Baljit Dhillon Vikram Singh

As a little girl, Baljit Dhillon Vikram Singh would accompany her father to the India-Pakistan border where he would stand and weep silently by the rail line. He would point towards the west and say, “Oh! Everything is over there, on the other side. Lahore, Lahore! Nanikie, Nanikie!”

Mrs. Vikram Singh was born Baljit Kaur Dhillon in the early 1940s in the village of Nanikie near Lahore. Her father was a prominent landlord. Mrs. Vikram Singh was the eldest of the three children. She attended the Queen Mary School for a few months in 1947. Mrs. Vikram Singh recalls that the social tension in Lahore kept growing around the time of Partition. One night she was woken up by her mother putting all her jewelry, money, and valuables in a vault that was located between the walls. She put all three children in the family jeep and they headed for Amritsar. On their journey from Lahore towards Amritsar, Mrs. Vikram Singh saw the dead lying in ditches along the road and floating in the canals. She clearly remembers the limbs of the butchered bodies. Even now, she says, the images are vivid. Her mother tried to cover her daughter’s eyes with her dupatta to protect her from the scenes. They reached her maternal grandparents’ house in Amritsar safely. Later, the family settled in Rajasthan.

Mrs. Vikram Singh's father had left everything in Nanikie, her ancestral village, expecting to return in a few days. But that day never came. Her father was allotted a small amount of barren land in the Punjab, in lieu of the hundreds of acres left behind. Overnight her family became refugees living off the land, eating turnips and saag, wearing simple clothes and riding bullock carts and camels instead of in jeeps and cars. The family worked very hard to make ends meet. Mrs. Vikram Singh mentions that her father was a great believer in education and sent all three of his children to boarding school in Nainital. She completed her matriculation from All Saints School in 1958 and was married in 1959.