But you know that it’s a novel there are characters, events and a narration, and all this conventional structure enables you perhaps to go beyond the reality in its bare power. “Too historical”: yes, certain facts be too historical, in the sense of sickeningly real, unforgivingly real. It’s enough to know that the frame is all too historical. I’ll leave to those better informed to say how much in Train to Pakistan is fiction, how much fact. Hence the interest of fiction: stories and novels might be the right way to mediatise events which otherwise would simply be too factually strong. It is part of our painful heritage”, says Vivek Sharma).

In order to deal with the past, and in this case, a horrible past, it should be careful how it says things, because otherwise this slow and powerful movement of forgetfulness might well be stronger (“ I would urge every Indian and Pakistani to read this book. And so history deals with oblivion all the time, by fighting against it, that’s its principal mission. We intellectuals would tend to consider History as necessary to the identity of a nation, especially if this history tells of its “mistakes” (but what are a country’s mistakes? How do you hold it responsible?) So what happens if a generation finds its past too heavy for it to continue to live with it? Hasn’t it got the right to forget? How do you rationalize this need for departure from a searing past? In general anyway, people forget, time erases. Not being Indian, how do I talk about it adequately? Here and there people say that the present upcoming generation is forgetting (has forgotten?) the events it relates, and such oblivion too is a formidable fact.

It seems both too simple, too factual, and so because of that, too deeply rooted in Indian history and drama (for those who need the plot, go here). I am not sure I shall be able to do justice to Khushwant Singh’s little novel (published in 1956).

Train to pakistan movie