Description

It is the summer of 1947. The Partition of India is unfolding across the Punjab. And in the fictional border village of Mano Majra — where Sikhs and Muslims have lived peaceably as neighbours for generations, where the trains running between Delhi and Lahore are the village clock — the world is about to come apart.

When a local moneylender is murdered and the body is discovered, suspicion falls on Juggut Singh, a Sikh budmash who has been carrying on a forbidden love affair with Nooran, a young Muslim girl. As communal tensions tighten and a ghost train arrives one night, carrying nothing but the corpses of slaughtered Muslims, the village must decide what kind of village it will be.

In spare, unsparing, unforgettable prose, Khushwant Singh — himself a refugee from Pakistan — wrote one of the first and still one of the greatest Partition novels in any Indian language. *Train to Pakistan* refuses every comfort. It blames no one community. It asks only the harder question: when neighbours turn on neighbours, who, finally, finds the courage to refuse?

A short, perfect, devastating novel. The Partition novel every Indian and every Pakistani should read at least once.

A national classic.