O Yasmeen As A “Switchboard Of Phantoms”
O. Yasmeen took fifteen years to write. During that time, I often sat with friends—especially Nandan, Pratap Somvanshi, and others—reading it aloud, listening carefully to their responses, and revising the work in light of those conversations. Each reading revealed new problems, and over the years, the book slowly shed layers and reshaped itself.
One question returned again and again: how does one write about Partition?
Most novels we read—especially the ones that travel farthest—follow a kind of industrial rhythm: a straight line from beginning to middle to end, characters who change in predictable ways, a plot that marches forward like a train on schedule. O. Yasmeen kept stepping off that track entirely.
There is no single line to follow. Instead, the pages feel like a switchboard alive with ghosts—voices crossing and interrupting one another, memories flickering in and out without warning. Poetry, philosophy, and prose share the same air, trying to hold the shattering that happened in 1947, when Partition tore the subcontinent in two.
Trying to tell that story in the usual way quickly revealed how frail the standard tools are. The "rational" mind lines up events like evidence in a courtroom, turning trauma into something to be filed and understood. It asks grief to sit still and be measured. O. Yasmeen refuses. It wanders through silences, trusting that the only honest way to approach such loss is to let the mind move the way a mind in mourning moves.
In trying to write O Yasmeen I learned to set aside the expectation of a tidy journey and accept something closer to a map of sorrow—places marked not by roads but by absences, by echoes, and by everything that refuses to stay buried
