The year was 1947. India was yet to begin scripting its independent history when Mahendra Raj, a civil engineer fresh out of college, took a train from Lahore on August 11 to what would become his new homeland. “Perhaps it was one of the last trains that was not attacked,” he says. 

Partition had caused devastation on both sides. Among the top priorities of the Jawaharlal Nehru government that took charge was to build infrastructure for a new administration, and for a vast populace and the millions of refugees it was to serve. The nationalistic fervour of shaping a new nation ...