KATE BROOKS/POLARIS The house at 11 Temple Road: The structure hadn't changed, but most of the house was empty and in a state of disrepair

On a personal level, I think of partition—when the blood spilling between Hindus and Muslims caused as many as a million people to die and perhaps 11 million to flee newly created Pakistan for independent India or vice versa—mostly in terms of losing our family home in Lahore. Once, in the early years after partition, my father went back to Lahore to get one last good look at our house and perhaps rescue some of his pictures and papers. The house had been appropriated by Muslim squatters and was then occupied by a Muslim family. They feared that he had come to reclaim the building, and they barely let him in. An old Muslim friend advised him to leave the city as quickly as possible if he didn't want someone to put a knife in his back. He did what he was told.

In 1978, I happened to be in New Delhi and met at a publisher's party a scion of an old, distinguished Muslim family, Fakir Sayed Aijazuddin, or "Aijaz," a Pakistani journalist. He and his wife, Shahnaz, also a journalist, were there to promote his book Pahari Paintings and Sikh Portraits in the Lahore Museum. They were as warm and outgoing as my Punjabi relatives, and we became fast friends. Aijaz invited me to visit Lahore, saying in perfect Punjabi, "Whatever the experience of your father back then, it is as safe for you to travel to Pakistan nowadays as for us to travel here."

"Do you have any mementos of your Lahore house?" Shahnaz asked.

"Only one, a member of a pair of finely carved Chinese ebony standing lamps which had flanked our sofa in the drawing room," I said. "My father insisted on giving it as a wedding present to my eldest cousin, Dharam Bir. He said, 'I wouldn't dream of taking it. It looks so well in your drawing room.' My father quoted to him a Punjabi couplet: 'To one who shares food, it is sugar/ To one who eats alone, it is a toad.' Cousin Dharam Bir had no choice but to accept the lamp. He took it back with him to Bombay, where he lived, and because it was already in India, it survived partition."

They wanted to know if he still had the lamp, and I told them that when I got my own apartment in New York, cousin Dharam Bir insisted that I should become the custodian of the lamp. It has stood in my apartment ever since, an emblem of our lost house.

In 1979, I started to write about my childhood and took the Aijazuddins up on their invitation to go to Pakistan, in the hope of checking my memories and perhaps reviving them.

Both Aijaz and Shahnaz were waiting for me at the airport. Aijaz embraced me affectionately and said, "Lahore Lahore hai."

"Lahore is Lahore" is a common greeting among Lahoris, as if they need constantly to reaffirm that Lahore is superior to all other cities in the world.

Even though it was getting dark, we took a taxi from the airport straight to Mehta Gulli, at 14 Temple Road, a lane on which all my Mehta uncles had built their houses with common walls and contiguous rooflines. We got out of the car at the old address, but the cozy lane had been incorporated into a much larger area, which seemed under development. There was an empty lot where a couple of my uncles' houses had once stood. Some of the other family houses had been replaced by newer, more lavish homes with little yards and alleyways between them. The wall from Mehta Gulli that we used to climb over to get to the little compound of my maternal grandparents was gone, along with their house. In fact, everything was so changed around that I wasn't able to find any of my childhood landmarks. Whenever we knocked at the door of a house, the whole family would appear in force, as if they were worried that we had come to claim the property and wanted to scare us off.

We backtracked to the spot where the taxi had dropped us and to the cul-de-sac in which my father had built his house, at 11 Temple Road, in 1928. There, surprisingly, not so much as a brick had been disturbed. Even the small white marble slab on which my father's name, DR. AMOLAK RAM MEHTA, had been etched in black letters was still there, set in the cement at the gate. The letters were dirty and somewhat eroded, but there was no mistaking the name.

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