- Lived:
- 31 August 1919, Gujranwala, Punjab → Lahore until August 1947 → Delhi for the rest of a long life; died there 31 October 2005
- Field:
- poetry and fiction in Punjabi — the first great modern woman's voice in the language, and the keeper of Partition's grief
- The Big Idea:
- When Punjab was cut in half in 1947, she did not write a history or an accusation. She called on a Sufi poet dead for a century and a half to rise from his grave and look — and in doing so said the one thing about Partition that both halves of Punjab still recite as true.
- In their words:
- "Ajj aakhaan Waris Shah nu…" — "Today I call on Waris Shah: speak from your grave."
- If you remember one thing:
- A pregnant refugee on a train out of a burning Punjab wrote a lament on a scrap of paper, addressed to a dead man — and those lines outlived the governments, the commissions and most of the histories, because she understood that what had been partitioned was not land but love.