Train to India

The story paints a winter in India not as a season but as a suffocating political atmosphere defined by a single weaponised slogan: "If you do not like the Leader, go to Pakistan." This sentence permeates every space—television studios, drawing rooms, highways, and private messages—becoming a tool that fractures society along chromatic lines of saffron and green. Its violence is both symbolic and material, shaping public discourse, breeding hostility, and eroding hope and memory. Meanwhile, the nation's taxpayers unknowingly fund the infrastructure of this hysteria: the jets, security, legal theatrics, and above all, the luxurious silence of Lutyens' bungalows where powerful politicians remain insulated from the chaos they help create. One night, the ancient gods of the subcontinent—bored, weary, and reminded of Partition's brutality—intervene. Rather than unleashing disaster, they carry out a surgical act: transporting twenty sleeping Indian politicians from their opulent Delhi residences to a peepul tree in Mano Majra, now in Pakistan. This tree once witnessed the horrors of 1947 and now becomes the stage where the gods return the infamous slogan to its creators. The politicians awaken in their nightclothes, stripped of power and suddenly tasting fear without microphones or security to shield them. As dawn breaks, India erupts in speculation about the VIPs' disappearance, yet no one calls it justice. In Mano Majra, the shock is equally profound—the mullah, the granthi, even the crows fall silent upon seeing the bewildered figures under the sacred tree. The rustling leaves echo a moral lesson, hinting at karmic reversal. And as the village braces itself for the arrival of twenty displaced politicians, the narrative suggests that Mano Majra, which has survived history's darkest chapters, will survive this too—perhaps with the help of its humble sandstone deity, and perhaps with more.