Mitr Pyare Nu is an autobiographical that strings together Mr. K. D. Kohli’s recollections of his ancestral land Pind Dadan Khan, set in the Greater Punjab of pre-partition British India.
It took ten long years for me to finally publish this book edited down to 800 pages that tell his story and have the precious moment of presenting it to him, on his 91st Birthday.
Today, after he has left his elemental body – what remains alive is the dastavez, a chronicle of my father’s life and that of my ancestors spanning over four generations. It covers his personal history and emotions that span from 19th century, 1860 to 2021.
Quoting my father from the book, “Separation is a bigger relationship than a union. Memories are seamless and borderless. The native in you and me resides in the homeland of memories that cannot be partitioned. Memories cannot be patrolled at the borders. You may travel to any corner of the world, you may change your language, you may change your religion, you may change your name, you may change your identity, but the one thing you cannot change is your mold, the one thing you cannot change is the color of that native clay, the soil from which you have been cast. The one thing you cannot wash off is the smell of the land that gave birth to you. You may be in any corner of the world, but your identity remains rooted in the earth of your native land. It is these which shape and casts your personality.”
By presenting this primordial tale of movement of mankind through the vantage of my family’s history of migration, I was mesmerized by the pulse of this contemporary moment of mass-unbelonging, expressed as a susurration of solidarity (in the words of my father) Pind Dadan lives not just in my memory, but in my present.
As I rewind back and share with you the life and times of not only this man but also many more like him.
