Sheela's Two Homes

Sheela is any happy child growing up in Sukkur, Sind – playing with friends, sewing dresses for her dolls... She lives with her uncle whom she calls Baba, father, just across the road from her real parents. The turbulent times in the run up to Independence don’t touch her. Till suddenly, there’s Partition. The gentle unfolding softens realities of a childhood quite far removed from today’s readers. Springing from yet another animation film by Nina Sabnani, it is her mother’s own story, and she continues that connection with the choice of visuals – fragments of cloth, touches of embroidery, that tell of a life across two countries, with two fathers, in two homes.