Toba Tek Singh is a canal colony town in the Chenab Colony, named for a toba, a pond, and for Tek Singh, a Sikh who is said to have kept water and shelter there for travellers before the canals came.
Manto's story Toba Tek Singh, published in 1955, is set in a Lahore asylum where the inmates are to be exchanged between the two countries by religion. Bishan Singh, from Toba Tek Singh, cannot find out whether his village is in India or Pakistan, refuses to be in either, and dies on the strip of ground between the wires.
It is the most exact thing anyone has written about the division of Punjab and it is about four pages long.
The town is a working agricultural centre of Pakistani Punjab.
A place named for a Sikh who gave travellers water is the title of the definitive story about Punjab's partition, written in Urdu by a man born near Samrala in Ludhiana district.
Manto was born near Samrala in Ludhiana district in 1912, grew up at Amritsar, wrote for Bombay films, and went to Lahore in 1948 and drank himself to death there by 1955. He was tried for obscenity six times, three times in India and three in Pakistan, and was acquitted every time.
He wrote it in 1954. It belongs with Khol Do, Thanda Gosht and the Siyah Hashiye sketches, which are a page or half a page each and are the most concentrated writing anybody did about what happened.
The town is a district headquarters now, cotton and wheat and a mandi, and the district was made around it in 1982. It is known across the world for four pages that almost nobody living in it has read.