The Convicts

Dear Pakistan, I have had this nauseous feeling inside of me for some time now. I had consciously stirred away from all the books that described the partition in great detail. And if I did read about it, it was objective and from a third party perspective. I refrained myself from having any feelings about it. And why should I have them? I was born in 1988 in a small town of Maharashtra- an Indian state far away from the India-Pakistan border. Yes, my best friend had her ancestral roots in Sindh but we seldom spoke about it in detail. I grew up hearing about ISI intermittently. From what we kids heard about it, for us, ISI was equivalent to a terrorist organization. You were always the enemy. How I hated you during the Kargil war. And yes, almost everything that went wrong in India was attributed to you and your ISI. And then this happened: It was 2003. I was 14. I was in Thailand as a part of the Indian contingent for the 20 th world scout Jamboree. I met people from ar