Blurring the Lines of Control
Sushmita Bose -
Sunday, December 21, 2008 7:11 PM
I happened to read a story by Sharmishta Koushik in The Times of India today: on Pakistani women who married Indian men, and the kind of problems they face at times even as they try and integrate with mainstream society. ‘You Look Like One Of Us' said the headline, while the strapline announced "Pakistani women married to Indians find barely disguised social mistrust here, though they share common cultural roots with the country". Intrigued, I clicked on the ePaper and read the entire story.
Definitely not the stuff that went into the making of Veer-Zaara (in the movie, even though the Pakistani state and the judicial system were villains, relatives, friends and an unknown lawyer came to the rescue of the lovers finally).
The Times of India story talks about how as "Pakistanis married to Indians, they [the women] had to tread carefully even before the Mumbai attacks. The married Indian woman typically tries to adjust to her husband's family, but women like Shazman [one of the women quoted in the story] have had to blend into an entire nation. That too, a nation that has had an uneasy relationship with the country of their birth."
Right after the Mumbai terror attack last month, one of the Pakistani women, for instance, was extremely frightened, and was talking about all the time. Her husband "felt I should change the subject. He advised me to avoid such discussions on the phone, and better still, to avoid calls from Karachi to ensure that I don't get sucked into a political mess," she recounts.
Another Pakistani woman (again, married to an Indian) Zainab "recalls watching the television news about Delhi's September 13 blasts with her family. Her father-in-law turned to her husband and said, ‘Look what these people do. You get upset when I blame Pakistanis but look at what they do.' The result: Upset at the implied insult to his wife's countrymen, Zainab's husband refused to speak to his father for a week."
We've all come across this ‘Us and Them' phenomenon. At times, the Indians-Pakistanis banter is light-hearted. Most times, it's nasty. I remember one of my family friends - who owned a couple of apartments in Delhi, and gave them out on rent mostly to expats -- proclaiming very loudly at a Diwali dinner how he would never, ever have a Pakistani tenant. I asked him what if these hypothetical Pakistanis happened to be people "just like us". "How can they ever be like us?" he ranted. Thankfully, the matter ended right there: the subject was changed with someone else piping up, "Let's not spoil Diwali by talking about Pakistanis."
When I lived and worked in Delhi, there were friends and colleagues who had travelled to Pakistan. Most said that there was a great deal of large-heartedness on the other side of the border; a lot of invitations to "have a meal at home" would come their way; and the moment people in Pakistan figured out that one was from India, the hospitality seemed to step up in display and depth.
The first Pakistani I personally made friends with was Barbara Breheret. She is a French Tourism official, who married a Frenchman, and is settled in the lovely skiing resort of Chamonix, wedged in the middle of the Alpine valley. She was a Pakistani Christian - but a Pakistani nonetheless - and I felt that I'd known her for ages. Whenever she spoke about Karachi and her life there, it felt so much like India: the madness, the chaos - and, of course, the warmth, and the goodness and the closeness.
I've been working in Dubai for just about three months now - and one of the best things that has happened to me here has been the multi-cultural crossing of paths. Every day, I bump into people from all over the world - and a great many of them are from across the Line of Control.
The setting is a tad different, so it's not the same as someone meeting Pakistanis in their own country and being meted out generous doses of hospitality. I am getting to know people who, like me, are displaced. They don't have the comfort of home and hearth, and that's probably why they defy all notions stereotypes -- wrong, right or half-baked.
Many of my Pakistani friends are single in the city, and we don't even thrash out a common agenda when we hang out: it comes so naturally and takes such a logical course. There are the same concerns (diets, family, friends, career choices, marriage, etc), the same frustrations (from why is there a market meltdown to why is it that we can't wake up early enough to go to the gym), the same set of needs (the most acute one: it's a lonely city - and at the end of the day, we really need a hug) and even the same table-top menu! Everybody balks at the idea of cooking, more so if you are living alone, but there are times without number when I go to a supermarket with a Pakistani friend, and we end up buying exactly the same food for dinner.
Most significantly, when 26/11 happened, EVERYONE from both sides of the border was horrified. There was no finger-pointing, no raging debates, only a lot of genuine anger - and grief -- at the perversity of it all.
I guess a lot of it has to do with the fact that we are occupying neutral grounds in Dubai. When you don't occupy either side of the Line of Control, there's not even an iota of struggle about having to cut across established identities.
Friendships, unlike nations, are borderless.