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The Rediff Special/ Elizabeth Kolsky

The smog stretches from Lahore to Delhi

A month or so ago, when I was living in Pakistan, I flew on the very short PIA flight from Lahore to Delhi. As I looked out the airplane window, I could not stop thinking about the grandmother in Amitav Ghosh's poignant novel The Shadow Lines who, while flying over a different subcontinental border, wondered where exactly the line of divide was. Given the weight of her memories and experiences, the violence, the loss, the separation, she wondered, shouldn't the earth also exhibit some manifested cleavage, some visible line of divide? I too was glued to the plane's plastic window, thinking about hijackings and bombings and mountain-high combat, but the smoggy fog that stretched straight from Lahore to Delhi prevented me from seeing anything but white.

I had come back to Pakistan after five years. I first went in 1995 to study Urdu, and this time I returned to conduct doctoral research for a history dissertation I am working on at an American university. My experience was a chequered one. I arrived just after the October coup, my mind filled with memories of nuclear test bombs and Kargil, US State Department travel warnings, ambivalence and some excitement, too. After all, for me it was a kind of homecoming: when I was last there, I lived in the Old City with a family to whom I became very close. I looked forward to seeing them, and I looked forward to seeing Lahore.

The city has changed a lot since then. The roads have widened, fountains and parks have proliferated, Daewoo and New Khan bus companies have transformed local transport, and Nawaz Sharief is in jail. But then there is also an unmistakable darkness that has fallen. For dust lies heavy on the trees and branches, smog suffocates the air and torments all lungs, and a deep sadness pulls on the faces of the city's inhabitants. People just look so depressed -- especially women.

I came to Delhi to tour with my parents who were on holiday from the States. Though I have been coming to South Asia, mostly in an academic capacity, over the past 10 years, this was to be their first trip to the subcontinent. We were going on what I had hoped would be a peaceful, dazzling tour of North India. I organised the trip through an online travel agency, which promised English-speaking tour guides and full days of sightseeing.

But just as I had spent much of my time in Lahore arguing, about being constantly leered and jeered at ("eve-teased"), about women being chhupi hui cheezen (hidden objects), about Indian RAW intelligence officers causing just about every act of violence under the sun (or perhaps I should say smog), about the fact that not all black people are African drug dealers (and anyway, surely the few thousand West Africans in Pakistan are not responsible for the booming multi-million-dollar drug trade), about what exactly "khule man" (open minds) means, and so on, so did I find myself in India constantly on the defensive. On Pakistan's defence and, as a result of the post-Partition predicament, on the Muslims' defence.

It seems to me that although there are over 150 million Muslims living in India, there is a perceived equation, on both sides of the border, of India with Hindus. As I see it, in India, recognition of the existence of Indian Muslims occurs in the nation's discourse only in the negative mode and as a challenge, such as when they are called upon to prove their "Indian-ness", rather than their accusatorily assumed and inherent "Pakistani-ness".

I brought my parents to North India primarily to share with them the majesty of Mughal art and architecture: to see Delhi's Jama Masjid, Humayun's tomb, Fatehpur Sikri, the Agra Fort, and, of course, the Taj Mahal. These are places I continue to return to, not only because of their visual magnificence, but also because they work as time capsules for me. They transport me to a time when the US, Coca-Cola and Baywatch did not dominate the global aesthetic, to a time when the word Pakistan did not exist and the word India signified a loosely defined geographical territory, to a time when there was no such thing as Hinduism, and when Hindu and Muslim were not terms around which political ideology and sheer violence danced shamelessly.

Now I am not saying that the Mughal period was paradise on earth. I guess what I am saying is that the contemporary context can just be a bit overwhelming, and the vision of the glorious Taj, transcendent, levitating, powerful, soothes my spirit in some ineffable way.

But my trip would turn out to be anything but transcendent. On the contrary, my mind would constantly be trained on contemporary conflicts and false convictions. For, in these recent travels through North India, I have learned from my illustrious tour guides that the Old City of Delhi is overpopulated because Muslims do not practise family planning (except for when they murder their female infants), that Islamic law has not changed since it was outlined in the Quran, that the Mughal empire collapsed because ever-tolerant Hindus would not tolerate Aurangzeb who was a "Muslim fanatic", and that not only are most Muslims fanatics, but seemlessly (that is, preposterously) related to this, Pakistan "creates terrorists".

Of course I could not but go to battle with these ideologues, when it suddenly occurred to me: I am on a trip organised by Ram Travels! Could this, I wondered, be some sort of BJP-backed rath yatra for tourists? Sadly, when I asked the tour guides as much, I learned that although many of them are BJP party members (a sad fact in itself), I was not on a rath yatra, nor was I in some particularly esoteric, fringe world of religio-cultural nationalism. In fact, it seems to me that I was probably in the heartland of contemporary middle-class North Indian opinion as these are ideas I have continued to hear.

To be completely honest with you reader, I am writing this article from Delhi. Due to reasons both personal and professional, I left Lahore last week to continue my research here in Delhi. And although I departed with a certain degree of anger and disappointment in my heart, I now find myself pushing to the front of posh south Delhi restaurants to listen to any and all news about Chief Executive Pervez Musharraf, who has, ironically, become my hero. I watched him proudly on Doordarshan as he stood his ground calmly and eloquently while being rudely badgered by his interviewer Karan Thapar. (Though he was insufferably contemptuous throughout the interview, in a small, reflective piece in a newspaper that Sunday, Thapar cowardly conveyed his more admiring sentiments about Musharraf when he quoted a crew member's comments: "Banda sahi hai. Burra nahin. Dil ka saaf hai." -- He's not a bad sort. He is good at heart.)

Now, instead of non-stop anti-India conspiracy theories, I find here non-stop anti-Pakistan conspiracy theories. I read in the daily Indian papers about how "militarist" Pakistan is "a thoroughly militarised state, resting on a communalised platform, forever eager to do battle with India". I scream at the printed word, "This is absurd!" But then, of course, it is the teeth-rattling seriousness of it all that makes it precisely anything but absurd.

Elizabeth Kolsky is a doctoral candidate in history at Columbia University and a Fulbright Scholar in Delhi. She is currently conducting research in South Asia for her dissertation on criminal law in the 19th century.

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