DHAKA, Bangladesh — In 1948, a year after the partition of India, my maternal grandparents moved from Calcutta to Dhaka, crossing from West Bengal in India to East Bengal, or East Pakistan — now Bangladesh. There, they built a tin-shed house in the new neighborhood of Dhanmondi, known before only for its paddy fields (dhan). At the time, the area was so desolate that every night my grandfather would fire his double-barreled shotgun to ward off foxes and thieves.

Two years later, he built the first brick and concrete house in the area, which soon enough filled up with one- and two-story bungalows, each with its own lawn. His house looked no different from the others, but it harbored a surprising secret: He had built it with a foundation that could support seven stories. As far back as 1950, he had told my grandmother, “A day will come when you won’t be able to see anything but people in this city.” And indeed, while at some point other lovely houses in the neighborhood had to be torn down in order to be built back up taller, his children just added new floors.

When I was growing up, such stories struck me as nothing more than proof that my grandfather was eccentric and a visionary. But how we fashion our family history also reflects our collective memory. And when years later I began to examine, for a research project in comparative literature, why Bangladeshis relate to partition differently than do Indians and Pakistanis, I found clues to an answer right in my family lore.