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ACT ONE: LOSING HOME Sirchand "John" Chabria- the filmmaker's father- arrives with the filmmaker in Ahmdabad for the first time in 20 years. Inside the sprawling concrete house surrounded by mango trees where three generations of his family live, he tells how they came to settle in this textile-manufacturing city. Over a montage of newsreel footage of Partition, still photos, family photos, and newspaper clippings, Sirchand recounts what it was like to live through one of the most violent migrations in modern history. Intercut with interviews with his brothers and sisters, the actual story of their journey emerges: how a Muslim neighbor came to the door one morning to warn of an approaching mob, how their mother hid valuables in jam jars and hems of clothing and fled with her family through streets literally muddy with blood, how some of them were able to find passage on a steamship, how others were forced to walk hundreds of miles to the border in columns of refugees that were so long it's said they took 8 hours to pass any given point. The narration explains that this is a family of Shikhpuri Sindhis who settled among the Gujarati people of Northen India. Although this caste and cultural distinction is lost to many westerners, it was a loss of a homeland to the Chhabria's. They were no longer surrounded by a history and culture that they understood and were a part of. They were strangers, even down to speaking a different language. The narration explains that the filmmaker believes her father never felt attached to his new home, and that was one of the reasons he left India for America, where he changed his name, married a white woman, and raised two daughters.
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