It's one thing to tell a story, and completely another to tell a story about a significant event in the country’s history. Especially, when it is about India’s fight for Independence. Writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has lived with these stories forever. “My grandfather and mother were both followers of Mahatma Gandhi, and actively involved in the freedom movement. I heard a lot about the marches, lathi charges, and harsh repercussions of those participating in them. All of this stayed with me,” she shares over a video call from Houston. The Indian-American author felt the urgency to pen these received experiences after completing her previous novel, The Last Queen, which recalled the story of Maharani Jind Kaur, and how the British “manipulated and bribed her court to take over Punjab”. “That was a painful story for me to write. I really needed, in some moral and cathartic way, to see the end of that movement when the British are forced out of India, and the country gains its freedom.” But this triumph also coincided with the Partition. One that was harder to ignore.

Divakaruni’s new book, Independence (HarperCollins India), takes us into the tiny village of Ranipur in Bengal, where the lives of three sisters—Deepa, Jamini and Priya—change almost unexpectedly in the August of 1946. “A lot happened in Bengal during that time.” The Direct Action Day and the Noakhali riots that followed were horrifying, but it had been neglected, she says. “I felt there was this huge gap in our Partition literature [written in English], and I wanted to fill that.”