While the Indian and Pakistani armies engaged in a fierce battle on the eastern front in December 1971 during Eastern Pakistan's widely documented liberation war, India's Ladakh Scouts and Nubra guards, under the command of Major Chewang Rinchen, forayed into the northern reaches of the subcontinent to recapture a handful of villages that Pakistan won control of after independence.
After what is now described by locals as a night-long exchange of gunfire and shelling, Turtuk, Thang and Takshi changed hands. And, while peace was restored to the villages eventually, multiple families were torn apart by what is now referred to as a second Partition in the region. As part of a larger audio-visual series that documents the stories of four individuals that I interviewed during an art residency in Turtuk, I worked on a series of textual portraits that act as gateways to their heart-wrenching accounts of separation that I hope to eventually expand on. They serve, I think, as continuations of Sarah's work on the memories of a home that is to be thought of fondly but never to be known again.