Dear Zahira, With Love by Sachin NG — Sameer Gudhate on Love, Loss and the Human Cost of Partition

When a Border Separates Two People, What Exactly Does It Fail to Separate?

Some love stories are about two people trying to find each other.

Dear Zahira, With Love by Sachin NG is about something more difficult: two people trying to remain connected when history has decided they belong on opposite sides of a border.

That distinction stayed with me.

Because we often talk about Partition through numbers—millions displaced, families separated, lives destroyed, borders redrawn. History gives us dates, political decisions and maps.

But a border is never really drawn on a map alone.

It is drawn through someone's home.

Someone's family.

Someone's identity.

And sometimes, someone's love.

Ghulam Ali returns to India, the country he considers his motherland, and meets Zahira. What begins as love quickly becomes entangled with the realities of Partition. Ghulam finds himself stranded in Lahore, injured, starving and suspected of being a jasoos. Having been forced into the Pakistani Army, he discovers an especially cruel irony: the country he longs to return to does not know where to place him anymore.

So he writes.

To ministers.

To bureaucrats.

To journalists.

And, most importantly, to Zahira.

Those letters become more than communication. They become evidence that he still exists somewhere between two countries that have stopped recognising him as their own.

And that is where the epistolary form works beautifully.

Letters are strange things. They are written in the absence of the person we most want to speak to. They require patience. You write, you wait, you hope.

Today, we can send a message across a border in seconds.

Ghulam and Zahira had words.

And time.

The distance between them therefore isn't measured merely in kilometres. It is measured in uncertainty, silence, waiting and the fear that the next letter may never arrive.

What I particularly appreciated about the book is that Partition remains a backdrop without completely swallowing the people living through it.

We see Ghulam's desperation.

But we also see Zahira waiting.

And Zahira's story matters because she isn't merely positioned as the woman waiting for her lover. She is living her own life in 1950s India, with her naani and sister, trying to navigate the realities of being a working Muslim woman while carrying a deeply personal secret.

Her dream of dancing freely becomes another quiet dimension of the story.

And this made me think about something we sometimes forget when discussing history:

People don't stop having personal dreams simply because history is going through a catastrophe.

They still fall in love.

They still worry about family.

They still want to work.

They still want to dance.

They still wait for letters.

They still imagine tomorrow.

That is perhaps the book's greatest strength.

It doesn't ask us merely to remember Partition.

It asks us to feel what it meant to be a person caught inside it.

At the same time, the book made me question one of the romantic ideas we often attach to love stories—that love can overcome every obstacle.

Can it?

Dear Zahira, With Love makes that question considerably more complicated.

Love can keep someone alive.

It can give someone hope.

It can provide a reason to keep writing when everything else has collapsed.

But love cannot control governments.

It cannot redraw borders.

It cannot erase suspicion.

It cannot undo history.

And perhaps that is what makes Ghulam's letters so affecting. They aren't written from a world where love magically solves everything. They are written from a world where love is sometimes the only thing a person can still control.

I also found myself thinking about the written word itself.

A letter is a physical act of faith.

You write to someone who isn't there.

You trust that they will receive it.

You trust that they will understand it.

And, most importantly, you trust that they will still care by the time it arrives.

In an age of instant communication, that feels almost foreign.

Sachin NG's choice to tell this story through letters therefore isn't merely a stylistic decision. It reinforces the central emotional reality of the book: connection requires patience when distance has power.

The writing is accessible and emotionally direct, and the historical setting supports rather than overwhelms the human story. There are quieter stretches where the pace slows, but those moments also give the reader space to sit with the characters rather than rush toward the next event.

And perhaps that is how this book should be read.

Slowly.

Because some letters are not meant to be hurried through.

Dear Zahira, With Love left me with a thought that has little to do with romance and everything to do with history:

When countries divide people, what remains entirely their own?

A passport can change.

A nationality can change.

A border can move.

A government can decide where you belong.

But can it decide whom you love?

I don't think this book gives us a simple answer.

And I'm glad it doesn't.

Because the most moving stories from history are often not the ones that explain history to us.

They are the ones that remind us that history happened to people.

Ghulam Ali and Zahira are two such people.

And their letters remind us that sometimes, across a border created by history, the most powerful thing a human being can say is simply:

I am still here.

And I still remember you.

My take

Dear Zahira, With Love is for readers who enjoy historical fiction, epistolary storytelling and emotionally driven narratives—but more importantly, for readers willing to look at Partition not only as an event in history, but as a collection of lives interrupted by it.

A tender story about love, separation and waiting.

But beneath all of that, it is also a story about identity—and the painful question of who gets to decide where a person belongs.

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