Zakir and violence.

Zakir does not once recall the violent events of the partition with any clarity or detail. Despite having experienced the ordeal of hijrat and being uprooted from his basti (a trauma he struggles to come to terms with throughout the rest of the novel), the violence of the partition does not live in Zakir’s memory nor is it a part of his consciousness. The reasons for this gap in Zakir’s memory are significant and deserve exploration. 

In contrast, Zakir visits various major violent events (fictitious or otherwise) with great lucidity. His graphic visitations of the War of Independence of 1857 are particularly striking. I believe that these visitations are symptomatic of Zakir having internalized the trauma of 1947 and are his method of dealing with the violence of the partition, something which traumatized him to the extent that he cannot confront it directly and manifests itself in his subconscious in the form of these visitations.