The Partition: A Novel

A beautiful girl, Billo, is born in a rich family of a Sikh landowner Sardarji and his religious wife, in the nineteen-twenties in the shadows of the Himalayan mountains in north-western India. Billo grows up in the lap of luxury. Akbar is the leader of a gang of Muslim boys including Rahman who work in Sardarji's fields. One day Sardarji finds Akbar trying to rape a half-witted girl from the village. He beats him to pulp generating in Akbar a relentless hatred for Sardarji. Akbar makes a plan to rape Billo to avenge his beating but Rahman saves Billo from Akbar and his friends and falls in love with her. Billo and her family's idyllic life is shattered by the partition of India in 1947 at the independence from the English rule. The area they live in becomes part of Pakistan forcing them to migrate to India. During the migration in the turmoil of ugly and relentlessly bloody riots that follow the partition, Akbar murders Sardarji, and Billo's mother dies of dysentery. Billo is left alone in the chaos. Before he dies, Sardarji accepts Rahman, a Muslim, to take care of Billo. Rahman converts to a Sikh and arrives in Delhi to start a new life with Billo. Akbar's vengeance is not over and he follows the couple to Delhi and kidnaps and drugs Billo and takes her back to Pakistan. Gradually, ground by the anguish and the relentless suffering, Billo develops from a waif into a force to reckon with and is ready for a hell-bound fight to avenge the wrongs done to her and her family by Akbar. .