No Muslim has lived in Hedon Bet in Ludhiana district since 1947. The century-old mosque is still lit.
Prem Singh, a Sikh, took over its care in 2009 from a Sufi faqir. Villagers light lamps daily, make parsad every Thursday, and hold an annual festival there. He also looks after abandoned mosques at Salana Bet and Baidshala, where a mosque and a gurdwara now function side by side.
Kulwant Kaur, a villager, put it plainly: Why should a place of faith, of whichever religion, be shut down?
Tayyab Hussain Falahi of the Punjab Waqf Board says the state lists more than a thousand mosques and 61 dargahs. After 1990 the Board stopped issuing licences and hundreds fell vacant.
The mosque is one of several hundred in Indian Punjab that lost their congregations in 1947 and were left standing. Most were converted to other uses, kept as stores or schools or houses, or taken down for their brick. A small number were kept as mosques by the villages around them.
The Punjab Waqf Board holds title to most such properties in principle and is in possession of very few of them in practice. Litigation over encroachment runs for decades and the board's own record of what it owns is incomplete.
What is maintained at Hedon Bet is not a congregation, since there is none, and not a monument, since the building is not protected. It is a place kept in the condition its users left it in, by people who are not its users, for reasons the villagers give in terms of respect rather than heritage.