Karachi to Shimla...

We would run down to the Gaiety Theatre to watch British couples dance through the roshandan (window)... their pristine dresses, their lavish scents.” At 94, Naema Begum still lights up at the mere mention of Shimla.

From her home in Karachi, she reminisces over a video call, “I miss the town dearly, it’s where I grew up. We would make the trip from New Delhi to Shimla in trains, tongas, and dolis covered with purdahs. Once there, we were free birds.”

Her Punjabi Muslim business family owned multiple buildings in Shimla. But with little paperwork to show for it, they existed only in Naema Begum’s memory. As the only surviving family member from the era, she could feel even those traces fading. That was until a chance conversation in a Facebook group began to put the puzzle pieces in place. “We had shared the video of a building owned by Saleem Qureshi, who was among those who migrated to Pakistan in 1947, on social media. He just wanted a glimpse of the place he once called home,” says Nandita Sharma, a Shimla-based scribe and travel enthusiast.

The present-day Alfa Restaurant that runs from the same building.

Days later, Sharma received a message from Naema Begum’s relative. He was seeking help to trace their family home. “Shimla has grown exponentially. It was like finding a needle in a haystack. Until… Naema Begum mentioned a sipahi (sepoy). She said, ‘We owned a department store and a sipahi always stood guard outside,’” Sharma recalls her cross-border conversation. For anyone even remotely familiar with the hill town, the sipahi would immediately evoke Scandal Point, a city landmark marked by a police post even today.

Over the course of a video call, Naema Begum traced back her steps. She would trot the Mall Road as a 15-year-old, making trips back and forth to the family store, Hoosain Buksh and Company. The search led Sharma to Jagjit Nanda, an avid photographer and collector who happened to have photographs of pre-Partition Shimla. After rummaging through the vast collection, a couple carrying the Hoosain name popped up at last.

“It took a lot of work to find old photographs to corroborate the facts, but eventually, we managed to establish that the family store ran from the same address as the iconic Alfa Restaurant today,” Sharma says. Records second the findings. British-era trading firm Balmer Lawrie’s archival files list Naema Begum’s grandfather, Altaf Husain, as one of the proprietors of Hoosain Buksh and Company — one of the oldest department stores in the region. Family patriarch Mir Nadir Hoosain had, in fact, amassed property across the summer capital of the British — including The Elysium Hotel, which later became a transit point for Muslims travelling across the border during Partition, and today houses RKMV College. For Naema Begum though, her teenage years were spent on the Mall Road and a triple-storey home. “We would wait for the evening to run up the stairs and roam on the Mall Road,” she recalled.

The red-brick building is located in Lower Bazaar, now owned by the family of Badri Das Kashyap. “We have kept the house’s original structure intact; even the doors are the same,” Kashyap, an advocate, said on being told of the pre-Partition past of his home.

Naema Begum in her younger days.

From British officials frequenting Hoosain Buksh and Company for crockery and chocolates to Shimla’s elderly sipping tea at Alfa Restaurant today, plenty has changed in the last century. The city has evolved. But the restaurant’s clear-glass window seats still offer the view of sipahis guarding the city at Scandal Point, as they did for Naema Begum back in the 1940s.

Kashyap Niwas also sports a rare trilingual nameplate, featuring Hindi, English and Urdu — the latter being a quiet reminder of the hill town’s culturally diverse past. Maybe the city’s soul does remain unchanged. Naema Begum would like to believe so.

“If someone were to take me back, drop me off in Shimla, I could find my way around the town, its roads and landmarks. People seldom forget their home,” Naema Begum signs off.