‘Should I feel different? It’s only cricket, yaar’

Should we have expected otherwise? The mass outpouring of goodwill and hospitality that lit up last year’s series must be seen in context. For a start, Pakistanis and Karachiites in particular had been starved of any top flight cricket since 9/11.

Additionally, Pakistan is hardly a tourist hotspot. Visitors from any country are often treated with an intoxicating mix of reverence and affection. Above all, that it was the Indians and after 14 years, imbued the reception with that much more emotion.

In India, a much vaster, less homogenous entity, to transmit a mass feeling of welcome is considerably more difficult and Delhi at least is seemingly more blase with foreign visitors. Whereas last year became in effect a month-long advert for Pakistan, this year the hospitality is low-key, which in any case is pretty hospitable.

Chandigarh, of course threatens to defy this. As befits the hearty Punjabi stereotype, it threatens to be similar to Lahore last year, especially as nearly 3,000 Pakistanis are expected to watch the Test here. Residents have promised to open their hearts and homes to Pakistanis.

Perhaps in no other city (including my own), and in no other context, could I hope to brandish so brazenly my very Pakistani-ness in anticipation of being treated royally in return. I shamelessly tried my luck with an auto driver and, bless him, he actually agreed to waive the fare. I paid him anyway.

But given the extremities relations between the two countries often hover between, the expected normality will be refreshing. If before last year’s tour, relations were ridiculously frosty, then in the year since there has been an almost unnatural attempt to redress that balance. Surely, after more than 50 years, there is a comfortable middle ground to be found?

Especially when you consider that, as is repeated ad nauseum, the similarities are so stark between at least the Punjabs. Okay, so in Delhi, as opposed to most cities in Pakistan, you can feel a vibrant middle class. And okay, so in Chandigarh I saw 15 female scooter riders in the journey from the hotel to the stadium, and that is 15 more than I have seen anywhere in Pakistan.

And granted India is shining, as those ubiquitous shrines, Bollywood and cricket reflect so readily. There is a more confident, savvy and assertive Indian. But underneath it, you also sense a yearning for — or a confirmation of — a new urban identity.

Ostensibly, there is little shiny about Pakistan. But there too a younger, globally aware, urban generation has embarked, after 9/11, upon a fledgling search for a new identity, albeit, typically, it is a more turbulent one.

Chandigarh too evokes much, not of Lahore, but of Islamabad. Both are artificial constructs of the 1950s, flanked by stunning hillside — Shivaliks in Chandigarh and Margalla in Islamabad. The stadiums of Rawalpindi and Mohali too carry an eerie resemblance.

The chaos pre-match was typically Indo-Pak in flavour: grumbling journalists, media passes missing, officials and security guards charmingly gruff and headless in their operation. The captains’ press conference was remarkable only for heckling photographers, cameramen and pushy reporters with mobile phones ringing at the most inopportune moments.

But even in the build-up there has been a noticeable lack of euphoria, of a realisation that it is just cricket at stake. Both captains spoke about how significant a rivalry India-Pakistan still is — bigger than the Ashes, reckoned Sourav Ganguly — but Pakistani players during practice were visibly relaxed.

I quote, as a concluding thought, the reply of one of the younger players who, perplexed at being asked how he felt coming to India to play for the first time, said with telling bewilderment: ‘‘Absolutely normal. I don’t know why I keep getting asked that. Should I feel any different to how I do in Pakistan? It’s only cricket yaar.’’

Which is maybe as it should be.

(The writer, a Pakistani journalist, is covering the tour for Dawn and Wisden)