Dear Zeba: You are now starting a new life. You and Ali will walk out of your parents’ home with love and blessings from the entire family. I am not there in person but my thoughts are with you all.I read in the newspaper yesterday that the new Pakistan high commissioner, Aziz Ahmed Khan, presented his credentials to the President of India and that the first bus to Lahore has just flagged off.There are seven of us sisters who had wanted to come together for your wedding. Your father is our only brother. I remember when he and I used to attend Delhi’s Modern School, acting in plays, winning trophies in debating competitions. We were often teamed with Arun Shourie, a good debater, who is now a minister with the NDA government.Then it was St Stephen’s College for your father and for me, higher studies in the US. In the eighties your family moved to Pakistan. You were a bright girl, a budding artist, from the same school. Today you are an artist par excellence teaching in one of Karachi’s most prestigious institutes. And we, midnight’s children, are denied by our two governments to participate in each other’s joys and sorrows.The Parliament of India was attacked in December 2001. Immediately it was the people who suffered. The idea was to stop the terrorists who kill innocents and attack the greatest symbols of democracy, the Kashmir Assembly and Indian Parliament. But since when have such dastardly elements come through normal immigration lines at airports and railway stations? While both governments practice one-upmanship, the people quietly suffer. As for Indian Muslims, they dare not speak out for fear of being dubbed “anti-national”.Two delegations of Parliamentarians have gone back and forth across the Wagah border in the last two months. People in India received them with overwhelming warmth. Are the people trying to say something which the two governments are refusing to heed?Zeba, you are an artist and the child of this great South Asian civilisation. But we, your elders, have not given you a pretty world. All the more reason that you do much better than we did. There was a great scholar, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who was India’s first minister of education and your great-grandfather’s mentor. In his speech before the UNESCO General Assembly he had said that on the world map all nations should be painted one colour so that a child can learn about the oneness of the human family.You artists from Pakistan, India, and indeed all parts of South Asia will have to work on this wise and infallible formula. Rescue the world from bigots and work towards painting it in one hue.(The writer is founder-member, Women’s Initiative for Peace in South Asia)
