TOBA TEK SINGH – From the road, the old railway station looks like it has been asleep for decades. The arches are hollow. The roof sags under years of dust and rain. The yellow brick has lost its shine, pitted and rough. Above the entrance, Nur Pur is painted in bold black. Stand there long enough and another name emerges from beneath the peeling whitewash. Kot Gurdit Singh.
The older letters are ghostly, their edges blurred but stubborn. For more than thirty years they lay buried under fresh paint. Now the sun and rain have worked together to bring them back, flake by flake, like a memory that will not fade. The station opened in the late 1800s on the Faisalabad to Karachi line. Kot means village. Gurdit Singh was a Sikh landowner who once commanded respect in the surrounding fields. For nearly a century, his name greeted passengers arriving on dusty trains. In the late 1980s officials painted over Kot Gurdit Singh and replaced it with Nur Pur, the name of a nearby Muslim village. It was part of a post-Partition reshaping of the map as Sikh and Hindu names disappeared from public places.
At the time, the station still had life. Farmers carried grain sacks to the platform. Schoolchildren in crisp uniforms lined up in the shade. The ticket clerk leaned on a stone sill, calling out fares through a small window, the same one that now stands chipped and silent.
Barkat Ali, known as Barkat Mohgi Wala, recalls seeing Gurdit Singh before Partition. “Small eyes, wearing a bushirt,” he says. Then the road came. Blacktop ran alongside the tracks. Buses and motorbikes took over. Ticket sales dwindled until, in the late 1990s, Pakistan Railways locked the doors. Inside now, the air is dry and still. The timetable board hangs on the wall, its Urdu lettering cracked like old porcelain. Faint red and blue lines on the fare chart are barely visible, the numbers rubbed to shadows.
The plaster is marked with graffiti, names, slogans and quick sketches in pen and charcoal. Outside, the platform is broken in places, the bricks uneven and sprouting tufts of grass. Beyond it, the tracks stretch straight into the haze, two metal rails glinting before they vanish into green. No train stops here. Toba Tek Singh was developed by the British toward the end of the 19th century when a vast canal system transformed scrub and dust into farmland. By 1906 the district had 148,984 people and 342 villages. Gojra, now a tehsil of Toba Tek Singh, earned the nickname “hockey city” for its champion teams. The city itself was named after a Sikh saint and was founded in the early years of the colonization era. Before Partition, Toba Tek Singh had a sizable Sikh population, many of whom had migrated from Eastern Punjab when the British began developing the region.
Most of the villages carried the names of Sikh or Hindu personalities. In 1947 they left for India. In their place came Muslims from Hoshiarpur, Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Amritsar. The city’s own name comes from Tek Singh, a Sikh who tended a pond, toba in Punjabi, and offered water and shelter to travelers. When officials later tried to rename it Fareed Abad, locals refused. The name stayed. Across Punjab many old names have been painted over. At the railway station, however, the paint is giving way. Nur Pur still claims the wall in bold strokes. Beneath it, Kot Gurdit Singh is returning, each season sharpening its outline. It is as if the wall is speaking, insisting the place was once called something else, that it belonged to another time. The building is silent, the ticket window empty, the timetable frozen. The trains have long gone, the people have moved on. But the name is coming back, letter by letter.