BARKHA Dutt believes she is amongst the last in her generation to have a Partition story. Many people who migrated to or from north India have a Partition story, and so does the Indian journalist. “My grandfather was a member of the Punjab Congress and a freedom fighter in united India and was basically from Sialkot, Punjab,” she says.

We are at the writer’s lounge at the Beach Luxury Hotel soon after her session with journalist Ghazi Salahuddin finished at the recently concluded Karachi Literature Festival. Like many others at the time, her grandfather was pushed into being a refugee and as he had reached Delhi empty-handed, he was given a plot in the city’s Refugee Colony. “My father still lives there,” Dutt adds. “And though it has been gentrified over the years, it is still a Refugee Colony.”

In 1989, when she was 18, her father, S.P. Dutt, took her and her sister to Sialkot. Recalling some of the roads, he directed them to their ancestral home located on Paris Road which was named Pillar Palace. The mansion, as she referred to it, was in a dilapidated condition. The owners were nice enough to give them the keys and asked them to do what they wanted to while they were there. “I have seen my father cry twice,” Dutt muses. “One, when my mother died. And then when he visited the ancestral mansion.”

Years later, Dutt got a chance to interview Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, and she narrated the story to him. “He was really nice,” she says. “He sent a photographer to what used to be the house and sent me the photograph. It is a school for girls now. It was nice to know that the bloodied years of Partition ended in a school.”

Her book, This Unquiet Land, is as clear and to the point as Dutt usually is. Only those topics are tackled which she has covered extensively over the years, and the opinions are strong and unsparing. Beginning her career in 1994 with a news show on Doordarshan, Dutt is the most portrayed journalist in movies. In her book, she has spoken about her personal and professional trials. Her point of view about the place of women in India or Partition is discussed through the addition of her own personal stories wherever possible.

When it came out on Dec 9, her book created quite a stir. Whether it was her reportage of the Kargil war or the Mumbai attacks or a scoop on the secret meeting between Narendra Modi and Nawaz Sharif in Nepal, or the trials she personally faced, there was much that people wanted to know when they walked into the Jasmine hall at the Beach Luxury Hotel. During the session, she remained as fiery as she usually is during the interviews she conducts on her prime-time show on NDTV.

It was only fitting that the first question of the session led her to begin with a personal story, about which she spoke about without flinching. “I thought a lot about adding my personal experience with sexual abuse in the book,” she began. “It’s neither a memoir nor an autobiography. It was about the larger theme of the book, the first chapter of which was about the place of women in India, so I decided to go ahead with it.” Otherwise, she said, she would have appeared a hypocrite by speaking about an important issue in third person.

During the session, she said that Pakistan and India share a schizophrenic relationship where the hostilities and even love is overdone. Today’s generation doesn’t relate to it at all. There was an impression that she has been soft on Modi in her book, she was asked. She replied: “I believe we need to be dispassionate in our assumptions of the people we cover.”

Having reported on Pakistan during the elections and at the time of Benazir Bhutto’s assassination, she shared a few stories of meeting Nawaz Sharif and former president Asif Ali Zardari. She spoke about Bhutto’s assassination and her impression of Sharif when he offered her a lift in his private plane on the way to Larkana. “He was advised not to visit Larkana as there was unrest and the people’s mood was volatile,” she explained. “I saw that he was visibly shaken by her assassination, even though they were political opponents. I think her assassination played a big part in the tempering of Nawaz Sharif into a more mature and a more moderate leader,” she added. Another instance was when in a “rare fit of temper”, former president Zardari, threw the microphone away when Dutt asked for another interview after realising that the camera had not been rolling earlier.

In her book, Dutt quotes eminent Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai while explaining feminism, which she said is all about freedom. “There is a part of me that wants to learn Urdu and Farsi, and another which for a long time wanted to read Ismat Chughtai, which I’m glad I finally did,” she added, beaming, during the session.

Published in Dawn, February 9th, 2016