Train to Pakistan

In the summer of 1947, the small Punjab border village of Mano Majra, where Sikhs and Muslims have always lived as neighbours, is torn apart by Partition when a ghost train of massacred Sikhs arrives from the new Pakistan. Singh's spare, unsparing novel is rooted in the real geography of the frontier: the mixed village by its railway station, the bridge over the Sutlej, the river swollen with the monsoon and the dead, and the trains that carry a people to safety or to slaughter.

Nooran

Mano Majra village

The neighbours

In Mano Majra, Sikhs and Muslims have shared the village for generations, their days ordered by the same trains and the same fields, the moneylender's daughter and the peasants alike. Singh draws this ordinary harmony with deliberate care, so that its swift, total destruction will land with full force, the ties of a lifetime dissolving in a season of madness.

The opening chapters

inspired by Mano Majra is a fictional village drawn from the small mixed Sikh-Muslim settlements of the Punjab border country; sited in that frontier region near the Sutlej.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗