Earth directed by Deepa Mehta written by written by Bapsi Sidhwa (novel) and Deepa Mehta; Cracking the earth Films, inc.; 1998, 101 min.

As an adult woman, looking out at the California hillside from my office window, I have the luxury of taking the land I call my home for granted. Born and raised for most of my life here, the landscape soothes me. Echoes of childhood still carry “one nation, indivisible” in my memory.

Yet the press of my family history and the pain held in my unconscious command my attention. I am the only grandchild of a Hindu man and woman who fled Lahore, Pakistan, in 1947 during the time known as the Partition. Before then, the colonial British Raj held disparate kingdoms together for 250 years under the name “India.” The people of this nation found their collective voice in the independence movements made known to the world by Mahatma Gandhi, and in 1947 the British were finally to “Quit India!” Yet in wake of their departure, they arbitrarily divided lands and left a tenuously cohesive people suddenly divided into Hindu-dominated India and newly created Muslim Pakistan. Horrific and somewhat inexplicable atrocities came to be associated with mutually directed, terrorizing violence that often pitted “brother against brother.” A legacy of shame surrounds the violence, as most acts were directed at the sexual organs of both men and women, with rapes, forced marriages, and unwanted children—all shrouded in silence.

I had the opportunity to spend some childhood years in India with my extended family. On one summer day, my uncle joked, as my grandparents sat with us in their kitchen, about the sandalwood Ganesha that hung above the door. “You know that's where they hid the gold and jewels on that day, when they came from Lahore. They've always been sneaky, those two. Can you imagine your Aji sitting on top of a train?” And, as my family chuckled at the imagined sight, and my grandfather made some witty remark, I felt both a tightening in my chest and a sense of alarm. “What train?” I asked.