Jaijon Doaba, also called Patharanwali, sits in the Mahilpur sub-division of Hoshiarpur district, about 80 kilometres from Jalandhar. It was a trading town. After 1947, when its Muslim workers, artisans and traders left for Pakistan, the trade routes shifted and the town died.
Fewer than 2,000 people live there now, among decaying three-storey havelis and shuttered shops. In one open shop stands an empty galla, a cash till weighing 250 kilos, with six built-in locks. Stone lamp niches in the walls are still black with soot.
Chaman Lal, a sweet-maker, keeps postcards from 1909. Ramesh Kumar, 81, owns a closed three-storey cloth shop.
The town emptied because of emigration rather than partition. Its trading families went to Britain and Canada from the 1950s and 1960s, kept the property, and did not come back, which is why the havelis are standing and locked rather than demolished.
It was a market town for the Kandi belt above it, and when the belt's people left too the market had nothing to serve. The shops are shuttered with stock still in them in several cases.
Jaijon is what a Doaba town looks like at the end of the emigration process rather than the beginning of it, and there are several more like it in Hoshiarpur district. None has been photographed or surveyed.