AL-Biruni, the 11th century Arab traveller, noted that there are 88,000 hells as per the Vishnu Purana. He went on to quote different kinds of sins committed by people and the corresponding hells prescribed for them. One doesn’t know which hell awaits the misguided men who almost bumped off Pervez Musharraf just before the SAARC summit. But one can easily guess that military-moulded Musharraf and our poetry-pouting Prime Minister Vajpayee have ensured themselves a place in heaven. And in history. If history witnessed a great nation divide on that fateful night 57 years ago, it will also record how these two leaders tried to bridge the gulf. The question is not whether hardliners in the two countries will return us to square one. The point is, despite the roadblocks, we’ve arrived thus far. When a PIA plane, after two years, flew in some passengers from Karachi to Mumbai, a teary-eyed welcome awaited them. There is a line in a poem by Ali Sardar Jafri written during the 1965 war. Reiterating the futility of war, he proposed an alternative: Maza to tab tha ke milkar ilaaje jaan karte/hamare dard mein tum aur tumhare dard mein hum, sharik hote to phir jashne aashiyan karte (It would have been been better had we found a panacea for our pains/we would have shared our grief and celebrated our respective independent shelters). Don’t we see signs of the poet’s wishes being realised? Everytime the Sada-e-Sarhad bus crosses the Wagah border, some hidden thorns get blunted somewhere. And as the Samjhauta Express pulls into Attari station, a new milestone in Indo-Pak relations will have been reached. When Bengal Tiger Saurav Ganguly’s boys meet Rawalpindi Express Shoaib Akhtar’s colleagues on Pakistani grounds, the incorrigible “pitch-diggers” will mourn. They can only build a wall of hate. They cannot cap popular goodwill. And the people, needless to add, want peace. They want a free flow of knowledge, unhindered exchange of music, cinema, art. Pakistanis want to see Aishwarya Rai as much as Indians want to hear Abida Parveen. The other day poet Basheer Badr from Bhopal said many Pakistan publishers had made a fortune by selling pirated copies of his collections. When Mumbai-based ghazal singer Seema Anil Sehgal toured Karachi and Lahore recently, holding concerts for Allama Iqbal (Pakistan hijacked Iqbal from us), she got standing ovations. Now that Vajpayee has lit the lamp, Wasim Barelvi’s couplet aptly on the poet-PM: Jahan rahega wahin roshni lootayega/kisi chirag ka apna makaan nahin hota (He will spread the light wherever he goes/The lamp doesn’t have its permanent home). Let this lamp of friendship burn till eternity!
