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Khushwant Singh

The Collected Novels

Train to Pakistan I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale Delhi

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

COLLECTED NOVELS

Khushwant Singh was born in 1915 in Hadali, Punjab. He was educated at Government College, Lahore and at King’s College and the Inner Temple in London. He practised at the Lahore High Court for several years before joining the Indian Ministry of External Affairs in 1947. He was sent on diplomatic postings to Canada and London and later went to Paris with UNESCO.

He began a distinguished career as a journalist with All India Radio in 1951. Since then he has been founder-editor of Yojna (1951-53), editor of the Illustrated Weekly of India (1969-79), editor of the National Herald (1978-79), and the editor of the Hindustan Times (1980-83). Today he is India’s best-known columnist and journalist.

Khushwant Singh has also had an extremely successful career as a writer. Among the works published are a classic two-volume history of the Sikhs, several novels—including Train to Pakistan, which won the Grove Press Award for the best work of fiction in 1954, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale and Delhi—and a number of translated works and non-fiction books on Delhi, nature and current affairs. His latest novel, The Company of Women, has been published by Penguin Books.

Khushwant Singh was a Member of Parliament from 1980 to 1986. Among other honours he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974 by the President of India (he returned the decoration in 1984 in protest against the Union Government’s siege of the Golden Temple, Amritsar).

Books by the Same Author

Books by the same author

Fiction

Mark of Vishnu

Train to Pakistan

I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale

Many Moods and Many Faces

Non-Fiction

History of the Sikhs: Two Volumes

Ranjit Singh: Maharaja of the Punjab

Fall of the Sikh Kingdom

Indira Gandhi Returns

Nature Watch

Translations

Umrao Jan Ada—Courtesan of Lucknow

The Skeleton

Land of the Five Rivers

Iqbal’s Dialogue with Allah

Essays

Khushwant Singh’s India

Editor’s Page

Introduction

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.

When I actually started writing the novel, I was in Bhopal living alone in a large bungalow overlooking the lake. I made a synopsis of all the chapters before getting down to writing. It was when I started writing the chapters that I discovered, to my dismay, that instead of my dictating to my characters how they should behave and what they should say in a particular situation, they began to evolve independent personalities of their own and dictate their actions and speeches to me. Most writers agree that they have had similar experiences of characters created by them. However, I persisted as best as I could and finished the draft of my novel. I sent it as an entry to the Grove Press competition for the best work of fiction from India. An American friend, Mrs Tatty Bell, wife of a British diplomat, who typed the manuscript for me told me bluntly one day: ‘It’s no good. It won’t get you anywhere.’ A few months later, when I was with UNESCO in Paris, came an announcement that Mano Majra had won the award. It was published under this title in the United States and the Commonwealth rights were sold to Chatto and Windus of London. It was my hunch that if the title was changed to Train to Pakistan, it would sell better. And so it did. It was published in most European and Indian languages. It has been reprinted over thirty times. And goes on selling.

The success of Train to Pakistan emboldened me to try my hand at a second novel. All said and done, Train to Pakistan was more a documentary than a novel. This time it would be a simple story of a close-knit family divided by conflicting political loyalties. I chose to set it around the time when the ‘Quit India’ movement was launched by Mahatma Gandhi during World War II. The main characters were the father who after years of loyal service to the British Raj, expected to be honoured with a title in the King’s Birthday Honours list and his young son who, undetected by anyone in the family, had joined a band of terrorists to disrupt arms supplies traffic on road and rail, and perhaps kill an Englishman or two. The story was built around my own family. I located it in Amritsar. This too was published in the States, England and India. I gave it the title (I have a fetish for giving titles to my books after I have written the last word) I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale. I think it is a better novel than Train to Pakistan. Not many people agree with me. It did not do as well as my first novel. Now you have the two together. I leave the judgement to you.

My third novel, Delhi, had a prolonged gestation. The idea of telling the story of my city, in which I had spent most of my life, came after I had read Ivo Andric’s The Bridge on the Drina, which tells the story of Yugoslavia through events that occurred on a bridge. (Andric won the Nobel prize for Literature.) First I read all I could find of contemporary accounts of different periods: Prithvi Raj Raso for the Rajput rule in India, the life of Hazrat Nizamuddin and the writings of Amir Khusro for the Sultanate, Taimur’s memoirs, volumes on the life of Emperor Aurangzeb, the poet Mir Taqi Meer, of Delhi devastated by Ahmad Shah Abdali, the later Mughals and the trial of the last Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. For the British period, I relied largely on my ancestors; my father and grandfather had taken the lion’s share in the construction of New Delhi. Likewise for the impact of Partition and the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. I examined Pyare Lal’s documentation of the last day of the Mahatma. The final chapter, the murder of Mrs Gandhi and the massacre of Sikhs that followed, were deeply imprinted in my mind. The daunting task was to string these episodes together and make them read like one continuous story. Over twenty years I tried many methods of linkage and admitted failure to find a satisfactory one. At one stage, I decided to give up the project. I let my colleague, David Davidar, have a look at it. He suggested inserting a few more chapter links. I did so. Even so I was not happy with the final product. However, three editions of the novel sold out before the first copy was available in the bookstores. Despite being panned by the literary critics, it remained at the top of best-seller lists for some months. There is no accounting for the tastes of readers!

New Delhi

October 1995

Khushwant Singh

Train to Pakistan

Dedication

For My Daughter
Mala

Dacoity

The summer of 1947 was not like other Indian summers. Even the weather had a different feel in India that year. It was hotter than usual, and drier and dustier. And the summer was longer. No one could remember when the monsoon had been so late. For weeks, the sparse clouds cast only shadows. There was no rain. People began to say that God was punishing them for their sins.

Some of them had good reason to feel that they had sinned. The summer before, communal riots, precipitated by reports of the proposed division of the country into a Hindu India and a Muslim Pakistan, had broken out in Calcutta, and within a few months the death toll had mounted to several thousand. Muslims said the Hindus had planned and started the killing. According to the Hindus, the Muslims were to blame. The fact is, both sides killed. Both shot and stabbed and speared and clubbed. Both tortured. Both raped. From Calcutta, the riots spread north and east and west: To Noakhali in East Bengal, where Muslims massacred Hindus; to Bihar, where Hindus massacred Muslims. Mullahs roamed the Punjab and the Frontier Province with boxes of human skulls said to be those of Muslims killed in Bihar. Hundreds of thousands of Hindus and Sikhs who had lived for centuries on the Northwest Frontier abandoned their homes and fled toward the protection of the predominantly Sikh and Hindu communities in the east. They travelled on foot, in bullock carts, crammed into lorries, clinging to the sides and roofs of trains. Along the way—at fords, at crossroads, at railroad stations—they collided with panicky swarms of Muslims fleeing to safety in the west. The riots had become a rout. By the summer of 1947, when the creation of the new state of Pakistan was formally announced, ten million people—Muslims and Hindus and Sikhs—were in flight. By the time the monsoon broke, almost a million of them were dead, and all of northern India was in arms, in terror, or in hiding. The only remaining oases of peace were a scatter of little villages lost in the remote reaches of the frontier. One of these villages was Mano Majra.

Mano Majra is a tiny place. It has only three brick buildings, one of which is the home of the moneylender Lala Ram Lal. The other two are the Sikh temple and the mosque. The three brick buildings enclose a triangular common with a large peepul tree in the middle. The rest of the village is a cluster of flat-roofed mud huts and low-walled courtyards, which front on narrow lanes that radiate from the centre. Soon the lanes dwindle into footpaths and get lost in the surrounding fields. At the western end of the village there is a pond ringed round by keekar trees. There are only about seventy families in Mano Majra, and Lala Ram Lal’s is the only Hindu family. The others are Sikhs or Muslims, about equal in number. The Sikhs own all the land around the village; the Muslims are tenants and share the tilling with the owners. There are a few families of sweepers whose religion is uncertain. The Muslims claim them as their own, yet when American missionaries visit Mano Majra the sweepers wear khaki sola topees and join their womenfolk in singing hymns to the accompaniment of a harmonium. Sometimes they visit the Sikh temple, too. But there is one object that all Mano Majrans—even Lala Ram Lal—venerate. This is a three-foot slab of sandstone that stands upright under a keekar tree beside the pond. It is the local deity, the deo to which all the villagers—Hindu, Sikh, Muslim or pseudo-Christian— repair secretly whenever they are in a special need of blessing.

Although Mano Majra is said to be on the banks of the Sutlej River, it is actually half a mile away from it. In India villages cannot afford to be too close to the banks of rivers. Rivers change their moods with the seasons and alter their courses without warning. The Sutlej is the largest river in the Punjab. After the monsoon its waters rise and spread across its vast sandy bed, lapping high up the mud embankments on either side. It becomes an expanse of muddy turbulence more than a mile in breadth. When the flood subsides, the river breaks up into a thousand shallow streams that wind sluggishly between little marshy islands. About a mile north of Mano Majra the Sutlej is spanned by a railroad bridge. It is a magnificent bridge—its eighteen enormous spans sweep like waves from one pier to another, and at each end of it there is a stone embankment to buttress the railway line. On the eastern end the embankment extends all the way to the village railroad station.

Mano Majra has always been known for its railway station. Since the bridge has only one track, the station has several sidings where less important trains can wait, to make way for the more important.

A small colony of shopkeepers and hawkers has grown up around the station to supply travellers with food, betel leaves, cigarettes, tea, biscuits and sweetmeats. This gives the station an appearance of constant activity and its staff a somewhat exaggerated sense of importance. Actually the stationmaster himself sells tickets through the pigeonhole in his office, collects them at the exit beside the door, and sends and receives messages over the telegraph ticker on the table. When there are people to notice him, he comes out on the platform and waves a green flag for trains which do not stop. His only assistant manipulates the levers in the glass cabin on the platform which control the signals on either side, and helps shunting engines by changing hand points on the tracks to get them onto the sidings. In the evenings, he lights the long line of lamps on the platform. He takes heavy aluminum lamps to the signals and sticks them in the clamps behind the red and green glass. In the mornings, he brings them back and puts out the lights on the platform.

Not many trains stop at Mano Majra. Express trains do not stop at all. Of the many slow passenger trains, only two, one from Delhi to Lahore in the mornings and the other from Lahore to Delhi in the evenings, are scheduled to stop for a few minutes. The others stop only when they are held up. The only regular customers are the goods trains. Although Mano Majra seldom has any goods to send or receive, its station sidings are usually occupied by long rows of wagons. Each passing goods train spends hours shedding wagons and collecting others. After dark, when the countryside is steeped in silence, the whistling and puffing of engines, the banging of buffers, and the clanking of iron couplings can be heard all through the night.

All this has made Mano Majra very conscious of trains. Before daybreak, the mail train rushes through on its way to Lahore, and as it approaches the bridge, the driver invariably blows two long blasts of the whistle. In an instant, all Mano Majra comes awake. Crows begin to caw in the keekar trees. Bats fly back in long silent relays and begin to quarrel for their perches in the peepul. The mullah at the mosque knows that it is time for the morning prayer. He has a quick wash, stands facing west toward Mecca and with his fingers in his ears cries in long sonorous notes, ‘Allah-o-Akbar’. The priest at the Sikh temple lies in bed till the mullah has called. Then he too gets up, draws a bucket of water from the well in the temple courtyard, pours it over himself, and intones his prayer in monotonous singsong to the sound of splashing water.

By the time the 10:30 morning passenger train from Delhi comes in, life in Mano Majra has settled down to its dull daily routine. Men are in the fields. Women are busy with their daily chores. Children are out grazing cattle by the river. Persian wheels squeak and groan as bullocks go round and round, prodded on by curses and the jabs of goads in their hindquarters. Sparrows fly about the roofs, trailing straw in their beaks. Pye-dogs seek the shade of the long mud walls. Bats settle their arguments, fold their wings, and suspend themselves in sleep.

As the midday express goes by, Mano Majra stops to rest. Men and children come home for dinner and the siesta hour. When they have eaten, the men gather in the shade of the peepul tree and sit on the wooden platforms and talk and doze. Boys ride their buffaloes into the pond, jump off their backs, and splash about in the muddy water. Girls play under the trees. Women rub clarified butter into each other’s hair, pick lice from their children’s heads, and discuss births, marriages and deaths.

When the evening passenger from Lahore comes in, everyone gets to work again. The cattle are rounded up and driven back home to be milked and locked in for the night. The women cook the evening meal. Then the families foregather on their rooftops where most of them sleep during the summer. Sitting on their charpoys, they eat their supper of vegetables and chapatties and sip hot creamy milk out of large copper tumblers and idle away the time until the signal for sleep. When the goods train steams in, they say to each other, ‘There is the goods train.’ It is like saying goodnight. The mullah again calls the faithful to prayer by shouting at the top of his voice, ‘God is great.’ The faithful nod their amens from their rooftops. The Sikh priest murmurs the evening prayer to a semicircle of drowsy old men and women. Crows caw softly from the keekar trees. Little bats go flitting about in the dusk and large ones soar with slow graceful sweeps. The goods train takes a long time at the station, with the engine running up and down the sidings exchanging wagons. By the time it leaves, the children are asleep. The older people wait for its rumble over the bridge to lull them to slumber. Then life in Mano Majra is stilled, save for the dogs barking at the trains that pass in the night.

It had always been so, until the summer of 1947.

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