Postcards of chill: Qazi’s Indian pooch, neem tree in logjam

At the Pak High Commission, a few kilometers south in Chanakyapuri, nature did her own to supplement the human effort involved in effecting this subcontinental logjam. Last week’s squalls launched a huge old neem into preposterous orbit and landed it flat across the main entrance, fashioning another barricade as if there weren’t enough already.

Not that they were using it; the gates have remained shuttered since Qazi was given his marching orders late April. ‘‘Not too many people coming, not too many going, but more than that, just not enough people to man the gates,’’ says the usher at the narrow makeshift side entrance employed now, Sab darwaaze band ho rahe hain, humne phir bhi ek khol ke rakha hua hai. (All doors are closing shut, we still have kept one open).

You’re in on a desultory wave of his hand, feeling almost cheated by the sheer ordinariness of the rites of passage. No questions asked, no reasons demanded, not even the routine electronic garlanding with a metal detector. But then, this is a demoted station, a high commission without a high commissioner, a mission virtually without a mission; there’s no premium on it and they aren’t bothered to feign.

‘‘We are in a nowhere place,’’ says one of the senior staff, ‘‘at the moment we are just short of being labeled persona non grata, just short of not being there at all.’’ On his walls are a few clues to the reasons why things are the way they are. A map of the subcontinent from Haqqi & Sons, Urdu Bazar, Karachi, that shows Pakistan leaping all the way east across the top to Punjab to meet Tibet and China.

Another map, this one from Vidya Chitra Prakashan, Ansari Road, New Delhi, carrying its own exaggerations of existing reality: Muzaffarabad, Gilgit and Mirpur lie marked well within India. It’s embossed with a handwritten disclaimer: Disputed Territory, it says.

Access and interaction with New Delhi seldom even gets up to the level of exchange of pleasantries. Access to New Delhi, the city, is restricted by an amalgam of apprehension and unfamiliarity. Living within walls pinches, especially in this prickly heated summer: ‘‘How much TV can you watch, even if it is PTV, which is frankly quite boring.’’ When they need information, they rush to friends who might have access to the news-wires; the mission has no service to itself.

In a corner of one of the main waiting halls, dank and so bare even breathing echoes, stands a multi-deck trolley which may in some era have possessed a television set and a videoplayer. It’s A Sony, says a sticker on its glassfront cheerfully. But the rolley-top itself is cheerless; there’s no Sony.

Quite unlike the vibrant and many splendoured home the Qazis kept at Pakistan House, the Pakistani High Commission has always been sustained on a retainer diet, almost as if it were, at the best of times, a holding operation that may need hurried evacuation. The premises have always had a derelict sort of look; those lapis lazuli domes may have set some tradition of showpiecing but that tradition remained set there. But there is today the odour of a new ad hoc air emanating from the absences at the mission, from the empty car lots and the depeopled corridors, from the closed rooms and from tables where the dust hasn’t been stirred, from the unruly lawns and from fax machines that haven’t been relieved of spewed paper.

‘‘There just aren’t enough hands,’’ says one of the more senior diplomats, ‘‘I have to make my own tea and wash my own cups, this is platform existence.’’

Over the past six months, the high commission has lost more than half its working hands to recurrent tides in tension; employees used to number 98 in December, there are less than 40 left today. Most drivers and clerical hands have been sent back, so you will see diplomats’ cars haphazardly parked on the campus and you will see the older children of remaining staffers doing high commission duty. ‘‘This is summer and I only have evening classes,’’ says one of them who is part-timing with secretarial work, ‘‘This crisis is handy experience for me and I can feel I am doing something for my country.’’ Not that there is much to do. Says the man who is having to brew and stir his own tea: ‘‘What are we doing here without a high commissioner?’’ Stamping visas? Few and far between.

At Rs 60,000—the new via-Dubai rates—for a ticket that barely cost a couple of thousand, there aren’t too many takers. Many more than just Shkole are paying a price here.