Coming Back: The odyssey of a Pakistani through India
(By Shueyb Gandapur)
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Like any modern-day traveller, I had brought back a sizeable repository of photographs, as well as some audio clips and a few random notes jotted down on my phone. But every time I thought to mould all of this raw material into a meaningful form, I reached an impasse. I realised that this was partly due to the restrictions that a long piece or a series for a newspaper or magazine placed on my writing. It was difficult to capture the breadth of what I experi- enced in India in such a narrow form.
Then came Christmas break the following year, and unchar- acteristically, I had time off from work without any plans of us- ing it to travel to a new country. This was when the reprimand of my conscience over my prolonged inertia became unbearable. I picked up my pen and let the ink flow. Flow it did, like a river that determines its own course. I do not know what came upon me, but I had never experienced such fluency in my writing before. The film of my trip to India started playing before my eyes. I kept on writing until I had recorded everything I remembered. When I finished, I heaved a sigh of relief as if a debt had been repaid. I sent the entire text to the journalist friend who had urged me to write. He responded with a promise that he would give it a read; a promise that might now get fulfilled, since the manuscript has acquired the form of a book.
Excerpts from this travel account were published in a literary journal and then it started gathering dust. A few years later, I at- tended a book launch in London at the insistence of a friend who was moderating a session with the author. The event that I attend- ed out of obligation to a friend turned out to be quite interesting for myself too. It was there that I had my first encounter with the publisher of Kantara Press, Jamil Chishti. That chance meeting led to the idea to convert my travel account into a book.
When the idea of this book was initially discussed, I was not sure if I was qualified to author a book on this subject due to my brief visit of only two and a half weeks. This is, of course, not the first volume of its kind. Books about Pakistanis visiting India and vice versa have been written before. Writers have spoken about the similarities and familiarities they found in unlikely places. Some went on a quest to rediscover family roots, others tried to uncov- er the reality of everyday existence on “the other side” that is not reflected in media reports. But then I realised that my personal experience had its own place in time and history, distinct from the perspective and experience of everyone else, so why should it not be heard by the people of our two countries as well as the wider world?
As I now had a larger canvas to work with, I revisited the se- ries and updated the narrative, unhindered by the restriction of a word count. Distance from the actual occasion of the visit be- stowed me with further insights and interpretations. The detail I had to skip previously in the interest of brevity was reincorporat- ed. A few months later, when I went back to my hometown, Dera Ismail Khan, wiser by the experiences gathered during my India trip, I looked at the crumbling houses, deserted temples and old neighbourhoods with more reverence and tenderness. They had once been inhabited and frequented by the city’s Hindu and Sikh residents, who were uprooted during the chaos of Partition, and now lived hundreds of miles away, remembering and commem- orating what they had lost. I felt like I had completed a circle and incorporated those later impressions in my account.
Relations between India and Pakistan are almost always char- acterised by varying degrees of mistrust and animosity with oc- casional efforts towards rapprochement, which rekindle over- whelming, although short-lived, feelings of warmth on both sides. The legacy of unresolved conflicts from the time of Partition has translated into four wars and many stand-offs that brought the two neighbours to the brink of war several times. At the time of my visit in the summer of 2017, the political climate was freezing cold and it has remained so, if not worsened, since then. This low period has lasted for longer than ever before during my lifetime. The forces of jingoism now act and speak with more confidence, drowning out voices calling for peace and free movement. Cross-bord...”
