The Villages We Could Not Return To

A fourteen-year-old boy leaves his village believing he will return within a few days. He never does.

In September 1947, a family leaves its ancestral village of Naththagala in Tehsil Palandari, in the erstwhile Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir. They carry little with them because they believe their absence will be brief.

It is not.

As the journey unfolds, the boy grows before our eyes. The villages behind him disappear, new roads open before him, and the certainty of childhood slowly gives way to exile. What begins as a journey of a few days becomes the story of a lifetime.

The Villages We Could Not Return To follows one family's passage through the upheaval of 1947, preserving the voices, landscapes, language, and memories of the Poonch region. It is a story of loss and survival, of friendships that endure across religious divides, and of a promise to return home that remains alive long after the road itself has vanished.

For some, history is found in official records. For others, it survives only in memory.

This novel belongs to those memories.