In 1947, my grandfather Mohammad Yasin was sixteen years old when the border of a new country was drawn cutting through Punjab and putting his village on the wrong side. Overnight, the place his family had always lived became part of India, and they became foreigners in it.
He led his family across the new border on foot, through the violence and hunger of one of the largest forced migrations in human history, and arrived in Pakistan with almost nothing. Then he spent the rest of his life building the country that had taken them in, first in its Navy, later in its Army, and eventually as a teacher and policy maker.