and trust has to be built over multiple conversations.36 In the first case, interviews can take a life of their own, with participants emotionally divulging the horrors they experienced. Aziz similarly described detainees as “zoning out” when stories were too difficult to tell or when they were in the throes of telling them. These emotional reactions, detectable in their voices, manner of oration, and in their body language, indicate both the need and difficulty detainees and their families felt in sharing their stories. Memory Detainees documented their experiences with abduction and imprisonment in their memories, and shared with JPP imprints left on their minds of torture, abuse, and humiliation. Denied all outside contact, there was no other place to record experiences other than in memory. Detainee descriptions of torture were visceral, from incessant beatings to sleep deprivation to sensory overload to being made to eat spoiled food. Responses also show that detainees and their families faced psychological trauma as a result of these experiences and prolonged separation from loved ones — from premonitions, to strange dreams, to inconsolable sadness. Das and Kleinman explain such dissonance and lack of presentness, writing “violence distorts the sense of time so it becomes difficult to say when the past enters the present”. Yasir Wazir’s father died while he was in prison, but his family tried to hide the news from him to protect him. He claimed to have sensed his father’s departure and dreamt of his death. Families processed the rupture in their lives through their memories of their sons’, brothers’, and husbands’ pasts, dichotomizing these into pre-abduction and post-abduction narratives of everyday life. After his death, Ghulam Fatima, Hanif Ali’s wife, believed that her husband’s mental health had temporarily improved with his return to family life. Their daughter Rubaba Bibi “was very dear to Hanif”, she said, recalling an idyllic scene in which he plucked jaman fruit (java plum) from the tree in their yard and shared it with his daughter and wife. Quoting Lawrence Langer, Das and Kleinman call such oral narrations a “survivor’s tale” of the “ruins of memory”.37  Zakaria, Anam. The Footprints of Partition: Narratives of Four Generations of Pakistanis and Indians. New Delhi. Harper Collins. 2015. 37  Das, Veena & Kleinman, Arthur. “Introduction,” Violence and Subjectivity. Berkeley. University of California Press. 2000. 36 16