The previous chapter largely focused on the state's response to abduction and recovery of women during the partition period. Much of that discourse focused on the larger question of restoring the nations’ honour and cleansing itself of past crimes, it is devoid of compassion and empathy and gives us little or no insight into the everyday experiences of women and how they dealt with this trauma. Fictional writers were the first to capture the human drama of partition, filling the gaps and omissions by historians who were dependent on documentary sources and thus restricted by what they could reveal. Writers like Intizar Hussain, Bhisham Sahni, Saadat Hasan Manto and Amrita Pritam were writing from their experiences of partition dislocation, having endured the break-up and its lasting implications on humanity. They were much more apt at capturing the nuances and the sensitivity of the subject matter under the guise of fiction. Historians, until more recently, have been quite reluctant to use literature as a source of social history. Bapsi Sidhwa, herself a writer, more critically argues that ‘historians only quote the politicians and catalogue prejudices of the period. It is the novelists who try to convey the emotional truths of individual people’.

The theme of abduction and recovery has been explored in several fictional accounts, including most notably by Amrita Pritam's Pinjar (The Skeleton); the classic Urdu short story, Lajwanti, by Rajinder Singh Bedi; and Saadat Hasan Manto's Khol Do (Open It). Pinjar focuses on Poroo/Hamida, who is abducted and forcibly converted, yet what is also apparent in the novel is the rejection of Poroo by her family after she was abducted and therefore deemed as being ‘stained’. Similarly, Lajwanti is abducted but is ‘recovered’ and returned to her husband, Sundar Lal. But Sundar Lal finds it difficult to revert back to the life he once had. Lajwanti's desire to speak and share the experiences of what happened with Sundar Lal are rejected and silenced by him; he retorts, ‘Let's just forget the past. You were hardly to blame for what happened. Society is at fault for its lack of respect for goddesses like you’.