For seven days, Balwant Kaur trekked through hilly terrain cradling her newborn son in her arms, gently chastising her five-year-old boy to keep quiet as they fled the brutality that overshadowed partition.
'Death was waiting for us,' she says gently in her native tongue, Pahaari, as memories of her painful past flood back. The ordeal is one she remains tied to; an exodus which six decades on, continues to haunt her.
'I was frightened for my children,' she says. 'We did not take the straight road because we were frightened of attacks. We slept with dead bodies because we thought that was a safe place.
'[Once] I heard a scream from the undergrowth; a man was being slaughtered by the tribals. He was screaming 'help me', but we were so frightened. There were mutilated bodies, dead bodies of women, children.
'Every time I sit and am alone, I remember that scene.'
When Britain relinquished its claim over the sub-continent and political leaders Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah signed up to the creation of the modern states of India and Pakistan, the step was politically momentous. Two nations were moulded along religious lines; India became home for Hindu and Sikh populations, and West Pakistan (now Pakistan) and East Pakistan (Bangladesh) for Muslims.
But the birth of two countries in August 1947 was a harrowing episode, accompanied by mass migration and genocide.