Then there is Meet Singh, the priest in the gurdwara, who time and again tries to convince the agitated Sikhs to protect the innocent Muslims in the village. There is Hukum Chand, the corrupt district magistrate, whose callous indifference to the happenings is alarming. The characters in the novel have been neatly chiselled by Singh. Those who reached alive added to the prejudice against the Muslims. The peaceful atmosphere turned venomous when a train, overloaded with dead bodies of Hindus and Sikhs, steamed onto the Mano Majra station from Pakistan. For the Muslims, it was the last hurdle to be crossed to reach the land that was to offer them security, and for the Hindus and Sikhs it marked the entry to a safe haven. The bridge over the river had a road and a single railway track from where the refugees crossed over. It was also the last railway station before the trains to Pakistan crossed the Sutlej, which served as a border. Mano Majra was the last frontier of what became the Indian Punjab. The other two communities lived in mud houses, and co-existed in peace. It is set in the fictional village of Mano Majra, located near the border, with Sikhs and Muslims in almost equal numbers, and just one Hindu, the moneylender. It was against this background that Singh wrote what was to remain inarguably his most memorable work of fiction and though written in English, the novel gives an authentic feel of the Punjab.

Even friends and neighbours, in many cases, proved treacherous while at times strangers came to the rescue. About a million, mostly in the two Punjabs, were killed or died of cholera in refugee camps, with thousands of women abducted, raped, mutilated and left to die. With over 10 million people uprooted, the paths of migrants were punctuated with pools of blood. Never before in history has there been a cross migration on such a stupendous scale. The generation that followed heard vivid eyewitness accounts, which have remained etched in their memories. Those who witnessed the tragedies, not to speak of the ones who were victims of rioters and rapists, are hardly there now. It was authored when horrifying riots in the wake of Partition were fresh in the memory of people on both sides of the Great Divide. I READ historian-and-novelist (he wasn’t a popular columnist then) Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan for the first time in 1959, three years after it appeared in print.

Imagery in a train to pakistan