This Side,That Side

Crossing the Wagah border for the first time is an exercise in remembrance,identities and mixed feelings.

Crossing the Wagah border for the first time is an exercise in remembrance,identities and mixed feelings.

When she was in junior school,my daughter had to do a project for which she had to interview a grandparent about their memories of August 15,1947. My mother described what she remembered doing at the stroke of the midnight hour how everyone spilled out on the brightly lit streets of Madras,jubilation everywhere,celebrating becoming a free country,experiencing the heady feeling of Independence. My daughter,of course,said she would never get an A. She told us how everyone else wrote gripping accounts of families left behind,and enormously dangerous crossings across the border,while hers was a tame account of scores of Indian flags being waved on Triplicane beach. Sensing her disappointment,her grandmother had tried to redeem herself,unsuccessfully,with the story of payesam cooked in large big brass bins in her fathers house when the All India Congress Committee meeting was held in Vijayawada in 1921,and Bapu himself came. My mother pointed out that while they were all aware of Partition,and saw several refugees proudly rehabilitating themselves,the horrors of it were not as real to them as they were to people from the north.

I was reminded of the incident last week when I crossed the Wagah border for the first time. I was full of trepidation,wearing my sari and bindi,and carrying the load of disapproval of my entire family,who viewed my desire to get a peek into Pakistan as treasonous. On the other hand,many of my friends in our delegation were carrying the long-standing desire of their parents and grandparents to go back home once and take a walk down the lane of bittersweet memories. They were seeing it through their eyes and some of them even carried loads of Indian sweets for the families they had left behind across the border. An 80-year-old uncle accompanying a member of our group summed it up by saying Its a 25-minute journey that took 66 years to make.

Five years ago,I had watched the Wagah border evening ceremony for the first time. I remember my shock as it sank in,that it was exactly the same people on the other side of the border except that the skins were fairer on an average,and the salwar kameez way more chic. It happened again last week when we crossed the border into the immigration hall. There was a large noisy group of us from both sides,milling around and making a racket. The immigration official complained pata nahin chalta kaun passenger hai,aur kaun receive karne aaya hai. He pointed to one of our hosts and said aap passenger hai? Line main khade ho jaaiye. There was a sense of déjà vu everywhere. The taxi driver said that he was very keen to come to see Hindustan and Ajmer Sharif,but Begum darti hai. I told him my family was furious with me too,for taking such risks,for what,so he just has to focus on the visa,not the begum,and cross the border.

I also realised that the Sindhis had their own state only across the border,and on this side,they had settled for a mention in the national anthem. When I teased my Sindhi friend Jyoti about it,she shot back with no Telengana-type problems for us. Ouch! Truth be told,the similarities came to a jarring halt on several occasions for me,and I suspect that I exhaled fully after three days,when I crossed the border and came back to India. But my relief was in contrast to the sadness that some of my friends felt at leaving a part of their family memories behind yet again,and wishing that their old or even dead family members could have accompanied them.

My friend whose family came from Sindh,and who runs a foreign policy think tank,said that Sardarji Prime Minister Manmohan Singh must go and matha theko at Dera Sahib gurdwara in Lahore as a gesture before his term ends. Some of my army friends who lost near and dear ones in various wars ask,What for. I wonder if my daughters generation will have these mixed emotions.

Rama Bijapurkar is the author of We Are Like That Only and A Never-Before World: Tracking the evolution of Consumer India