ਸੱਥ

The Satth Project

An Atlas of Punjab, told from inside it

The locks are now rusted and the Nanakshahi bricks are withering away. People took them long ago to build their own homes, while the Haveli in the square of Chakk 531 has been left to weaken, its old foundations somehow still holding against decades of neglect. Now, even those foundations are being uprooted as the government prepares to replace it with something new. They say it’s too old. They say there’s no one left to claim it.

Is that really so?

A 97-year-old Baapu Ji, now living in Multan, still remembers who it belonged to. His best friend, S. Tara Singh, who had to move to Tarn Taran, had lived there before the ’47 riots, before a border divided Punjab and scattered the people who had once known the same streets, the same homes, the same Satth. Tara Singh had promised he would return, but he never did. Or must I rather say, never could. Baapu Ji still remembers the two of them sitting together in the village gathering, and inside a massive iron trunk he has kept for decades an unsent letter addressed to Tara Singh, a small piece of a friendship that outlived the place where it began.

This is what The Satth is about.

Both the Charhda and Lehnda Punjab are filled with stories like this, carried across generations by people who remember places that maps have renamed, houses that no longer stand, streets that have disappeared and lives that were separated by a border that none of them chose. Some survive in photographs and letters, some in government records and old maps, and some survive only because an elderly person still remembers exactly where a house once stood.

The Satth brings these fragments together before they disappear with the people who carry them. It is a gathering of Punjab’s memories, its places, its people, and its Virsa, across both Charhda Punjab and Lehnda Punjab, because when a place disappears, what is lost is far greater than its walls.

And if we allow its memories to disappear with it, what will remain of the Punjab that once was?

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