Rajinder Singh Bedi was born near Sialkot in 1915, worked in the post office and at All India Radio Lahore, and moved to Bombay after 1947.
His short story Lajwanti is the central literary treatment of the recovery of abducted women after Partition: a husband takes back a wife who was abducted, treats her with elaborate tenderness as a symbol rather than as a person, and cannot look at her.
It says something about the recovery operation that the official reports could not, which is that being restored was not the end of the matter.
His novel Ek Chadar Maili Si won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1965 and deals with a widow married to her dead husband's younger brother, which is a Punjabi custom he neither defends nor condemns.
He wrote screenplays and dialogue for Hindi cinema for thirty years and directed. He wrote in Urdu.
The three great Partition writers of Punjab, Manto, Bedi and Krishan Chander, all wrote in Urdu, all worked in Bombay cinema, and none wrote in Punjabi.
He wrote in Urdu, worked in Hindi cinema as a writer and director, and his short stories are among the most respected in the language.
The radio years at Lahore put him among the writers making a modern prose for the region, and the studio work is where the compression in his stories comes from.
He wrote the screenplays for a number of the best regarded Hindi films of the 1950s and 1960s. The Punjab of his fiction is the west Punjab he left in 1947.