart.

Though it’s fictionalised, parts of this story are very much real. The audiobook narrator captured the story perfectly.