“But every night, without fail, after shutting the bookshop, he would stop at India Gate and buy flowers for my hair on his way back to the camp. He would present me with a jasmine gajra, and I would sleep with it tied in my hair, and in the morning, my hair would be fragrant.”
Delhi-based oral historian Aanchal Malhotra savoured her grandmother Bhag Malhotra’s every word as she narrated her love story with Aanchal’s grandfather, Balraj Bahri Malhotra, the name synonymous with Delhi’s iconic Bahrisons Bookstore. Theirs was a love born out of the Partition of 1947, which saw British India divided into two independent dominions: India and Pakistan, an event marked by bloodshed, violence, and the displacement of millions of people.
But Aanchal never fails to be amazed by how the contours of some of the most beautiful love stories of that time could be shaped by such a tragic event.
Proof lies in the story of her grandparents.
The intervening decades hadn’t blurred any details; Bhag recounted the nitty-gritty of her love story as if it were only yesterday that she and her to-be husband, Balraj, locked eyes for the first time at the social service camp where Bhag volunteered. Balraj’s adoptive sister, Swaran Lata, played cupid.
“Sometimes we would meet in the camp after work. But it was not like the couples of today, not so direct, not so candid. That was a courtship where we spoke far more with our eyes than with words. We would just look at each other from afar – no movies, no dinners, uska zamana hi nahi tha (all of this was not common),” Anchal quotes her grandmother in her book In the Language of Remembering (2022), a literary archive tracing the generational impact of the Partition of 1947. Through these stories, she has attempted to render emotions of love, loss, pain and regret into a vocabulary, allowing them to live on in people’s memories and history.
While her grandparents are no more, their story, like so many others, will live on.
Two refugees & a chance meeting
The Kingsway Camp in North Delhi housed over 30,000 refugees; it was one of the biggest of its kind. Aanchal’s grandmother lived in Hudson Line; her grandfather lived in Reeds; both were part of the Camp.
What’s interesting is how they’d both found their way there.
Partition unleashed an exodus of millions of refugees across the India-Pakistan border. Among them was a 19-year-old Balraj, who, along with his parents, two brothers and a sister, was forced out of Malakwal (present-day Pakistan). At the station, Balraj’s father, the then-manager of the village bank, was asked to stay back and render his services to the people, training them in basic banking. He obliged. The family proceeded without him. Once in Delhi, they were allocated a space in Kingsway Camp.
At around the same time, a 16-year-old Bhag Guliani, her four siblings and her single mother had been forced out of their home in Dera Ismail (D I) Khan (present-day Pakistan). When they reached Delhi, they had nowhere to stay.
Unsettled by the unwelcoming response they received, Bhag’s mother had attempted to return to Old Delhi Railway Station the next morning after they’d reached, helpless at not having anywhere to live. “If we are to die, then we will do so on our own land. We don’t know this new place, and we are not welcome here,” Bhag recalls her mother’s words.
But the teeming crowds at the station, the stench of blood and the gory sights made her rethink her decision. Luckily, they chanced upon a gentleman who took them to a camp in Meerut; eventually, the family moved back to Delhi, where they were allotted residence at Kingsway Camp.
That’s how Bhag and Balraj ended up in Kingsway Camp.
Now, for how they met.
The young man from Malakwal with big dreams
In the years following their settling into the Camp, Balraj and his brothers took up whatever odd jobs they could find, from selling coal at train stations to fountain pens at Chandni Chowk. In 1950, they reunited with their father and acquired a tender for printing and distributing government publications. Meanwhile, Bhag passed her matriculation examinations, after which she began teaching and volunteering at a social services camp in the area.
Around 1953, Balraj, who had heard of shops being allotted in Khan Market to a few refugees, approached his employer for help. The employer, impressed with Balraj’s dedication, helped him acquire a shop, and that’s how Bahrisons bookstore was born.
Around that year, Balraj and Bhag met for the first time.
And just like that, they knew it was love.
In 1955, the couple got married and, in a few years, moved to Netaji Nagar, New Delhi. The popularity of Bahrisons grew, with diplomats, prime ministers, and other affluent people among their list of guests.
An anecdote that’s often told is of how Bhag, a pillar to Balraj through the years, would take a few hours off work during the time Balraj would go home for lunch. She would handle the cash counter. In 1977, she chose an early retirement and divided her time between the bookshop and home.
Today, Bahrison’s is distinguished by its shelves that stack high up to the ceiling, filled with some of the best stories. But if the walls could speak, they’d argue that the best one was written by fate — the one that brought Balraj and Bhag together.
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