Stranger to History (27 page)
I thought my mother must have suffered at my going, both out of concern for my well-being and for her own makeshift peace with that time. ‘Just remember, my darling,’ she said, ‘you’ll find him charming, interesting, very funny, but he’ll always let you down.’
That morning, my flat in Delhi was dark and quiet, except for the dull hum of the air-conditioner. The marks of the morning were apparent. A crack of light came from the kitchen where Sati, the servant, moved around before anyone else; a Thermos of coffee had been left for me on the dining-table; newspapers lay unopened on the floor.
Sati came out of the kitchen when he heard my footsteps. I had been at university for many months and he still beamed at seeing me after so long. He handed me a blue polythene bag with my breakfast in it.
‘Is Keval up?’ I asked.
‘Yes, he’s in the car.’
Downstairs, it was a beautiful, clear dawn. The rain had come and gone, and though the night faded from one pale patch in the sky, no direct light had crept in yet. The brightening of the day could not be separated from the adjusting of the eyes.
Keval sat in the car, smoking a cigarette. When he saw me come out, he brought the car up, with no more fuss than if he were taking me to school.
‘
Chalo
Pakistan,’ I said, as if we were refugees in 1947.
‘
Chalo
Pakistan!’ he chortled.
We drove through the Delhi of roundabouts, long avenues and white colonial bungalows. Long stretches of dark, empty road, with off-duty traffic-lights, gave way to a headlight parade of trucks. Keval would accelerate until he was just inches behind one, and its bright, painted colours were visible, then he’d sidle over to the right to see if it was safe to overtake. Sometimes he’d overtake with oncoming headlights close in the distance, slipping between yellow lights and coloured trucks. We passed factories and warehouses, agriculture marooned in every corner of free space, until we were only among fields. I remember falling asleep just after we drove through the city’s red stone gates.
When I woke up, a heavy pink sun was blanching fast. Salmon, gold and saffron light seeped into the hot haze, lifting from green, waterlogged fields. The town we drove into was Ludhiana. It was a town of cloth mills, and the evidence of this was everywhere. The industry invaded the inner streets. Rough mountains of fabric were heaped precariously outside every shop so that only wholesale purchases seemed possible. Trucks, with sack-cloth posteriors, bursting with cotton, clogged the town’s narrow arteries. The bypass was under repair so highway traffic, impatient from recently moving at a steady pace, now inched behind the cotton trucks. Bicycles, two- and three-wheeler scooters completed the chaos, driving one little wheel into any opening. But for the porous fortification of open drains, the only indication of municipality, the street caved in on itself. Ludhiana itself was a town inside out, in which factories and highways sprung up in its centre and the people lived outside.
It was the first large Punjabi town we passed through. In my own complicated situation, Punjab was a way through the confusions of nationality and religion. My father was from Punjab across the border, but so was my mother’s Sikh family. There was Punjab in India and Punjab in Pakistan. It was like a network of cultural familiarity that stretched over the two enemy countries. It was made up of language, song, poetry, clan affiliation, and a funereal obsession with certain tragic romances. Decades after Partition, it clung on, like the rods in a crumbling building, bent, mangled, but somehow, still fierce. More than India, it was Punjab that was divided to make Pakistan, and the pain of it was felt acutely on both sides.
There was a time when my entire journey from the moment we left Delhi would have been through Punjab. But what was left of the state in India after Partition was further divided into three smaller states. So, of the state that once stretched from Delhi to Kabul, only a patch remained in India, carrying the name Punjab. And when my father first saw Indian Punjab, all those years ago, he said, with characteristic delicacy to my mother, ‘We got Punjab, you got the foreskin.’
There had been a substantial monsoon, and in this river country, every little stream and canal ran unsteadily, like an overfull glass, to drop-off points in the fields. The villages we drove past were single-storey brick constructions containing a surprising number of auto mechanics and chemists. The rains did the job of the municipality, producing a large patch of wet black mud, which served as a town square. Vegetable sellers, tea stalls and outdoor eating places fought for space. The idleness of cows and buffaloes seemed to rub off on the people, who lazed on rope beds.
Stout yellow and white milestones now read ‘Jalandhar’. A functioning bypass swept away the town, and a cement bridge took us across a wide, muddy river. The Beas. One of the five rivers of Punjab, two of which remained in India, and from which the state derived its purely Persian name:
punj
, five, and
ab
, water; five waters.
Then, abruptly, in this landscape of fields, tractors, canals and red-brick houses, a road sign read: ‘Lahore 43km.’
‘Forty-three kilometres!’ Keval cried. ‘I could drive there in less than an hour!’ Until now there had been no indication of the closeness of the border, and I hadn’t expected to see any before Amritsar.
Keval was still shaking his head, his crooked protruding teeth frozen in a grimace, when the road took on a new aspect. It was no longer the busy run-down highway leading to Amritsar, but a leafy dual-carriageway with little traffic. Its construction and maintenance bore the unmistakable mark of military efficiency. The first signs of an army presence were soon visible: cadets and young recruits peered inquisitively out of the back of their camouflaged trucks; the Border Security Force’s bases appeared, and some of the army vehicles turned into them. Their high walls, with bright bougainvillaea hanging over them, suggested army schools and peacetime routines. The occasional armoured car appeared, but there was nothing threatening in its heavy tread. The entire place possessed an old-fashioned cantonment atmosphere of good food and officers’ evenings.
The only unnatural element was the fields: the massive, unending expanse of agriculture, which threatened to engulf the neat academies and bases that had been set up so incongruously on its stretch. These fields, heavy with rice and water, so removed from everything, seemed strange things to defend. Keval and I pushed on along this unexpected road, eaten up by fertile land, until we came at last to the moody frontier.
It appeared like a roadblock, at best a scenic stop, to interrupt the land’s flat expanse. Hawkers and agents fell upon the car, selling soft drinks and postcards of the border-closing ceremony. It was a difficult moment for Keval and me. I felt bad at having to leave him behind. I also felt a degree of fear because I couldn’t see into Pakistan and wasn’t sure if my mother’s friend’s son would have come to pick me up. Keval registered my nervousness and said, ‘No reason to worry. I’ll wait for you for an hour until I know you’ve crossed.’
Shooing off hawkers, he led the way past the car park and refreshment stalls and through a small black gate. Here, an attendant asked for our passports. Keval gave me a tight hug and sent me off.
Through the gate, I could see the lavish excesses of the governments’ imagination. A pink amphitheatre had been constructed where spectators at the daily border-closing ceremony could sit. It consisted of an exchange of huffs and salutes performed in symmetry by the Indian and Pakistani sides. Then two gates, painted to look like iron flags, were slammed shut before a hooting crowd. It was a choreographed piece of officialdom, a military extravaganza for the bureaucrat. Two concrete arches stood at equidistance from the open gates. In their shade, two men from the respective sides sat with ledgers in their laps. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to finesse these symmetries in concrete.
I was ushered into a cool, dark office on the Indian side where a man inspected my passport. Then a coolie in a blue shirt and white pyjamas pushed my bag through an X-ray that wasn’t switched on. I picked it up at the other end and was directed out of the office on to a bleak stretch of road leading up to the arches. The great trees of the sub-continent lined the road: dark green mango, frangipani, pale eucalyptus, dour, drooping
ashok
and the patriarchal and sacred
peepal
. Among them, appearing intermittently, were rusty billboards advertising Pepsi. Following the coolie, I saw the fields again. A great black two-faced fence, with a stooped back and tense barbed wire, ran for miles through them. On the other side, past the barbed wire, the fields continued. The morose screech of a koel broke the quiet.
When we reached the Indian arch, I saw in the ledger that the last person to cross had been a Nigerian some weeks before.
The coolie walked a few yards further, past the short shadow cast by the arch, to where another coolie in identical white pyjamas, but with a green shirt, took my bag from him. The exchange was made with so little ceremony that its meaning was nearly lost on me. The coolies’ faces, tired and lined in the same way, next to the detail of their ragged shirts in different colours, seemed to mock the place. After the pomp before, that was all: I was in Pakistan.
The gate on the other side was of rust-coloured brick, with cream crenellations and turrets. In gold Urdu letters a sign read: ‘Gate of Freedom.’ Above it, the green – the darkest of all greens, a black forest green – and white of the Pakistani flag raced in the wind.
In the old-fashioned colonial offices on the other side, the reception was warm. They read the name in my passport and asked, unprompted, ‘This is the People’s Party Salmaan Taseer?’
‘Yes,’ I answered.
‘You’re not carrying alcohol, I hope?’
‘No.’
I knew that my father was well-known in Pakistan for his political role, and later his businesses, but not the extent of it. Sitting in those shaded offices, heat and heavy trees outside, I knew that I had set in motion one of the biggest decisions of my life.
Then an unsettling exchange occurred. One of the men, effusive and warm at first, asked in Urdu, ‘So, what brings you back this time?’
Urdu and Hindi were hardly different so I replied easily, ‘Not much, boss. Just my friend’s birthday.’
The hospitality evaporated and they stared at me in silence.
One of the men repeated the word I used for ‘birthday’, and suggested another. Then, he said, ‘Oh, you’ve come from
India
?’ The differences between the two languages were very slight and, growing up in Delhi, my language was heavily influenced by Urdu, but I had used the one word that only someone who grew up in India could have used.
And so it was that I took my first steps into Pakistan aware of my unique patrimony, knowing at once familiarity and unfamiliarity.
K
arachi, Pakistan, four years later. My arrival in Pakistan was sudden and unplanned. Two weeks ahead of schedule, I was on an Emirates flight, covering the short distance from Dubai to Karachi. We flew like a small plane, close to the land, sometimes over bright blue water, sometimes over desert, before dropping toward the Indus’s saline mouth and the hard yellow land of Sind.
I chose Karachi, rather than Lahore, because I wasn’t ready yet to see my father. I was also thinking of his letter and wanted to travel in his country before making my way north to him.
It was my first time in Karachi. The highway that brought me into town didn’t bring me far enough for me to have a feel of the city. I expected a noisier, more congested city, more like Bombay or Tehran, but the city we entered was spread out, with empty residential streets. Long, unshaded main roads connected little markets and offices to colonies of golden-brown, California-style bungalows, with green, reflective-glass windows. There was in the hot breeze, the listless neighbourhoods, the bungalows, with large balconies, and the bleak, grid-like streets, here and there with the cowering shadow of a palm on them, seeming to rise to a distant point, and then dropping, a hint of the sea. There was also, in the high walls of houses, armed guards standing outside, white cars with tinted windows, through which it was possible to make out the silhouettes of bodyguards, a hint of crime.
There was some talk of my staying at my father’s guesthouse in Karachi, but my elder half-brother, whom I hardly knew, insisted I stay with him. He lived in one of Karachi’s newer bungalows. It was a small, well-proportioned house, sparse and functional, with a large balcony. Most of the day it was quiet, except for the hum of an air-conditioner. Large Indian blinds kept the sun’s blaze out and gave the little house a permanent feeling of afternoon. My brother ran it like a bachelor’s home, with a single servant who brought up beers, lime water and meals on TV trays. I had a basic room, with a narrow bed, next to my brother’s, which, after all these years of being an only child, gave me a taste of living with siblings.
I felt unexplained tenderness for my brother. My father and he had always had a complicated relationship, often related to my father’s disapproval of the women he dated. I sensed damage in my brother, the kind that can sometimes occur in children whose parents have been too powerful or too successful. After years of being my father’s heir, of being told who to marry and who not to marry, groomed at the best schools and universities in Europe, he was about to find himself, at the age of thirty-five, beginning life alone in a country where connections and influence were everything. He had known about me for many years before that first trip to Pakistan, and perhaps because of our troubled relationships with our father, we shared a special connection.
After Iran, and my sudden arrival in Pakistan, I was happy to rest for a few days. I felt the delayed strain of my night flight from Iran, of connections made and hours lost. I wanted to put off travelling, calling my father, and even thinking too much about Pakistan. But on that first evening, I had a foretaste, among educated Pakistanis, of a great double-edged tension. As India came up again and again, in big and small ways, sometimes through caste references, sometimes through Bollywood, I was reminded, as I had been unexpectedly four years before at the border, that I was a stranger in Pakistan.