An earthy, robust and deeply funny account of the privileged life of a young Sikh boy for whom, as headmaster's son in an all-boys' school in the North West Frontier Province, life is beautiful.

Set in the fictitious town of Sripur a charming settlement blessed with great scenic beauty, natural streams and luscious fruit orchards in the first half of the twentieth century, is an account of growing up in a middle-class Sikh household in the years before electricity and running water.

Cocooned in the embrace of his extended family, and inured from the more brutish aspects of an all-boys' school by his father's exalted status, Monu lives an enviable life full of undeserved favours, sly loves and small triumphs. But then Partition looms its ugly head and in no time at all his innocuous world is ripped asunder, as petty biases and mindless racial slights deepen into a divide of deathly proportions.

A Sikh Boy is not just an account of an idyllic childhood but an examination of the mindset of a young Punjabi youth, who, caught in the thick of the 1947 riots inexplicably and unthinkingly perpetrating violence, begins to question his deeply ingrained biases.

Published: 2006
Pages: 230
Format: Paperback