Mappings

Yeh akhri alvida na ho...lets talkshawk ji !

Talkshawk, says the Telenor ad campaign splashed across huge hoardings in Lahore.

In Lahore, do as the Lahoris do, I figure, so I may as well take the advice literally.

And so, Salaam Alaikum Farid, as the first person to post on my blog, you deserve all my attention this morning ! You sound like an NRP, Farid, a non-resident Pakistani, or perhaps you’re even an NRI, a non-resident Indian. I think, though, I will put my rapidly falling Pakistani rupee bet on you being an NRP…hardly anyone I know in Delhi will wish the other person, unless its from one Muslim to another, with a Salaam Alaikum…

So when did we lose these million forms of address to each other? I’ve been to Pakistan a few times, but it still takes me some time to get used to the hearty Salaam Alaikum! (Its actually “as-salaam alaikum,” a friend tells me, when I ask her what I must say in reply. The “walaikum-assalaam” is difficult for me, I add, doesn’t trip on the tongue like the air-kissing “Hi” we use with such alacrity back home in Delhi …don’t worry, she says, just say “salaam alaikum” as an answer, its also widely accepted).

And so, Salaam Alaikum, world!

I quite like this Urdu/Arabic form of address, although I must confess I feel much more comfortable saying it in Pakistan than I would do in the Arab world. The sibilant “salaam” is kind of universal, it has an egalitarian feel to it. Salaaming someone never gave the religion game away. The other person would never guess if you’re Muslim or Sikh or Hindu. And in Lahore, it’s all so deliciously Punjabi-fied anyway !

That’s the thing about being a Punjabi in Lahore, even if you speak it badly, my only excuse being that I was brought up on the eastern end of the Indo-Gangetic plain, in the heart of the coal fields of Bengal and Bihar. So what was my Punjabi-speaking, God-fearing father, straight out of Government College, Lahore, with a First Class First (you don’t even hear this expression in Hindi movies these days, its that old-fashioned), doing there anyway?

So my father exchanged the river Ravi for the river Damodar (a tributary of the mighty Ganges) in 1947, and there we were, being born and growing up, in another country, several thousands of miles away. On August 15, as the Union Jack came down and the Indian flag went up, my ‘daadi”, my paternal grandmother, is supposed to have lain in bed with the lights off. “Raje nahin badalte, praja badalti hain” she told my “bua,” my father’s sister (who told me), when she heard about the massacres and the rapes and the killings taking place in her beloved Punjab.

There are hundreds and thousands of stories of separation and partition, so memorably and painfully illustrated in all those books and films that could only touch a Punjabi. And for all those who haven’t seen the newly brought out version in India, by Roli Books, of Khushwant Singh’s classic ‘Train to Pakistan,’ with Margaret Bourke-White’s classic photographs of Partition, go ask Ferozsons of Lahore. That’s the kind of bookstore we want in Delhi.

This exact week in Lahore, the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and the Heinrich Boll foundation are doing a conference on ‘Memories of Separation,’ for which the redoubtable Urvashi Butalia and other Indians have flown in. The auditorium is packed, listening intently to speakers from both sides on such subjects, like the Politics of Forgetting and Remembering, and, Violence, Trauma, Justice and Reconciliation : Building a civic culture, post-partition.

But I’m escaping the conference, I don’t want to spend my precious visa time being reminded of the pain I’ve inherited from my parents. The best thing would be to hastily repair to the throbbing, pulsating, oh-so-alive city! There’s the Starving Buddha sculpture still to see (about three feet high, in blue schist stone, found in the Sikri, Mardan region of northern Pakistan) and to talk to the kids (okay, students !) at the Punjab University just across the road.

Talkshawk, the Telenor campaign has said, remember?

Telenor needn’t have added, in Punjabi. With the auto-rickshawallah, with the man selling tickets at the Lahore museum entrance (he gives me a ticket for Rs 10, same price as for Pakistani citizens, instead of charging me Rs 100, the foreigner rate. “Koi baat nahin, hamaara itna to haq banta hai, na!” Doesn’t matter, at least we must own this right!), with Aziz at the Kim bookshop just outside the museum, with the security guards just inside the museum who bring me to the Jain Mahavir corner, telling me that I must see the god from China (Cheeniyon ka but), with the girls across the road at the College of Art & Design.

The problem between India and Pakistan, I will strongly argue, is not really about Kashmir (don’t get me wrong, I’m already hastily adding, there certainly is a Kashmir dispute, which both governments must settle), it’s about Punjab.

The massacres and the rapes and the killings, all took place in Punjab, not in Kashmir. The trains carried dead Hindus and Sikhs and Muslims, from Lahore to Amritsar and back, and from Delhi to Lahore and back. It was the Punjabis that killed each other. Lahore was really a Sikh city, with only 30-35 per cent of its population in 1947 being Muslim, so what business did Radcliffe have drawing his big, fat line excluding Lahore from India? When Khizr Hayaat Khan, chief minister of undivided Punjab, pleaded that the entire Punjab, with his beloved Lahore as its capital, should stay in one country, the Muslims of now-Uttar Pradesh derided and abused him.

If this sounds like a rightwing diatribe, then I seek forgiveness, Farid. Its not meant to be one. Only, the ultimate betrayal in the India-Pakistan war or hostility, call it what you will, has been done to Punjab, and Punjabis have paid the price for it.

Lahore has a salve for that as well. Come and talkshawk here ji, and all will be well. The Punjabi will heal you, even in English. Language over religion? Why should we allow anyone to even ask us that question.

So the Punjabis want both, language and religion, several religions for that matter. Both Salaam Alaikum and Sat Sri Akal. Hello, Hi, how are you, will also do ji. Let a million forms of addresses bloom!

I’m leaving Lahore now, to embark upon a journey across the plains of Punjab, taking the same route that Alexander the Great, Babur and Sher Shah Sur once took. Only this time, it’s not on the Grand Trunk Road that Sher Shah built, but on the beautiful motorway that Nawaz Sharif gave his country when he was prime minister about a decade ago. (The drive’s so utterly smooth, Lalu Yadav will certainly be reminded about Hema Malini’s cheeks).

Yeh akhri alvida na ho. Atif’s song, made popular by Bollywood, carries me forward.