Apparently, sharing a car with a Pakistani Muslim woman was unbearable. Even in America.
It wasn’t a white American who objected to my presence. It was another brown woman, an Indian, whose ancestors had once belonged to the same undivided land as mine.
For weeks, my friends had been quietly negotiating around her discomfort. I couldn’t stay overnight at their accommodation. My movements around the house were restricted. Plans were adjusted, arrangements reconsidered. I knew something was wrong, but I chose not to make an issue of it.
Then, one August weekend, while we were helping a friend move, another condition emerged. She would not share a cab with me.
The objection, as it was conveyed to me, was rooted in my identity as a Pakistani Muslim woman. I found myself wondering what could make even a short car journey together so intolerable.
That was the moment my discomfort turned into disbelief.
I wanted to confront her. I wanted to ask what exactly about my presence had made sharing a car impossible. But another question began troubling me more: where does such hostility come from, particularly in someone too young to have witnessed the history supposedly dividing us?
I grew up Pakistani. She grew up Indian. Neither of us drew the border. Neither of us lived through Partition. And yet, one weekend in America, that border somehow entered the car before either of us did.
To understand how such hostility survives generations, I turned to Anam Zakaria, a Pakistani oral historian and author of The Footprints of Partition.
“What I found was that the further we move from Partition, the more partitioned and hardline we are becoming,” she told me, reflecting on her research in South Asia.
Zakaria recalled her grandmother, who had witnessed the bloodshed in Amritsar and volunteered at a refugee camp. She carried painful memories and did not want her granddaughter to visit India. Yet she also remembered Hindu and Sikh friends, including people who had helped save lives during the violence.
For those who experienced Partition, memories of bloodshed existed alongside memories of coexistence. But subsequent generations did not necessarily inherit both.
“You often don’t really inherit stories of rescue,” Zakaria observed.
She explained how accounts of violence became intertwined with national narratives, while memories of friendship and shared lives received less attention. Textbooks, media and subsequent political developments continued to shape how the past was remembered.
“It’s not just Partition. It’s also about how Partition is evoked,” she said.
Zakaria cautioned against attributing every contemporary hostility to the trauma of 1947. The ways that history has been retold, and the political and social developments that followed, also matter.
Her account left me considering a possibility I had initially overlooked: perhaps the young woman I encountered in America was not simply carrying an inherited memory of Partition. Perhaps her understanding of Pakistan had been shaped by narratives constructed long after the border was drawn.
I thought about my own upbringing. I, too, had grown up with stories of Partition, wars and political tensions between India and Pakistan. Yet those histories had never prevented me from forming friendships with Indians. Why did the same border seem so difficult for someone else to cross?
I began asking younger Pakistanis and Indians what they had believed about one another before meeting.
For 20-year-old Pakistani Tuba Taban, Indians were never entirely strangers. She called them “land mates.”
At home, conversations about shared food, language and culture made India feel familiar. Indian dramas reinforced that connection. But studying Pakistan Studies introduced her to a different narrative, one in which India was portrayed as an adversary.
Her experience made me wonder whether prejudice is always inherited within families, or whether institutions can teach people to see neighbours as enemies.
Baqi Ali, a 31-year-old Pakistani living in Toronto, described another route to forming impressions. Before meeting Indians, he believed they generally disliked Pakistanis, an assumption he associated with media and political rhetoric.
Personal encounters challenged that belief. The Indians he met did not resemble the hostile population he had imagined.
I recognised something of my own experience in his account. Living abroad had brought me into friendships that national boundaries might otherwise have made difficult.
But I kept returning to that August weekend, just after both nations had celebrated their independence. Thousands of miles from the India-Pakistan border, distance had allowed some of us to build friendships beyond inherited divisions. Yet for one woman, even sharing a short car journey remained unacceptable.
The Indian voices complicated my understanding further.
A 38-year-old Indian man, whom I will call Arjun to protect his identity, recalled that his childhood impressions of Pakistan came largely from Bollywood films. Many of those impressions, he acknowledged, were limited or mistaken.
Meeting Pakistanis reinforced his sense of how much the two societies shared. “Pakistanis are probably the most similar to Indians than any other country,” he said.
Yet his personal experiences had not erased his concerns about territorial disputes and terrorism, which he continued to see as obstacles to closer relations between the countries.
Friendship, I realised, did not necessarily require agreement on everything that divided our nations.
Another Indian participant, a woman in her mid-thirties who requested anonymity and had lived in America, approached Pakistan with curiosity rather than hostility. She wondered about Pakistani women’s lives, religious identity and how two societies with shared cultural histories had evolved differently.
In America, she befriended Pakistanis whose warmth felt familiar. They enjoyed life, helped one another and exchanged kheer, not only on Eid but also on Diwali.
But after some returned to Pakistan, she noticed what appeared to be a change in how they presented themselves on social media. Their posts became more religious, while their attire and expressed beliefs seemed different from what she remembered.
“What happened? Are these the same fun-loving people?” she wondered.
She was careful to acknowledge that she was no longer in direct contact with them. Her impressions were based entirely on their social media posts, and she admitted that she might be mistaken.
Her account stayed with me. Were her friends changing, or were they presenting different versions of themselves in different surroundings? Could the expectations of a social environment influence what people chose to reveal about themselves?
I had no way of knowing what had happened to her friends. Religious expression, after all, was not itself evidence of hostility or intolerance. But her uncertainty reminded me how easily we interpret another person’s identity through what little we can see of their life.
As I listened to these accounts, I kept thinking about the friends who had found themselves caught between the young Indian woman and me.
For weeks, they had tried to accommodate her discomfort without making me feel unwelcome. But when the refusal to share a car became impossible to ignore, the situation could no longer be managed through quiet adjustments.
My friends challenged her objection. What followed was not reconciliation, but a rupture in relationships that had existed long before I entered the picture.
The disagreement has since reached a point where the shared living arrangement is coming to an end. The Indian woman who refused to share the cab is expected to move out next month.
I had never wanted to become the reason friendships were tested. Yet I struggled with the idea that maintaining peace had required everyone else to accommodate one person’s refusal to be around me.
When I discussed this with Zakaria, she offered another way of understanding the fallout. Confronting prejudice, she suggested, can expose differences in values between people who have known one another for years. Sometimes those differences become difficult to overlook.
I understood what she meant, but it left me uncomfortable. The people who challenged the exclusion were now dealing with its consequences. I wondered whether speaking up had made their lives more complicated.
Still, what would the alternative have been? To keep adjusting plans, avoiding shared spaces and treating my presence as a problem to be managed?
The experience had begun with one woman’s refusal to share a car. It had now reached the point of a household preparing to separate. I found myself asking how much people are willing to overlook in the name of friendship, and when keeping the peace becomes another way of accommodating prejudice.
Before we ended our conversation, Zakaria offered a caution I needed to hear.
“I would be very mindful of not generalizing it,” she said of my experience. She reminded me that Indians and Pakistanis in the diaspora also build friendships, work together and create meaningful connections. What I had encountered, she suggested, was an extreme episode.
The people I interviewed gave me reasons to take that warning seriously. Some had grown up recognising similarities across the border. Others had questioned assumptions after meeting people they once knew only through films, media or political narratives. Their experiences did not erase mine, but they prevented me from treating it as the whole story.
I still do not know what shaped the young woman’s hostility. Whether it came from family, education, religion, contemporary politics or something more personal remains unanswered. We never had the conversation that might have helped me understand.
The woman who refused to share that car is preparing to leave the house. I do not know whether the friendships disrupted by the encounter will recover, or whether the people involved will eventually find their way back to one another.
What stays with me is not simply that someone refused to share a car with me. It is that others were willing to challenge that refusal, even when doing so unsettled relationships they had built over years.
Perhaps the more difficult question is not only how prejudice survives across generations, but what happens when someone finally refuses to accommodate it.
(Noreen Shams is a Pakistani multimedia journalist, author and media trainer whose work explores politics, international relations and social issues. A Chevening and Humphrey Fellow, she is the author of London Word by Word.)
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