Category: Travel

“Lahore? Pakistan?”

“Have you seen all other places in the world?”

“Be safe.”

Friends and family in Delhi and London – where we live – were worried about our trip to Lahore. I am sure they were concerned about our well-being. Pakistan is India’s enemy. We grew up with that idea. Pakistan is hostile. Pakistan is not where you go for a holiday. I won’t say that this left us with absolute comfort.

“Would you like some Lahori fish?” My father-in-law would spice the fish, fry it and serve – when he was in a good mood, when he loved the people who he served it to. His karakul cap and green salwar suits were quite incongruous in south Delhi. But he wore them proudly. Those memories goaded us to make this trip, despite the cautions.

Twelve years after he passed away, we would see Lahore, his birthplace. A place where he, as a five-year-old in 1947, was hurried into a tonga, put on his mother’s lap and sped to a train to Amritsar, where he lived for a few months. After which, he lived in Delhi. Though he had left Lahore forever, Lahore never left him.

“Lahore?” This question came up again and again. Posed by travel agents, visa application forms, the Pakistani embassy, immigration officers, custom officers and numerous other agencies that operate on the two sides of the Wagah border.

Should we? The question reared its head several times. Let’s be honest: none of us had visited Pakistan. We did not have many Pakistani friends. Lahore of 2017 was not the Lahore of 1947. What were we getting ourselves into?

We gave ourselves the same reason we gave others, the one that my wife had put down in the visa form: ‘To visit the birthplace of my father.’ And ‘To visit the birthplace of Guru Nanak.’

On a phone call from London, I told the travel agent in Lahore that we intended to visit a locality called Ramnagar. He wasn’t sure if there was a place by that name in Lahore.

“Should I help find the place?” he asked

“No, don’t bother,” I said. I wasn’t sure how the current owners of the house would react.

§

An hour’s flight from Delhi to Amritsar, and an hour by road across the Wagah border – that’s how close Lahore is. With all those cautions, I admit I was a bit nervous as we carried our bags across the no man’s land, and when the tall Pakistani soldier said: “Welcome to Pakistan.”

Compared to the Indian side, the immigration and customs team were deathly quiet. I heard faint laughter of men from inside a closed room. My hair raised. We were walking into enemy country. All my family. All I had.

A man in a beard and a uniform sauntered by and asked why we wanted to go to Nankana Sahib, and if we were Sikhs?

“No,” I said, “We are Hindus.” And waited for a reaction.

“Usually, people from your community go to Katas Raj near Lahore. There is a Shiva temple there, where Shiva had shed tears. Have you heard of it?”

“No,” I said, wondering how he knew of it.

The travel agency, which a Pakistani friend in London had organised, had sent a large van to pick us up – the kind used for high security, with a thick metal body, and tinted window glass. The young driver was quiet as he drove us to Lahore. When he suddenly veered off the highway, I asked him, “Where are we going?”

“This is a short cut to avoid the traffic.”

The van became increasingly hot; and I found it hard to keep awake. Why was Lahore so hot? Was it not December?

“Is the AC working?” I asked the reticent driver.

“Yes, it is,” he said.

My family dozed off. I tried to keep my eyes open, looking out for traces of a city.

It arrived suddenly. A calm canal flowed by the road, white colonial buildings appeared from a British past, and I sighed in relief as we entered our hotel. There was a bright Christmas tree in the lobby, two musicians with a sitar and a tabla, and a tall Pathan at the door who said, “As-Salaam-Alaikum”.

I replied, “Wa-Alaikum-Salaam.” I hadn’t uttered this greeting for three decades – since I left Kashmir.

Our children corrected me: “It is not Asalam-Vale-Kum. It is Asalam-Alai-Kum.”

I had to change money. So, I walked down the road to a money exchange; I had been warned not to carry cash, not to carry mobiles with me, that I could be robbed in Lahore. I did both. The friendly hotel staff, the Christmas festivity and the musicians in the lobby had made caution vanish. I was bolder. I haggled for the best exchange rate until the man behind the counter said politely, “This must be your first time in Pakistan.”

I took the rate he offered, and walked quickly back to the hotel.

The driver called to apologise for he had accidentally turned on the heater switch instead of the AC, that’s why the van was so hot. I laughed.

§

Old Lahore buzzed with lights and traffic.

“Just like India,” I said, looking out of the van.

“No women on the roads,” my daughter pointed out.

Nestling against the Mughal fort, Shahi Qila, was an elegant restaurant that offered a table on the rooftop. The sight was breathtaking. The three domes of the Badshahi Mosque were resplendent in their silvery whiteness, its minars golden in reflected light. The setting was surreal, magical.

A female singer in the restaurant began to sing an old Hindi film song: “Ajeeb dastan hai yeh, kahan shuru kahan khatam”. The only Hindi song my daughter knows in its entirety, also her favourite. The melodious voice rang through the restaurant, echoing off the mosque. My daughter began to hum. The song pulled several heartstrings at once.

I noticed a small statue of Krishna and one of Ganesha in the restaurant.

Chhod aaye hum woh galiyan, is a song of remembrance, of nostalgia, of small things left behind. The female singer, in a black dress, sang this Hindi film song next. Behind the restaurant, lay sprawled the old city of Lahore, smoggy, faintly lit, intricate, mysterious. Somewhere within those dark lanes was a part of my children’s legacy. Where their grandfather was born. The lanes which we would have visited every time we visited India. If Lahore was in India. If India was not partitioned. Throaty and melancholic, the singer’s powerful voice rose high into the night sky, deep into the lanes. I had tears in my eyes.

I looked at the statues. The gods left behind.

We thanked the singer. The mosque’s silvery domes had something healing about them.

§

On the next morning, as we entered Ramnagar, my son began to feel sick, so we stopped the van and he stepped out for fresh air. A tall man in a Peshawari cap emerged from nowhere, running towards him. He asked me to step back, and squirted an orange peel under his nose. It all happened too fast.

“Do you feel better?” he asked my son.

“Yes,” he replied.

As the man strode away to attend to his orange juice stall, I followed him.

“Shukriya,” I said.

“Have you come from far?” he asked.

“Delhi.”

“Oh, you are our mehman, guests.”

Ramnagar was a maze of lanes, a test of memories. Juice vendors, butchers, mithai shops and restaurants were rammed into lanes packed with houses. The lanes had interesting names: Hariom Street, Nath Street, Shanker Street, Vidyalaya Street. I was transported to the Ramnagar of 1947. I saw a sanjha-chulha on a rooftop, where women of the street would have baked bread together. Where children would have played gilli-danda and stapu in the streets. Where a bhajan and an azan would have sounded together.

Seventy years later, Ramnagar was a colony of refugees who had fled from the horrors of Partition from Amritsar, Jalandhar, Karnal and other towns and villages of Indian Punjab.

We knocked on a door. It opened hesitantly. An elderly woman appeared, her wet hair tied in a towel, saying that the old man who remembered the streets of 1947 had recently died. She looked at my wife and said, “I too want to go to the house where I grew up, but no one takes me there. No one.”

We were soon in front of the house that most matched the description of my father-in-law’s house. This was the house where my wife’s grandparents would have lived, where her father was born. The lane that they would have left in panic, horror, terror. The blue wooden door was locked. The owners were in Rawalpindi. We had come so far, travelled so long, to be at the house, to find it locked.

A woman in her 40s saw us wandering in the lanes and asked if she could help. She spoke to my wife. On hearing my wife’s story, hers tumbled out. Her father had fled Amritsar in 1947 for Lahore, and he had lost his young sister in the run; she was abducted. Many years later, a woman from a rich family in Lahore had turned up at their home in Ramnagar, saying that she was the lost daughter. No one recognised her, and no one accepted her. The grandmother had died lamenting for her only daughter. In their house, they still have a crochet shawl made by her grandmother. The only possession her father had grabbed from their Amritsar home as they had fled for their lives.

My wife’s grandmother’s tale was no different. She had run for her life too, her husband taken away, her father and brother killed. She had run with her seven children to an unknown future. I wondered if she would have crossed the path of the woman from Amritsar who had lost her daughter?

My wife asked me to take a photo. Two women with two stories. Their stories had more in common, I learnt later.

Muneer, an old man, promised to find out and let us know if the blue-doored house was where my wife’s father was born. Muneer was just two in 1947 when they had fled Ambala in India and landed in the Hindu house where they have lived ever since.

“Stay back for my sons’ wedding next week, see how we do it here,” he invited us. As if we were still his neighbours. He hugged me when we left.

§

We went to Krishna Temple in old Lahore. The old temple was squeezed in between a row of houses, with a metal gate, behind which a security guard asked, “Hindu or Muslim?”

He entered our names in a register. I had never seen names being entered in a temple before.

“Sometimes people visit on Holi and Diwali,” he explained.

“Are you Hindu?” I said.

“No, I am Christian. I take care of the temple.”

This was not the Pakistan I had heard about.

We went to the Shahi Qila fort next. The easy-going, middle-aged guide Arif told us that the original mud and stone fort was built by Lav, the son of Ram. That Akbar built the Shahi Qila on the vestiges of Lav’s fort. And there was a Lav temple inside the fort.

He said, “History of Lahore begins with Lav, when people want to know. Otherwise, it starts from Akbar.”

My wife saw a souvenir shop in the fort; she bought two tall glasses of brass for our sons and one of copper for our daughter. She bought a small, ornate metal mirror and comb set for herself. Then she picked up a small brass charkha, a spinning wheel.

“I’m not sure we need that,” I said.

She left it on the shelf.

We had cups of sweet tea under a banyan tree with the friendly guide Arif. I forgot we were in Pakistan. The subtle cautions of my Indian friends seemed as pointless as the India-Pakistan border.

As night fell, the Mughal arches and facades turned into colourful, incandescent fantasies for a private show by Pepsi. The show kicked off with the national anthem. An anthem of a country hostile to the country that we had grown up in. A country that took birth and robbed my wife’s father of his birthplace. Unmindful of the emotions it caused, the anthem rose and fell. Arif shuffled his feet while it played. We stood still. A few feet away from Allama Iqbal’s tomb, the poet who said: mazhab nahi sikhata aapas mein ber rakhna (religion does not teach you to be hostile).

Outside, the flower sellers, fan sellers, trinket and toy sellers were wrapping up their wares, offering cheap bargains. It was a warm winter evening.

The next day, we drove to Nankana Sahib as per our plan. Our driver was joined by a friend. Throughout the two-hour journey, they giggled over an Indian Punjabi comedy, as they drove. My sons, who had never seen a Punjabi movie, who don’t understand Punjabi, watched the movie with them, laughing with them.

Heavily armed policemen guarded the gurudwara gates. Our shoes were swiftly taken by a small Sikh boy, who spoke Urdu and Pashto, no English. After the darshan, we went into the busy hawker street for a few souvenirs, and saw the small Sikh shoe-boy again, next to a Muslim shawarma-and-burger seller, watching a burger sizzle. A Sikh teenager joined them, and I asked him if he lived around.

“We came from Peshawar after it went really bad there,” he said. “But, here, we live in puraman mahol, peace.”

We left Nankana Sahib. The birthplace of a saint, the first guru of the Sikhs. Whose first followers were a Muslim and a Hindu.

The Lahore museum is divided into six halls – Mohenjo-Daro/Harappa, Hindu, Buddhist/Jain, Islamic, British and post-1947. The guide Arif turned up as agreed, helped us navigate the histories, pointing out the Hindu, Buddhist and Jain idols in detail. And, in turn, asking us questions about Vishnu, Shiva and the mother goddesses. I saw paper copies of the Holy Koran in Nastaleeq and Naskh scripts, and religious Hindu scripts in Pali and Sanskrit inscribed on stones.

Young school girls in headscarves had started milling about in the museum. I recollected the history lessons from my school. What we called Indian history. The museum was a mini Lahore, a mini Pakistan. Its past and its present. An India in Pakistan. Or a Pakistan in India.

§

After four days, we left Lahore for the Wagah border. The road that my wife’s grandmother had taken 70 years ago, with her seven children. Never to return. My wife took her mobile out. She took a long video. Of trees, shrubs, village houses, cattle, people.

She said, “I feel I am leaving something behind.”

At Delhi airport, on our way back to London, my wife pointed at a large wooden charkha installed at the airport gate. It said, “The world’s largest spinning wheel.” She never points out such things to me.

Later, at home in London, she told me that her grandmother, when fleeing Lahore in the tonga, had brought a charkha with her. My wife’s father, a small boy of five, had been adamant on taking it along, their only possession from the Lahore home. The charkha had stayed with her grandmother, until she had died, when it was given away.

I thought of the Muslim man in Amritsar who had rushed back to grab his mother’s crochet shawl, to take with him to Lahore.

Weeks later, the house in Ramnagar with an open rooftop and the blue door came to me. I called the neighbour Muneer and congratulated him on his sons’ wedding.

He said, “I wish you were all here for the wedding. You must come again. And you must stay with me. You are my brother, your children are my nephews and niece. Your wife is my sister. Come again.”

He had, unfortunately, not been able to confirm if the house with the blue door was my father-in-law’s home.

But it didn’t matter anymore. We had found a new home in Pakistan.

My wife has placed the metal comb and mirror, which she had bought for herself, next to her father’s photo in our home. I wish I had let her buy the small charkha.

Note: Names have been changed to protect their identity.

Sandeep Raina was born and brought up in Kashmir. He writes short stories about Kashmir, which have been published in The Hindu, The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Times of India/The Economic Times. He lives in London.