My housemate Lydia came home from work eager to tell me something. I had just gotten home from work myself, and was opening a bottle of wine. We shared a brownstone with her boyfriend, Cyrill, and our mutual friend, Jeff, in the South End of Boston in the late 1990s.

“Did you know,” she said, like she had just discovered something important, “That you’re not from India?”

“You’re not serious, right?” I replied. We weren’t particularly close, but we had known each other for several years. She actually irritated me quite a lot, but we found ourselves living in the same house, sharing mutual friends, often socializing together. Lydia was very pretty, but clearly not the brightest bulb.

“I’m from Pakistan,” I said, very slowly.

“I know!” Apparently, she had just discovered that India and Pakistan were not the same country, and in case I did  not know that the country of my birth was actually a country, she thought she would let me know this seemingly new information.

“You know about the Partition, right?” I asked.

“The what?”

Clearly this conversation was going nowhere. More wine, please.