Through the Looking Glass

Being a linguist and an artist, I had established e-mail contact with a Karachi artist. He showed me his work and let me try out his calligraphy pen. It was easy to transfer the movements of Hindi lipi to the Urdu qalam. And it was easy to cross the gap between only hearing Urdu in India and actually speaking it. The difference between Indian Urdu and Pakistani Urdu was not accent, it was something more nebulous. Pakistani Urdu had an absence of self-consciousness.

We had had the option of spending an extra day in Lahore on our way back. My husband had asked me to look for his grandfather’s old house on Jail Road. The house, we discovered, had changed, grown vertically — 16 families now lived there.

The next day, there was a sense of a countdown. We tried to see what we could and pick up last minute gifts before rushing to Wagah. After three, the border closes. The woman at the hotel desk raced after us to give my daughter the lace naqab she had wanted. She wore it as she crossed back at Wagah. The Pakistani officials did a double-take, trying to make sense of the name on the passport and the Islamic headgear. Then we walked through the mirror and materialised on the other side.

Back home I visited my grocer in Delhi. He is Hindu, speaks Punjabi, and votes as the others in the market do. I took a deep breath and said I had just got back from Lahore. The whole store froze. Everyone turned to stare at me. With expectation. Tell us more, their eyes said. The old man was visibly moved as I told him of the kindness we had experienced. “Do you mean she still loves me,” he seemed to be saying. “After all these years?”