![]() ![]() Mano Majra is the microcosm of how things must have unfolded in every town, for every Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh during the partition riots. Train to Pakistan does not preach you tolerance, or teach you history. The same friends who tearfully depart you to safety in the morning, will take guns to kill you in the night if sufficiently agitated and convinced on the grounds of defending your religion. The story shows how humans quickly change when in a mob. He releases Juggut Singh and Iqbal with the hope that they would help save the refugees in some way. The Muslims are evacuated, but Hukum Chand’s plans foil when agitators corrupt the villagers into taking arms to kill the Muslims who would be transported to Pakistan. ![]() When trains loaded with dead bodies of Sikhs and Hindus from Pakistan arrive in the Mano Majra railway station, the magistrate, Hukum Chand decides to use Juggut and Iqbal for generating a feeling of insecurity in the Muslim tenants of Mano Majra, so they would easily evacuate to a refugee camp before riots break out. When dacoits from a nearby village murder and loot the Hindu moneylender in Mano Majra, policemen arrest Juggut and a bourgeois social worker Iqbal Singh who is cast as a Muslim because of his ambiguous name and a circumcised body part. The hero of the story is a local Sikh badmash Juggut Singh who is in love with the Muslim weaver’s daughter, Nooran. Train to Pakistan is different, it is si mple and so powerful, it removed me from my immediate surroundings(my office desk with a view) and I found myself in Mano Majra, a border village between India and the newly formed Pakistan in 1947. When I was in school, I remember a notorious classmate bring Khushwant Singh’s autobiography “Truth, Love and a little Malice” and the entire class had a field day reading the parts where he describes his sex life explicitly. I have always been in awe of this writer Khushwant Singh. ![]()
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