Dalip Singh, like millions of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who braved a journey, fraught with dangers and tainted with the blood of about one million who were slaughtered by majority communities in each region, had traveled from Pakistan to the Indian Punjab on the roof of a bus, along with his brother.
Trains often arrived in stations on either side of the border overflowing with silent corpses.
"They stopped our train in Pakistan for two days (...) The Pakistanis wanted to kill us, but in India they had stopped two other trains and they said, 'If you slaughter one, we will slaughter two'. So we managed to make it out alive," said 80-year-old Hardit Singh, then a mere child, Dalip Singh's neighbor.
According to Hardit Singh, 18 people in his village in Peshawar - in present day Pakistan - were killed for refusing to convert to Islam.