Train from Pakistan, 2004: The Return

(Final preamble to an epilogue on a tribute that became a travelogue accused of being a monologue. If chowkies, inter-actors and lurkers here think that what I got from some of them is bitchy and terrible, then they need to see what a typical South Asian family can achieve after a funeral where truth takes precedence over pretense. To some extent, "pulling their chain", was like therapy. Consider . . .)

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Within less than 36 hours after the brief rites at my father’s simple and minimalistic electric crematorium funeral were conducted by my 18 year old son while I stood by and handled the logistics, in February’04, Raghu and I were on our way to his boarding school near Ooty after tying up most of the practical loose ends. From Delhi to Bangalore, about 3 hours by an early morning flight, in the face of the usual band of disapproving relatives. As most everybody will concur, the level of disapproval by relatives in our part of the world is inversely proportional to the actual practical work they do, at family functions and gatherings.

Thence onwards by road in a borrowed "test" car from Bangalore to Ooty, about 6 hours fast driving time through rugged Tipu Sultan country, subject to normal traffic and road conditions, but extended to almost 12 due to a breakdown caused by over-heating en route on the very steep water-shortage short-cut Maddumalai Ghat route right in the middle of burnt-forest non-mobile phone Veerapan territory. Nothing that my trusty Bangalore driver from Raichur, Shekhar, some wires, nylon rope, washing soap, old lubes, rags and roadside bitumen waste would not fix, but tiresome all the same.

A very late evening arrival at the senior boys dorms in the Nilagiri House hostel within the sprawling campus of the almost 150-year old Lawrence School in Ooty did tend to give an eery air to the proceedings, especially in the cold, rolling, wet and silent mist on top of the highest geographical profile chosen for this historical school. The cemetery nearby, spooky enough as are most old English resting places in India at the best of times, but now top of mind. I’ve seen death and its manifestations often enough, up close and personal, silent as well as violent, but for Raghu it was a new step on the road to life. Leaving him to his own devices at such a time was very difficult for me, but also essential, this is also called growing up.

That’s when I promised myself quietly, as I bid Raghu farewell and good luck for his forthcoming XIIth Board exams, that we would retrace some of my father’s steps. Together, some day.

As I drove fast in low gears at high revs taking turbo influenced chances, cutting corners, skidding, and side-slipping, grabbing the road back just in time by pushing the small front-wheel drive car back on to the tarmac before she went over into ditch or mountain wall, on inhuman reserves brought out into time-enhancing focus by fatigue, more on hazy memory than on lurid bright Tamil road-signs, with Hendrix and Joplin on the stereo, too fast for my ageing reflexes on dark, wet and slippery but still familiar mountain roads remembered from my youth rallied recklessly in unsafe soft-suspension rear-wheel low-powered cars driven under alcoholic bravado a generation ago, through the now pea-soup thick fog towards the unchanged for decades but still impeccable residential area for senior officers at the Defence Services Staff College at nearby Wellington, off Coonoor, to spend the night there with a cousin dearer to me than a younger brother, I had no idea that "cricket" visas to Pakistan would be so easily available within the next month. All this, driving through the Madras Regimental Centre campus and wading through the Indian Army Traffic Check Posts and multi-layer Indian Army security in position, to reach the warm rooms and hospitality of an organisation that was my father’s life and my youth, the Indian Army.

That was the only night I permitted myself the luxury of mourning, as I handed over to my cousin the documents for what needed to get back where it belonged, a .38 restricted bore revolver over a hundred years old and with a pearl-handled grip, legacy of days spent during World War II with the Baluch Regiment. The Armies of our countries, too, work in mysterious ways.

Simple fact, as far as I could understand with my Dad when he was alive, objectivity and pragmatism came first. The way our trip from Lawrence School/Ooty to Lawrence School/Murree emerged, unfolded, and now drew to a close, just proved it. Again.

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Raghuveer’s short and sweet description about his inter-action with young men of the Islamabad Blue Area variety of his age in Pakistan was - all that most of these guys want to talk about is Indian starlets and the best methods to leave Pakistan.

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18th April’04 evening through 19th April’04 evening:-

Our short Sheikhupura and Nankana Sahib interlude ends in a crowded part of town, "somewhere in East Lahore", close to a snazzy Hyundai taxi, with a fairly sombre series of bear hugs, and promises to meet again, Insha-Allah Vahe-Guru, if life permits. The Urdu speaking Lahore local taxi driver is paid handsomely, in advance, by our semi-urban Jat Sikh Muslim contact who has been with us for the past two hours, himself basis a very deep but chance contact out of Canada, and that gives us this very rapid mind-blowing lesson on his first-hand version and exposure to Indo-Pak history. I listen to the two. Their world-view on co-existence is amazing.

Here is an interlude then, a brief extract from the life of an illiterate woman, the ones we see in the market going about their lives, calling them Dadi or Nani without much ado.

Does reciting a few kalmas or shabads and eating a mouthful of beef biryani or kadaa parsaad on a dark night in a field from where you can see towns going up in flames in the distance given to you by a neighbour intent on helping you stay alive, if you are a middle-aged woman with hungry children, abandoned and thrown into a well by your menfolk intent on escaping to the "other side" with the family gold, make you any better or worse? And subsequently, you marry that widower neighbour, and bring up all the children from his previous wife along with yours as good human beings? Track down your relatives from your first marriage, and send some of those children to England, while staying back yourself, does that make you or me better than her?

And if the children, with common generic surnames now, choose to stay in touch by adjusting to any of three or even more religions as required, then who am I to pass judgement?

Standing on a grubby street-side in Lahore, I begin to understand some more about Partition. Jinnah and Nehru, who we discuss and argue about, probably didn’t know too much about what happened on the ground in 1947. Or didn’t want to. And so many of us, so-called educated elite, we choose to ignore the truths.

It was all about property papers and steel trunks and fair maidens, wasn’t it? My mother was one of the few women present at the spot in Karachi on the 14th of August 1947, for the flag hoisting and march-past. Some day I am going to place her version here, too.

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We are running behind schedule for our next appointment, an evening with some of Lahore’s finest. These are also people with a world-view, introduced to me through the golf circuit, most of them have visited India multiple times. There are inter-community and inter-religious marriages as well as business linkages, there are friends working together abroad for best in breed kind of jobs and there is great anticipation of a forthcoming increase in opportunity with better relations between countries. Meanwhile, it is all about jobs abroad in investment banks and re-insurance and technology and research and development and medicine and engineering.

On the way to GOR-1, we ask the driver to give us a quick drive-through look at Lahore by early evening. Lahore is a crowded city, that’s not saying much, most of it seems to be under construction. But the over-riding perception of an ancient city surrounded by over-utilised fertile land heading towards becoming a dusty metropolitan nightmare does not change. We drive past forts and gates and all the names mentioned when interacting with Pakistanis. No doubt Lahore was once home to a multi-cultural and evolving melting pot; the ruins are there to see. Today, sad to observe, it appears to be a mono-ethnic male-dominated overgrown village. The Hindus and Sikhs have gone to India, the Europeans and their merchants have quietly abdicated leaving their brand names behind, the other minorities are visible only in the exception, as for those stalwarts all over the sub-Continent - the Anglo Indians - of them almost no trace. In addition, the politicians have moved to Islamabad taking the diplomats and foreign organisations with them. To everybody except its inhabitants, Lahore is just one more provincial serai on the GT Road. Yes, it has an International Airport which is, according to one source, better than all others in the world. Hmmm.

Pop groups and ice-cream vendors are drawing the crowds at the Race Course, we hear loud announcements that mention Junoon and Euphoria as we head for the bungalow. There is a traffic jam at the mosque nearby, many of the powerful and faithful visit, and have to leave in huge big SUVs and sedans through streets clogged with pedestrians heading for the music. I am pleased to note that traffic cops trying to give precedence to cars over pedestrians here seem to have no clue about the realities of human traffic flow, as in most other places. I am also pleased to note that pedestrians here are like those in India, not averse to thumping a bonnet or two and glaring at people sitting inside in impotent rage.

My taxi-driver tells me that if a car even touches one of the pedestrians, there can be a riot. We lower the windows and he offers me a smoke. Capstan!! We reach our host’s bungalow on Dampur Road.

A small army of drivers, guards, helpers and others grab whatever little baggage we have, and now onwards, through a dinner of the sort made famous in articles by Indians on Pakistani hospitality, we are treated like royalty by our hosts, their family and friends. Since I already know many of the people present in the course of their visits to India, there is no holding back on the realities of life. The simple fact that Pakistan has something like two decades of catching up with India is an accepted currency. The hope that Pakistan can do it without the agony of separatist wastage and social mistakes made by India is the other side of the coin.

We then head for a comfortable night at the nearby Punjab Club, driven there in person by one of the seniormost civilians in all of Pakistan. We could have been at home, being transported by an elder of our own family. Maybe, once upon a time, this was home. The receptionist has an amazed look when I enter "Indian" in the club register. For what it is worth, I have seldom stayed at a club in India. But I figure they must all be almost the same. At the Punjab Club, after checking in, I go back to the Reception area. Payments are accepted only in Pakistani Rupees or hard currency, luckily we have some British Pounds on us, so that works. We book a taxi for the early morning sight-seeing tour and drop to Lahore Railway Station, and soon after that, while I write up on my notes, Raghu is fast asleep.

The gossip of the day at the Punjab Club in Lahore is all about whether the previous Chief Secretary, Randhawa, slapped the current incumbent, his junior, or not. From what I can understand, he did.

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19th April’04:-

Chota hazri at the Punjab Club is done in fine style. Three people are required to serve us, word has obviously gotten around here too that Indians are big tippers. Fair enough, if not when we come back to our neck in the woods, then where else? I ask the head bearer what that exquistely lovely small rug draped on the sofa is all about, and he gives me a strange look as he tells me it is a prayer rug. Oops!!

We skip the coffee option, and stay with tea, tea-bags by Tetley of Tata. Raghu grabs a couple of bottles of unmarked club-cola, which are far better than the fake stuff we’ve been having on the road. We grab a few souveniers from the room, stuff like notices to members ("Ladies are not allowed in a room") and a bottle opener which has been forged by fixing a steel washer to a metal handle. We are tempted to purloin the attractive prayer rug, but think against it.

People at the party the night before have told us that we need not worry, even if we miss the train we can take a taxi to Wagah and connect there again, but we would rather not take chances. So we’ve organised a taxi which will give us a short guided tour, most of Lahore can be done within an hour we are told, just like Islamabad.

Our driver for the quick tour is the king of one-liners ex-Dubai, and pilots with great skill as well as elan a clean Suzuki-800 with his son’s photographs all over the insides and name emblazoned across the front windscreen. When he hears that Raghu and I are father and son visiting Pakistan, he goes into raptures about all his Indian friends and the kind of fun they would have in the UAE. He hints that something of the same kind of fun now keeps him out of his home-port, and I meet another soul who feels that Lahore is just a biggie village when compared to Karachi. While he has some knowledge about history and forts and mosques and graveyards and memorials and such touristy stuff, he seems to know a lot more about police stations en route. Matter of fact, as we spin through the almost rural ambience of this city in the morning, we seem to pass a lot of police cars and trucks being given their early morning wash along the roadside, like buffaloes.

Like all people ex-Dubai, our driver has also got a world-view. There are passengers, there are Indians, there are Pakistanis, and then there are tourists who are good for taxi trade economy. The last few weeks of high-tipping heavy Indian tourist rush thanks to cricket has left him richer, and he looks forward to more of us. The Sikh religious tourists come across for special praise as high-roller tippers. Another box of anjeer barfi, refused with grace at first but then accepted as a gift in the name of his son. In exchange, Raghu gets one of the many "taveez" that he is wearing, straight from off his neck.

Breakfast is together at an early morning cafeteria type place outside the Lahore Railway Station. Potato and meat "tikkis" caled "kababs" served with boiled agg and what we would call in Bombay "faan", all washed down with strong readymade tea served in glasses. Our driver has many friends there from the Railway Station circuit, and very soon, without any effort on our part, one of them has gone with Raghu and bought our tickets for the train ride from Lahore to Wagah and thence to Attari. Once again, we have great difficulty in making these humble and honest sons of the soil accept money.

We have a short, rancourless, free and frank discussion on matters Indo-Pak, and I bring the conversation around to Jehad boxes. For the first time I get what seems to be like an honest opinion, that it is like just another "haftaa". There are no dissenting faces on this issue, early in the morning, while getting ready for a day of work, the viewpoint is clear - jehadi donations just add to the costings. Feed the cops, the municipality, the transport department, the parking lot guys, the hoodlums, the military, and the jehadis. Our Dubai friend says, well, he has heard that in India too, we have to forcibly donate for festivals, but he adds that then atleast there is some entertainment. Some song and dance and fireworks and reduction of frustration. Here the jehadis take the money, buy huge big SUVs, and then expect the poor to only kill and die. Later on, in the privacy of the taxi, our driver tells us that if there is frustration in a society, then there will be "too many mentals". On that thought, we leave the subject of Jehadis alone.

Note- for the train tickets, I say "without any effort", because on the India end, a ticket for the Delhi-Attari-Wagah-Lahore journey can only be purchased if you have a valid visa and passport for the journey. At Lahore, courtesy our new friends, it was like buying a ticket for a local train in Mumbai. Question of honour, as explained by our Lahore taxi friends.

We are also given a brief guided tour of the historic Lahore Railway Station, including parts of the offices upstairs which are still being cleaned up. There is not much rush at this hour, and if one squints, one can imagine that the scenery is like it used to be in sepia tinted photographs lying around at home. Almost too soon, our Lahore interlude is coming to an end.

The train is not too crowded, so we get decent window seats. The rattle-trap hand-painted green wagons groan and clank out of Platform 1, the uniformed Immigration and Customs and Security types survey the passengers for possible victims. We are accosted by a middle-aged man, with "spook" written all over him, who tries to cosy up to us and claims that he is also an Indian visiting relatives, but gives up soon when he realises that (a) I know more about kulfi at Bazar Sitaram and calligraphy at Ballimaran than he claims to and (b) we are not taking anything back, not even photographs.

We head past the level crossing with traffic backed up for kilometres, increase speed as we sway alarmingly past the fetid slums of Mogulpura, knock up the famous world’s greatest dust-storm as we cruise past the barren landscape in its pre-monsoon yellows and browns, and jerk alarmingly as the wagons hit each other’s tired buffers on tracks that have not been re-ballasted for decades it would seem. At some points, where the train slows down to a dead crawl, we can see that the tracks are down to sleepers resting on the flat earth without any ballast at all.

It takes us two hours to cover the 40-odd kilometres to Wagah Station.

A brief collage:- Pakistani Immigration and Customs facilities here are the usual repeat on incoming. The thief charging 10/- per traveller for trolleys whether used or not tries to swindle us again as we pull our strolleys past him. The bank is still shut, the PCO guy is still everything, probably the Mayor too. The food is terrible and over-priced. The theme here seems to be to openly fleece whatsoever they can from the poorer lot, and don’t mess with the middle class beyond over-charging them. I change the balance few thousand rupees worth of Pakistani money I have into tenners, and place it in the hands of wide-eyed young children heading for India with their poor parents, Pakistani and Indian travellers, looking wistfully at the quarter-plate of rice and daal being sold for 20/- each.

As I have mentioned before, levels of poverty and illiteracy have probably not changed at this border for the past 5 decades. That is the truth.

Indians returning home after cricket are being handed back their confiscated booze bottles, and deals to dispose off them for consumption and/or sale are struck right away; no point carrying them back to India, is there? A group of 40-odd Pakistani Hindu pilgrims from Sindh headed for Ujjain, dressed in white kurta pyjamas, are being especially targetted by the Pakistani establishment, and a collection of 1000/- Pakistani rupees per head is rapidly organised with some help from the other cricket travellers to ensure that their passage is not prevented. That is also a truth.

I hang around at the rear of the line to get a birdseye view of the proceedings, ignoring offers for assistance from a rodent of a man in a beige shalwar-kameez pimping for line-breakers, which makes the Immigration guys even more suspicious. Once through with that, after a lot of bad-tempered and energetic review of every page of my three-booklet thick and much stamped passport and a placid look from me refusing to take the hint, I am propelled towards the X-Ray machine, where some of Pakistan’s finest indicate to me that a donation for their favourite charity may not be out of place either. Blank looks, and next stop is the Customs Man.

Ah, this is where I come into my element, having decades of experience dealing with those cut from this cloth all over the world. Fair, tall, handsome and with an attitude with which rocks can be cut, the dude in white sporting a Mont Blanc and designer shades asks me what I have, what I do and straight out, what’s there in it for him. I tell him that all I have is a bad stomach, I want to do my business, and if he doesn’t hurry things up, I may do it right there. Obviously he has not been spoken to like this in some time, so he gets tough with me, at which point I tell him that I don’t have toilet paper either. This sounds better in Punjabi. Not knowing what to make of this, he places a chalk-mark on my bags and lets me through.

Behind me, an old woman, I can not make out whether she is Hindu or Muslim or Indian or Pakistani, is crying because "they" have taken away EVERYTHING she had brought along as gifts to be distributed in India.

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The Wagah-Attari train is re-assembled on the International side of the platform, and is ready to be despatched from the Pakistan end, but there is some delay in "accepting" it from the India end, it seems. Choices for us while we wait are:- direct sun on the platform versus an option of being micro-waved inside the fan-less coach. The third option, of standing in the shade under the trees on the other side is not available to us initially courtesy some very tough looking army soldiers dressed in t-shirts and light trousers, but in the manner of things, after some time, people are permitted to loiter across as long as they stay within the barbed wire and do not go ahead of (towards India) or behind the train (towards Pakistan). In the not so far distance, we are shown Pakistani farmers entering an area which goes up to the very last inch of No-Man’s land, and are told that Indian farmers can do similar farming from the other end. There is a single barbed wire that segregates the two, but wild animals have bored tunnels from below, and fertilisers as well as water are often "exchanged" on need based basis.

I have heard of such tunnels. Full trucks can be driven through some, it is rumoured.

Note- the soldiers in Pakistan seem to be dressed in summer smart light casuals, means beige cotton vests, denim trousers and premium sneakers, with baseball caps. The police are also to be found in a variety of whites, blues, greys and blacks. To be fair, it does make them look less colonial than their cousins across the border in clod-hoppers, thick khakis and olive greens.

I get talking with a young soldier, he is from the Northern parts of Pakistan and hates the heat as well as the pettiness of the people in the plains, and after a while he provides me with some amazing anecdotes on co-operation with the Indians in the course of the cricket visits. Of being on duty when armadas full of equipment manned by Indians was wheeled across for joint duties with the Pakistanis during the cricket matches. Of one particular "near miss" when the bad guys almost got too close in Multan. And most of all, about the unspoken but well-known fact that internal security for some of Pakistan’s finest was being "assisted" by Indians now. Well, I tell him, we have had the misfortune of getting a lot of experience on the subject of internal security for the past two decades thanks in no small measure to Pakistan, so there is some sort of equalisation of inertias here it would seem?

In due course his friends amble across, and we have a great chat on who is the enemy. If all they are doing is co-ordinating the outer security for Americans and co-operating with Indians on security for cricketers and others, and now sitting quietly while the fence comes up along the LOC in Jammu & Kashmir too, then who is the enemy? One very interesting input I get over a shared smoke is that the rank-and-file Pakistani soldier is convinced of and aware of the fact that there is no discrimination against Muslims in the Indian Armed Forces.

So, who is the enemy then? Throughout my trip I have got the feeling that generations of disparate Pakistanis being held together by the common glue of hatred for Indians seem to be unraveling at the ground level, even in the Pakistani Armed Forces, the more of us they meet. It isn’t us from India, their enemies, we are getting along with our lives, I tell them, and to be truthful about it, I think they believe me. And then, this simple soldier, he gives me a truth: it is you, the educated elite, the officer class, who want to keep us fighting, when we would rather build bridges and roads and hospitals and schools.

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The smartly dressed and very friendly Pakistan Railway guard/senior conductor on duty ambles past, cajoling us to get back into the train, as he moves towards his cabin at the rear. The gate from the chamber of horrors also known as "Customs Shed" is shut tight, and those who have not been able to make it on to the train for any reason are huddled in some sort of unroofed but caged no-man’s land. They shall be held there till "something" is done about their release, I am told. My toothy spook waves out at me cheerfully and bids me "Khuda Hafiz".

With the flag and bell and exchanging of waves routine, the train moves out of Wagah station towards the border. Right outside Wagah, just after the first set of points, the train slows down to a dead crawl as it goes over a section of damaged track across a small makeshift bridge supported by wooden chocks, spanning a dry drain. The bogeys under the wagons scream in protest as they are twisted to an angle of almost 30-degrees from the horizontal on one side, and the wagon itself heels over dangerously. To our misfortune, the supports give way when our wagon, second-last, is about to cross, and the train is halted again. On both sides, soldiers line the railway lines with languidly shouldered weapons, while a 4-wheel drive vehicle runs paralel to the train for some distance.

We are asked to shift forward through the vestibules, and the train moves ahead again. Only to come to a halt just short of the Border Railway Gate. It seems that some of the Indians required to man the tracks on the Indian side have not reached as yet. Which is correct, because away not too far in the distance we can see a light-blue and grey Tata-609 bus bouncing it’s way furiously on a track paralel to the border. Once it gets to the gate, it disgorges a group of soldiers, documents are exchanged, the gate is opened, and the train lurches forward again. At walking pace. As it comes closer to the border, Pakistani officials (except the Pakistan Railway Running staff) hop off and amble back towards their soldiers.

And before you know it, without any difference in the beat or speed, a weather beaten sign informs you, "Welcome to India", in 19 different languages. Just like that. The difference here is that the Indian BSF soldiers are riding horses alongside the train, and the train itself is going much faster towards Attari Railway Station. The train is suddenly full of Indian officials from a variety of services, Punjab Police, Border Security Force, Customs, and other unidentifiable sorts.

It is good to be home. I switch on my mobile phone, get network, and SMS the family that we are now back in India.

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Inward Immigration and Customs at Attari/India is the usual mess of forms and lines and procedures at the "International" side. Since we are in the "nothing to declare" group, we rush through that one, and are stamped as well as processed on to the "India" side of the platform. Next, I use a little bit of clout and get us especially excused from the Attari-Delhi special train, which will leave only after all inward passengers are cleared. That involves another series of registers and signatures, a few more ignored hints, and an exit on to the parking lot.

400/- gets us an owner-driven Maruti-800 taxi direct to Amritsar Station, with assurances on confirmed seats for the evening air-con Shatabdi Express to New Delhi, 100/- over the going rate but that’s fine, we are moving faster, on song, and not just the engine. We pick up a couple of bottles each of chilled Kingfisher beer, Thums-up cola, Bikaneri wafers and Bisleri mineral water at the first opportunity, which is a busy little shop not too far from Attari station.

Once we get to Amritsar Station, 30-odd kilometres in less than that many minutes, we are able to motivate two seats for yet another additional cost of 100/- each over the fare. A quick shower in the Waiting Room (soap and towel and a pipe in the wall of the "bathroom" for 10/- rupees extra, and all the running cold water you want for free, what a bargain) and we ask the Railway guys if we have time to visit the Golden Temple, we are told that it would be cutting it too fine, so regretfully, we leave that for another time.

The Shatabdi Express cracks the 452 kilometres in 5 hours and 45 minutes. The TTE checks our tickets and breaks out into a big grin when we tell him that we are returning from Pakistan. At Jullundur, a very dear friend, DB, joins us. Across the aisle, Raghu sleeps.

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The one big thing I learnt from my trip to Pakistan is that we Indians are not their enemies anymore. The Pakistani enemy lies within their own system.

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Postscript: September’04, I receive an invite, it says:- S and I are going to be in Delhi from tomorrow (Tue) eve till Sat morning, when I go on to Srinagar. I’m on two panels at a workshop on conflict resolution (or something) at the Habitat Centre. The first is on Thu 23rd 330-5, on "Role of the Media in Conflict Generation and Conflict Transformation", with Beena Sarwar, Sidhharth Varadarajan and me being moderated by Javed Naqvi (Jacaranda 1 is the venue at the IHC). The second is on Fri 24th 2-430, on "Transcending Borders - The Role of Multi-Track Peacebuilding", with Beena Sarwar again, Saira Basim, Saumya Sen
and me, moderated by Meenakshi Gopinath (Magnolia). S will probably attend at least to throw rotten eggs. Do come if you can!

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Veeresh Malik
New Delhi