![]() Abandoning chores, they gathered on rooftops to watch in silent fascination. There had been rumors of the arrival of the silent "ghost trains" that moved quietly along the tracks, grinding slowly to a halt at the end of the line, filled with slaughtered refugees.When the first ghost train came to Mano Majra the villagers were stunned. Lulled by distance and a false sense of security, the villagers depended upon one another to sustain their meager quality of life, a balanced system that served everyone's needs. At first the villagers of tiny Mano Majra were unconcerned, complacent in their cooperative lifestyle, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and quasi-Christian. For many remote villages the supply trains were part of the clockwork of daily life, until even those over-burdened trains, off-schedule, pulled into the stations, silent, no lights or signs of humanity, their fateful cargo quiet as the grave. Women were raped before the anguished eyes of their husbands, entire families robbed, dismembered, murdered and thrown aside like garbage until the streets were cluttered with human carnage.The trains kept running. ![]() A particular brutality overtook the frenzied mobs, driven frantic by rage and fear. Almost ten million people were assigned for relocation and by the end of this bloody chapter, nearly a million were slain. The farther from the cities they ran, the more the indiscriminate killing infected the countryside, only to collide again and again in a futile attempt to reach safety. Muslim turned against Hindu, Hindu against Muslim, in their frantic effort to escape the encroaching massacre. Travelers clogged the roads on carts, on foot, but mostly on trains, where they perched precariously on the roofs, clung to the sides, wherever grasping fingers could find purchase. Once that fateful line was drawn in the sand, the threat of destruction became a reality of stunning proportions. Entire families were forced to abandon their land for resettlement to Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India. The summer of the Partition of India in 1947 marked a season of bloodshed that stunned and horrified those living through the nightmare. The events of clashes between Sikh and Moslem that have occurred since this book was first published in 1956 further suggest that such men of good conscience have grown fewer in number. Singh suggests that the men of good conscience who try to make even token attempts to bring this insanity to a halt are few and far between. Khushwant Singh portrays a society of confused, angry villagers who see no way out of the ongoing cycle of killing except to perpetuate that killing. This mass killing is simply a sociological given: its root cause goes back uncounted centuries of strife between Moslem and Sikh yet it is hailed by Sikhs as 'the' reason to replicate the slaughter of Moslems on yet another train headed to Pakistan. He is used as a pawn in the Sikh's killing of innocent Moslems, and his choice is the same that all men of revived conscience have had to face in similar such times: should he participate willingly even eagerly in the proposed slaughter of a train of deported Moslems shipped unceremoniously to Pakistan or should he speak out against the insanity that is insane only to him? The various flaws of all the characters of the novel-their vicious caste system, their willingness to demonize other races, their unwillingness to question even the most fundamental elements of their dogma-all stem from the cycle of killing that did not begin with the trainload of Sikh corpses that entered the sleepy town of Mano Majra in India. Jugga is far from an angel, but he slowly grows in stature from the baseness of his profession to one who is forced to contemplate the consequences of his own role in the ongoing cycle of killing between Sikh and Moslem. Their illicit relation is a microcosm of all that is terribly wrong when the cut of a person's beard counts more than the content of his soul. Jugga is a Sikh thief who happens to take a Moslem woman as a lover. There is no clear cut hero although a criminal named Jugga comes closest. ![]() Nearly everyone in the novel is flawed to some degree with the effects and aftereffects of ethnic cleansing. In the border between Pakistan and India, the theme of revenge killing calling for ever more revenge killing has found a clear voice in TRAIN TO PAKISTAN by Khushwant Singh. Ethnic conflict has been a staple of cross-cultural contact for as long as more than one race and religion have tried to co-exist. ![]()
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