A 90-year-old Pakistani man and an 89-year-old Indian man, who were childhood friends before the partition of the subcontinent, are building a renewed bond after meeting again in the U.S. A TikTok of their story and emotional reunion is going viral.
Megan Kothari, 32, documented the experience of reuniting her grandfather Suresh Kothari with his childhood best friend, AG Shakir. The two grew up together in Deesa, Gujarat, and were separated in 1947, when the division of the country forced Shakir’s family to flee to Pakistan. They were both around 12 years old.
“He talks a lot about this one friend,” Kothari said of her grandfather. “How they were very close, they were very mischievous together … then he remembers, overnight, how he had to leave.”
The two reunited in October on the occasion of Shakir’s 90th birthday party, where they greeted each other with an eager embrace and spent much of the evening hand-in-hand. Having filmed the whole experience, Kothari decided to share it on TikTok this week. In two days, her post quickly garnered hundreds of thousands of views and comments.
The story struck a chord with South Asian users, most of whom have their own partition stories to tell, Kothari said.
“Pakistani people commenting, Indian people commenting, they’re all coming together, which is so beautiful,” she said.
Deesa, in the Indian state of Gujarat, is located just a few hours from the Pakistani border. On Aug. 15, 1947, the then-British-ruled country was divided in two: a Muslim-dominated Pakistan and a Hindu-dominated India.
The mass migration that followed was the most violent event in South Asian history, leaving 500,000 to 2 million people dead and 15 million displaced. Shakir’s family left the city on a boat to Karachi in October 1947, his daughter Saeema Shakir told NBC News. Fleeing in the middle of the night, they didn’t have time to inform friends or loved ones of their journey.
Suresh Kothari, who was studying in Bombay at…
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