Why did I come to write this book? Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the author of Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, reminds us that ‘we all need histories that no history book can tell, but they are in the lessons we learn at home, in poetry and childhood games, in what is left of history when we close the history books with their verifiable facts’. I was born about a couple of kilometres from Qadirabad Headworks Colony (in the district of Gujranwala–Punjab), one of Pakistan's largest 1971 wartime Bengali internment camps, which a former internee described as a place in ‘hell’. This residential colony, located on the bank of the Chenab River, was established in the 1960s by the governments of Australia and New Zealand for the workforce who worked on the construction of Qadirabad Headworks under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty. I grew up playing cricket on the Qadariabad Headworks Colony School field in my early teens, and I remember going to drink water from a nearby nalka (traditional water pump). There was a rusted water tank, with the inscription ‘J [Joi] Bangla’ on it. I have heard stories about ‘Bengali qaidi’ (prisoners) being imprisoned in the colony. One story is that a Bengali was shot by a camp guard while attempting to flee from the colony and was buried in a nearby graveyard. As a boy I did not have the orientation to understand most of the ‘stories’ about ‘Bengali qaidi’; however, their residing in the colony has always intrigued me.

During the research for my previous book, The Punjab Borderland: Mobility, Materiality and Militancy, I found documentation about the 1971 wartime events in West Pakistan, the opposite of what I had anticipated to seek out.