Farewell Karachi

When celebrity journalist and writer Bhawana Somaaya’s therapist once asked her what her biggest fear in life was, she unthinkingly said, ‘It’s not having a roof over my head.’ Until then, she had never acknowledged the intergenerational trauma-informed instinct of displacement and placelessness. She was yet to unpack its haunting grip on her flights, fights and freezes.

Farewell Karachi is the story of a family planting its roots anew in a country at the cusp of a violent Partition. Spanning over a hundred years and five generations, the narrative draws on an intimate portrait of a large family that grew up under the unspoken spectre of Partition. Told in an astonishingly mosaic and archaeological tone, this is the saga of a displaced Gujarati family from Karachi that moved to Kutch and subsequently to erstwhile Bombay in India to rebuild a life for themselves.

In telling this moving tale, the book also seeks to make sense of and heal from the foundational wound of two South Asian infant nation-states, exploring how that wound shaped the imminent futures of the peoples partitioned along the Radcliffe Line. In here are dreams, some shattered, some salvaged; in here are customs, heartbreaks and carefully preserved recipes. At the heart of this memoir are the stories behind the nests we weave.