Page 71 - Train to Pakistan

roof. No one clung between the bogies. No one was balanced on the footboards.
But somehow it was different. There was something uneasy about it. It had a

ghostly quality. As soon as it pulled up to the platform, the guard emerged from
the tail end of the train and went into the stationmaster’s office. Then the two

went to the soldiers’ tents and spoke to the officer in charge. The soldiers were
called out and the villagers loitering about were ordered back to Mano Majra.
One man was sent off on a motorcycle to Chundunnugger. An hour later, the
subinspector with about fifty armed policemen turned up at the station.

Immediately after them, Mr Hukum Chand drove up in his American car.
The arrival of the ghost train in broad daylight created a commotion in Mano

Majra. People stood on their roofs to see what was happening at the station. All
they could see was the black top of the train stretching from one end of the
platform to the other. The station building and the railings blocked the rest of the
train from view. Occasionally a soldier or a policeman came out of the station

and then went back again.
In the afternoon, men gathered in little groups, discussing the train. The

groups merged with each other under the peepul tree, and then everyone went
into the gurdwara. Women, who had gone from door to door collecting and
dropping bits of gossip, assembled in the headman’s house and waited for their

menfolk to come home and tell them what they had learned about the train.
This was the pattern of things at Mano Majra when anything of consequence
happened. The women went to the headman’s house, the men to the temple.

There was no recognized leader of the village. Banta Singh, the headman, was
really only a collector of revenue—a lambardar. The post had been in his family
for several generations. He did not own any more land than the others. Nor was

he a head in any other way. He had no airs about him: he was a modest hard-
working peasant like the rest of his fellow villagers. But since government
officials and the police dealt with him, he had an official status. Nobody called

him by his name. He was ‘O Lambardara’, as his father, his father’s father, and
his father’s father’s father had been before him.
The only men who voiced their opinions at village meetings were Imam

Baksh, the mullah of the mosque, and Bhai Meet Singh. Imam Baksh was a
weaver, and weavers are traditionally the butts of jokes in the Punjab. They are
considered effeminate and cowardly—a race of cuckolds whose women are

always having liaisons with others. A series of tragedies in his family had made