Sassi was a Brahmin's daughter at Bhambore in Sindh, set adrift as an infant and raised by a washerman. Punnun was a Baloch prince of Kech in Makran. They married. His brothers drugged him at the wedding and carried him off on a camel.
She woke, found him gone, and walked into the desert after the tracks. She died of thirst on the way. He came back and died at the same place.
The story belongs as much to Sindh and Balochistan as to Punjab, and the Punjabi version is Hashim Shah's, written around the turn of the nineteenth century.
It is the one qissa in which the woman does the journey. The others wait or are taken. Sassi walks, and the walking is what the poem is about.
Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai's Sindhi treatment in the Shah jo Risalo is the other great version, and the two traditions sing the same story in different languages on either side of a border that did not exist when it was written.
The qissa is set at Bhambore on the Indus delta and in the Makran, and the geography of it is Sindhi and Baloch rather than Punjabi.
Hashim Shah's Punjabi version is the one read in Punjab. The story travels in Sindhi and Balochi as well, which makes it one of the few narratives shared across all three.
The ruins at Bhambore have been excavated and are identified with a port of the early Islamic period. The story is fixed to a real place that was abandoned before the story was written down.