Neighbourhood watch

Not only are we not the same people, Pakistan and India seem to inhabit parallel universes these days

As a child (and grandchild) of refugees from what is now Pakistan, I was weaned on tales of the halcyon days of our  pre-Partition life. Needless to say, all these stories had a certain fairy-tale element to them, recounted as they were through the prism of nostalgia. 

My grandmother, who had grown up in the North Western Frontier Province, never tired of recounting the many military victories the men of her village had been part of, the reminiscing growing bloodier with each retelling. And my grandfather, without fail, would point out with a sneer that while these men may have been brave they were also rather stupid. 

Why? Because when the British granted them one wish after one such spectacular victory, guess what they asked for? 

No, they didn't think it was important to get drinking water to the village where women still had to trudge to the river to get supplies for their families. Oh no, that would have made too much sense. So instead they asked that a cannon be installed at the entrance of the village because then everyone would know what brave warriors they were!

My mother's memories revolved around large bungalows with sprawling gardens where she and her five siblings would run wild. They took particular pride in infiltrating the houses next door and stealing mangoes off their neighbours' trees without ever getting caught (a theme that resonates even now in the India-Pakistan story). And what do you know? The mangoes were always sweeter on the other side. 

Of them all, only my father managed to salvage something of his pre-Partition life. He stayed in touch with the best friend of his college days in Lahore. And every year, we kids would look forward to Masood Uncle's annual visit to Calcutta. He timed his visit around Eid so that his wife could spend time with her family in the city and his kids could get to know their Indian cousins. 

Given these circumstances, it was only natural that I would grow up thinking of Pakistanis as people who were just like us. To me, they were not The Other. They were just like Masood Uncle who came to visit us laden with gifts and uncomplainingly ate the vegetarian food served by my grandmother's kitchen (which remained an onion and garlic free zone till she died). They spoke the same language (Punjabi) that we spoke at home. They wore the same kind of clothes. Hell, they even looked like us, if just a little bit fairer and prettier. 

After the Masoods departed, I would often daydream about the time when I would go to Pakistan. When I would get to walk down the street that bore my family name. When I would explore the rooms of the house we had left behind. When I would get to revisit all those haunts that my parents talked about incessantly: Shalimar Bagh and Lahore Fort (from where Maharaja Ranjit Singh ruled Punjab) to name just two. When I would be able to get in touch with my roots. 

Well, as it turned out, I did get to go to Pakistan once I had grown up, as part of the media party accompanying Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee on his historic bus journey across the Wagah border to Lahore in 1999. But sadly, this was not the Pakistan of my dreams, the Pakistan in which I believed I would fit right in, the Pakistan that would have seemed a home away from home.

Instead, from the get go, I felt like an outsider. Yes, everyone did speak Punjabi. But it was littered with so many high-flown Urdu words that they may just as well have been speaking a foreign language. And when my colleagues were introduced to some of the Pakistani media corps, they were completely befuddled by their names, trying them out gingerly as if expecting them to explode in their mouths. You see, one of them explained to me, they had never heard these 'Hindu names' before (my name they had no problem with, because it was also a Muslim name). In fact, none of them had even met a Hindu before, so we were like an exotic species which provoked both curiosity and wariness in equal measure. 

This was not the Pakistan of Masood Uncle, who had had emotional and familial ties to India. This was a new Pakistan that had no fond memories of the pre-Partition days. This was a Pakistan that identified with the Islamic Middle-East rather than with 'Hindu' India. This was a Pakistan that regarded Indians (read Hindus) as The Other. This was the Pakistan that had been brought up to regard us as the enemy.

Clearly, we were no longer the same people. And frankly, looking back, I had been foolish to imagine that we would still be. 

But over the last couple of weeks, as the Uri attack has dominated the news cycle, and various Pakistani talking heads have popped up on prime time Indian news TV, I have come to realize that, far from being the same people, we actually occupy parallel universes. And while we live in a world in which Pakistan is a failed state which uses terror as an instrument of state policy, in their world-view India is an aggressive neighbour, who bullies and terrorizes its own people and then blames Pakistan for it.

No matter how much we try, it is hard to see how we can reconcile these two positions. And so we are doomed to conducting an eternal dialogue of the deaf, talking at, rather than to, each other.

         Past imperfect

What do you do when you can never go back home?

Whenever I drive down the Moolchand flyover in Delhi, I find myself looking out for a red-tiled roof on my left. It is another matter that the humble barsati that was my first home in Delhi is long gone. In its place stands a ritzy three-storey building which houses an international bank and sundry designer stores.

But even though my eyes can’t deceive me, my mind always goes back to what was: my first visit to an old-style bungalow in Defence Colony; endless negotiations to get the rent down; trips to Fab India for furnishings; the many moon-lit parties I hosted on the terrace; lazy Sundays spent in the winter sun; the searing heat that no air-conditioner could banish; the whistling cold wind of winter that got into my very bones; and most of all, the ineffable feeling of freedom I felt in the first home that was truly my own.

All of this, however, exists in my mind alone; the place that created these feelings and memories has long since vanished, a casualty to the endless development and re-development that characterizes the city. (The Khan Market of my youth, for instance, now exists only in the imagination of my generation.)

I am not new to this sense of lost worlds, though. In a way, it seems like a natural progression of my family’s own personal history of loss and remembrance. As a child, I grew up on tales of the Partition and the homes that we had left behind. My grandmother would regale me with stories of her village in the North-Western Frontier which produced so many brave soldiers that the British agreed to grant them any wish. But instead of asking for running water for the village, my grandfather would interject scornfully at this point, they asked for a cannon to be installed at the village gates!

My parents would remember fondly the large, sprawling houses they grew up in, with their endless acres of garden fragrant with the smell of mango-laden trees and flowering jasmine. Was it my imagination or did the homes get more and more palatial with each re-telling? And was it simply nostalgia, rather than blatant lying, at work? I really don’t know, though I am inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But such was the magical world they created in their re-telling, that I couldn’t really bear to see if it would ever measure up to reality. Which is why on my solitary visit to Pakistan, I did not make the slightest attempt to get to the village in Jhelum in which an entire mohalla had been named after my family (or so they claimed, at any rate!).

The lesson I learnt at my grandmother’s knee was that you can never really go back home; because that home could well have changed beyond all recognition. Far better to see it for what it was in your mind’s eye, than risk besmirching your memories with the stain of reality. Which perhaps explains why I am so loath to ever go back: to my childhood home; my school; my college. I would much rather remember them the way they were, than have my memories diluted by how they are now.

A friend of mine learnt this lesson the hard way. A Kashmiri Pandit, he was exiled from the Valley along with his family, while still a child. Ever since, he would have a recurring dream of his childhood home, of the garden he played in, of the school he attended. In his dreams he would roam the streets of his lost city, visit old haunts, enjoy that once-familiar view.

And then, one day, he finally made his way back home. Only it wasn’t home any longer. There were strangers living in the house that was once his, the streets looked completely different, and the Arab-style hijab had taken over from the Kashmiri kalle dajj. He took the next flight out. And since then, he says, he has never dreamt of Srinagar again.

Well, I don’t know about you, but I would rather have my dreams than a bitter dose of reality. I would rather remember my college library the way it was – with me perched on my favourite window seat, with the sloping table piled up with endless reference books, while I lost myself in a short story by Katherine Mansfield – than go back and be confronted with a modern monstrosity (which I am sure it isn’t; but I’d rather not find out).

Sometimes, of course, I have no choice in the matter. No matter how much I long to go back to my first office, in the slightly dilapidated building that then housed the ABP headquarters, there is no way that I can. That place, the repository of so many memories, burnt down to the ground, even as I watched, horrified. No, I am not kidding. A blaze that started in the early hours of the morning gutted the entire building, taking with it an entire chunk of my life.   

So, what do you do when you can’t go back home (or indeed, to the office)? Well, as I have discovered, the best thing to do is just re-create it in your imagination, populate it with your memories, and make it the stuff of your dreams. There really is no better way to triumph over reality.