Stepping Across the Line at Wagah Border

Mohsin Raza/Reuters A Pakistani bus crossing into India at the Wagah joint border crossing near Lahore on Jan. 20, 2006.

The last time I crossed the India-Pakistan border was in January. Crossing the border on foot has a strange way defying the received wisdom about border crossings, and indeed about India and Pakistan. Travelers with visas and the requisite clearances can walk across the border post at Wagah in the northern state of Punjab until about 3:30 or 4 in the afternoon. After the immigration counters close, the border post at Wagah turns into a site for unabashed chauvinism as the gates are closed between the two countries.

On a January afternoon, after attending a literary festival in Lahore, Pakistan, the Indian novelist Jeet Thayil and I sped through Lahore in two separate cars, trying to make it to the Wagah border in time to walk back to India. As we drove to Wagah, our tires screeching, soldiers, rangers, chickens jumped out of the way, perhaps recognizing the urgency of our mission.

We rolled down our windows and sought directions, as we were hopelessly lost. “India?” strangers shouted. “That way!” They looked at their watches. “Hurry! Only 20 minutes left!”

On the Indian side, we had two taxis waiting to ferry us to the Amritsar airport to catch our flights to Delhi. Mr. Thayil made it through with minutes to spare. I didn’t.

As I walked into the immigration complex at Wagah, the Pakistani visa officer strolled out, carrying a cup of tea. “Madam! Madam! Everything is now closed. I’ve just shut down the computer,” he gently admonished me.

“I told you the other day, did I not, that you must be back here before 3:30. It is a quarter to four now. And look, your friend has gone,” he said as he pointed toward Mr. Thayil’s retreating figure in the distance. “Now go back,” he said, “and enjoy our Lahore for another day.” I took his advice.

When I returned to the border post the next morning, the visa officer greeted me like a long-lost friend. “So, Madam,” he said, “you decided to leave our country then? Did we not make you feel welcome?”

This light-hearted banter wasn’t reserved for me; the handful of other border-crossers were treated similarly. Casual conversation, cups of tea, a story here or there while your papers were being dealt with, and then you were waved through.

Nor was it any different on the Indian side: returning Indians were greeted like long-lost friends, welcomed home, given advice about where their cellphones would work best, offered tea, told to relax while their passports were stamped. It was hard to believe that every evening, the border post at Wagah transformed itself into a theater where India and Pakistan rehearsed their chauvinistic hatred for each other.

Tall, uniformed Indian and Pakistani soldiers have been carrying out the choreographed routine of the border-closing ceremony since 1959. Until 20 years ago, it was relatively quieter and attracted audiences of some 100 or so people, but now it is a full-fledged mass performance, played to a gallery of several thousand every evening, as Indian soldiers and Pakistani rangers compete in goose-stepping and a major domo on either side exhorts people to shout patriotic slogans, while Bollywood music blares in the background. The whole performance is like war - except that it’s fought with words and gestures rather than weapons.

Hamza Ahmed/Associated Press Pakistani troops, right, giving sweets to their Indian counterparts on the occasion of Pakistan’s Independence Day at the Wagah border post on Wednesday.

Borders can sometimes reflect the reality of the countries that lie within them. For India and Pakistan, the land border at Wagah reflects both the confusion that lies at the heart of our current realities and the history that gave rise to them. The relationship between India and Pakistan is made up of love and hate, and a fair dollop of confusion.

The love comes from memories of a past in which much was shared, and as with all stories of love, it tends to gloss over the bad and privilege the good. In India and Pakistan, the nostalgia for homes left behind, friends lost, ties irretrievably cut because of the rigid borders, a culture that was shared and rich and so much more, is immense. The desire to “return” to seek out homes, friends, food, music is a constant, and there are any number of stories that describe how the intractable borders between the two countries can indeed be crossed, whether it is through cricket, or music, or literature or just the ordinary movement of people crossing over.

The hate comes from both suspicion and genuine experiences of violence: millions of Indians and Pakistanis, who have lived through the violence of the Partition carry in their hearts a terrible hurt and often a deep hatred for its perpetrators. Such wounds are not easily healed. India and Pakistan have worked hard to pretend that the bitter history of the Partition is now over. And the wounds and the legacy of the Partition are difficult to talk about. The hate is helped along by the continuing rhetoric of enmity, betrayal, and suspicion that the two countries rehearse against each other. The border closing ceremony at Wagah acts out the rhetoric of hate.

The confusion comes from being caught between these two.  India and Pakistan are more than six and a half decades old. Can the two countries continue hating each other? On what basis? There was a time, not so long ago, when the telling and retelling of stories within families who had lived through the Partition of India, kept its many hidden histories alive. But now, with most of the actors of that history having gone, those stories too have gradually begun to disappear.

Margaret Bourke-White/From the book ‘Train to Pakistan’ by Khushwant Singh Refugees in caravans and bullock carts during the India-Pakistan partition of 1947.

For those born after the Partition, the nostalgia, the longing, the connection with homes elsewhere have little meaning. There was a time when not knowing allowed Indians and Pakistanis to imagine each other as monsters and enemies ready to swallow us up. But the internet has put paid to all of that. The constant movement of people across borders and the rejection of fundamentalist ideologies by people in both countries has begun to change that picture.

What then are India and Pakistan fighting about? It is hard to say. But what is true is that the world today is much more complicated than it was six decades earlier. India and Pakistan have now become flashpoint countries that provide the battleground for so much that involves the West, particularly the so-called war on terror, the growth of the Taliban, the question of Afghanistan. And that is bound to have its impact on what goes on in both our countries - growing incidents of terrible violence where everyone suspects the involvement of the other, targeting of innocent people simply because they belong to the ‘other’ religious group, the growing, and increasingly tragic complications in Kashmir, the incidents of ambushes and random firing at unnecessary deaths at the border - all of these have now become part of our daily realities.

In 1947 Harkishan Das Bedi, a schoolteacher in Lahore who loved nothing more than his students and his books, was forced to leave his home and move to India overnight. He left behind his papers, books, his memories, everything.  Mr. Bedi settled as a refugee in Jallundar in the northern Indian state of Punjab.  He was desperate to get his things back but unable to easily cross the border.  Finally, Mr. Bedi wrote a letter to the person he thought must have inherited his home. He addressed the letter to ‘The Occupant’ and wrote, “ I write to you as a human being. I hope you will not be put off that a Hindu has written to you. We are human beings first and Hindu and Muslim only after that. I firmly believe you will oblige me by answering this letter in the name of the human bond we have.”

Across the border, Chaudry Latif, a refugee from India, who had moved into Bedi’s house in Lahore, had left the previous occupant’s things untouchedâ€"as people often did in those times. When Mr. Latif received Mr. Bedi’s letter, he responded, collected Mr. Bedi’s things and managed to get them back to him.

Over the years, the two men developed a friendship that allowed them to transcend the administrative borders between India and Pakistan. Mr. Bedi and Mr. Latif hoped that one day India and Pakistan would decide that friendship, not enmity, was the way forward, for there was so much to be gained from that. Their wisdom, whose truth is so self evident that it does not need to be reiterated, is still to sink into the psyche of India and Pakistan and their governments. The day it does, we will have hope.

Urvashi Butalia is the author of The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Ms. Butalia runs Zubaan Books, a feminist publishing house, based in New Delhi.