A new edition of Khushwant Singh’s novel Train to Pakistan includes 66 harrowing Partition photos by Margaret Bourke-White. Somini Sengupta interviews Singh and extracts many interesting anecdotes:A framed photograph of Gandhi and a pile of empty whiskey bottles

… he would drive on to Delhi and, on its outskirts, encounter a jeep full of armed Sikhs, who would boast of having slain a village full of Muslims… a chilling echo of what he had heard on the other side of the soon-to-be border… Today there is not a single memorial to the partition in India… let alone a museum. It is only remembered, or forgotten, by the people who lived it…

There is a street littered with corpses, an audience of vultures looking down from a roof. There is a dead man in a hand cart, his open eyes staring through the spokes of the wheel. There is an old man, only skin and bones, leaning on his pile of bedding, vacantly staring at the sky. Two years before Bourke-White shot these pictures, she photographed the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Buchenwald…

Perched on a hill, with a view of snow and cloud, the house in Kasauli, a former British cantonment town, shows off Mr. Singh’s affinities. His study contains a framed photograph of Gandhi. Next to a large statue of the Buddha in the living room is a pile of empty whiskey bottles… Mr. Singh says he is not a believer… [Singh’s] father constructed much of Delhi, a city reinvented by the flow of partition refugees… [Link]

I wonder how many other non-believers retain the turban and beard for cultural reasons.

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