I Still Remember a Small Town

Change had not touched it for generation. Daska, the small town in undivided Punjab, lived life predictably. The village of Kandan Sian had its own ghosts, dain, and special odd characters. Fairs, festivals and seasonal practices added the spice to life's simplicity. The author has lovingly picked details from a remarkable store of memory, to bring alive an era abruptly extinguished by Partition. The reader can expect to be transported, in every since of the world.

Like thousands of others, O.P. Narula became homeless in 1947 when the country was partitioned. And like all those thousands of others, Narula could not forget the place he had grown up in and its landscape. The small town of Daska in Sialkot district and the village of Kundan Sian remained permanently etched in his memory and always rang a nostalgic bell in his mind.

In this book, Narula, a product of the Punjab College of Engineering and Technology (PCET), better known as McLlagan College, recounts life in a small town of pre-Partition Punjab and the pangs of a compact society torn asunder by a stroke of history. He records their loves and hates, affections and rivalries and their way of life, simple and ignorant of all modern sophistication. Partition of the country altered the lifestyle of a whole generation beyond recognition. Many of them crossed over to India but there were many who not so lucky. Some rebuilt their lives in the new environment while some were not able to break away from the past. That generation of readers, which must have by now been reduced to small group of senior citizens, will relish reading Narula’s narrative. But even the post-Partition generation will find the description of a lost culture absorbing.

After recording the impressions of his young days, the author describes a visit to the old sites of Daska after 50 years and finds all the mental images he had conjured up about the landmarks that existed there in his childhood shattered. The march of time had obliterated everything that he had hoped to see.

However, the author would have done well by resorting to first person narration. The use of the acronym ‘Opana’, made up of his initials, takes away some of the beauty of the narration which is absorbing, and at the same time, authentic.