October 1947. Amrit is standing on the window’s edge. A mob of Kabailis storms her village near Srinagar, and she can now hear them running up the stairs to her room. She is expected to jump to an ‘honourable’ death. She turns to look at her children – they’re hiding under the sheets just beside her – and hesitates. The cursed legacy of her troubled mother has been successful in dictating her life (and death) after all, despite her family trying it all.

She was the first girl in the household to get educated and tiptoe around the patriarchal lines of society. She always had the love and comfort of her maidservant Banto, an orphaned Muslim girl who protected Amrit all her life but also resented Amrit for the fortunes that life denied her.

Songbird in the Wall seeks to understand the lives of the women in pre-Independent India and their brushes with postpartum depression, the freedom struggle, religious prejudices, and the traumatic gendered violence of the Partition that was a culmination of all these.