I had written a lot of short stories before I embarked on writing my first novel Mano Majra, better known by its later title, Train to Pakistan. I had no idea how one wrote a novel. I did not think I had the stamina to write one. But I did have the theme. I had lived through the civil strife that engulfed the whole of northern India. Almost every other day of the spring to summer of 1947, we heard stories of massacres of Sikhs and Hindus in the villages of the Northwest Frontier Province and Rawalpindi and Campbellpur districts; and of thousands of refugees trekking eastwards to areas where Hindus and Sikhs were in preponderance. When communal violence broke out in Lahore there was hardly a night when we were not woken up by the sounds of gunfire and mobs yelling: Allah-o-Akbar from the one side and Har Har Mahadev and Sat Sri Akal from the other. The spreading communal violence did not affect our small circle of friends: Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Christians continued to meet as usual and enjoy their sundowners. Of course we developed a sense of guilt. There was so much violence and wickedness going on around us and we did nothing about it except talk and drown our consciences in drink. It was after the Partition of the country was over, after ten million people had been rendered homeless and one million slain, that I felt I had to purge myself of the guilt I bore by writing about it.

At the time the novel was taking nebulous shape in my mind, I was in London. I decided to throw up my job and try to live by writing. I took myself off to the Italian lakes to put my ideas on paper. I chose the location for my novel, a hamlet along the river Sutlej. I chose models on which I would base my characters. In the initial draft I picked three, representing the trinity of Hindu gods: Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer. The characters of my novels would be a poor farmer symbolizing the Creator; a magistrate whose duty was to maintain peace in this district as the Preserver; a communist as the Destroyer. However, I soon realized that every human being has all the three aspects of the trinity in him in different proportions.