India, Aug. 16 -- There are homes that leave us, and there are homes we are made to leave. Jasbir Pal Singh belongs to the second kind of memory, the kind that does not fade so much as settle, like dust that never quite finds the floor. He was eight years old when Peshawar stopped being his city after the announcement of Partition in 1947.

Now touching 90 and a successful businessman, he still vividly remembers what all happened in those days of upheaval. It had not felt precarious before that. His father ran Khalsa School with the quiet authority of a man respected across community lines, and the Singh household sat comfortably, if a little conspicuously, among Muslim neighbours who outnumbered them many times over. Peshawar was not hos...