Nakodar, Shahkot, Goraya, Phillaur, Nurmahal, Bhogpur, Adampur and Alawalpur are the small towns of Jalandhar district, each a market centre for twenty or thirty villages.
Nakodar holds the two Mughal tombs of the court musician Ustad Muhammad Momin and his pupil Haji Jamal, with tilework as good as anything in Indian Punjab.
Nurmahal holds a Mughal serai with carved gateways. Phillaur holds a fort built by Ranjit Singh Ji's French officers and a Mughal serai beside it.
Adampur has an airport that has opened and closed repeatedly, serving a district whose main external connection is to Canada.
These towns have a Mughal monument, an emigration economy, a grain market and a bus stand each, and no published local history of any of them exists.
There are about a hundred and fifty towns of this kind in Punjab.
Both are octagonal brick with glazed tile and one of them keeps a good part of its original surface. They were built for a musician and for his student, which is an unusual thing to raise a monument to, and there is nothing at the site that tells a visitor who either man was.
Goraya sits on the highway and has foundries. Shahkot and Bhogpur have sugar and rice mills. Alawalpur and Adampur have very little except the money coming in, and their main streets are banks, travel agents and coaching centres in a row.
These towns run on the same three things: the mandi, the money coming from abroad, and the schools and coaching centres preparing the next people to leave.