The Indo-Pak partition for some of them is gun fires, bomb-making classes, smiling buddhas, hotlines and FDI. But for most of us rest, it’s the issue of cricket matches and wedding visas. Nidhi Dugar Kundalia attends an India-Pakistan wedding, only fleetingly interrupted by the ghosts of the past.
By a curious circumstance, I once ended up at a wedding with a Pakistani bride, an Indian groom and a party of Indian and Pakistani guests looking at each other from the rims of their flute glasses. Tall, slender women from the other side with sharp noses and bright lips. Eager, showy, perfumed young boys from our side, hardly able to contain their excitement with there being so many exquisite, statuesque Pakistani women around. Amidst the usual wedding conviviality of clinking glasses, pleasantries, occasional green eyed laudation and exchanges of business notes, there was a stage where the young ones from both sides danced to the latest cheeky Bollywood hits like ‘Mere photo ko seeney’ and ‘Lungi Dance’. An occasional spry uncle joined in. An aunt who was dancing on a dopamine overdose of enthusiasm for an hour, walked off the dance floor, heaving and cracking her neck. “I would do yoga if it weren’t such a non-Pakistani sounding activity”, she grumbled. For a Pakistani to do yoga is like questioning the Dō-Qaumī Naẓariyah, the two-nation theory, the very basis of Indo-Pak division.
Indo-Pak marriages are uncommon but not unheard of. The majority of such marriages are said to take place among the Muslim communities of Punjab separated by the Wagah border. Jammu and Kashmir (including PoK) also contributes a huge number to the cross-border marriage figures. There are even instances of reformed Indian insurgents returning to India with wives and kids in tow. At least 10-20 requests are said to be filed every year with the board handling Muslim wedding registrations with reference to Indo-Pak marriages, usually organised between families who were divided at the time of partition. But over the past decade, there have been more and more of other kind of marriages, usually between young people who have met at international film festivals, the United Nations, foreign universities, or, in some cases, in Internet chat rooms.
For me, growing up in India in the ’90s, Pakistan was just a notion. Conversations on the border issue were never very nuanced. By the time I moved to London in 2010, I had come into my own world view: Pakistan is a foe country, all Pakistanis must dislike all Indians. My first encounter with a Pakistani was at a corner shop in Central London, where I lived. He was from Karachi, he said, and left some 40 odd years ago for a ‘better life.’ An ancient man with a splendid silver beard and altruistic eyes. I always saw him through the prism, a prism through which a singular light refracts into its parts, divergent and infinite.
He was always chatty, almost garrulous. While returning my change for a pint of chocolate milk, he’d bring up the most British of topics — the weather. He once asked me to buy a warmer coat than the one I was wearing. “We often underestimate how cold it can get in the winter here,” he said.
“We?” I thought. “Who is we?” With that one word, he had set in motion a common-ness that hitherto, I had discounted.
And now here ‘we’ were. By a palm fringed pool of a hotel, with towering buildings of a metropolis looming on horizon – the people from the subcontinent that shared more than just mangoes, monsoon and some spices and mosquito nets. A stocky mullah performed the nikah the evening before, under a gondola of real and plastic flowers. He then read out the duahs–“Barak Allah hu lakawa Baraka alayka wa jama bayakuna” from a frayed green book. And while the couple was ushered out to a fancy suite for what the family thought was their ‘first night’, the older relatives slowly started broaching the topic that was just lurking behind the thick curtains of this wedding.
Why all the border infiltrations? Was a nuclear option on the table? And the trickiest of them all: who won the Kargil war? “We slayed out far more soldiers from your end”, said the bride’s maternal uncle in a crispy grey suit, unlike the menacing men in salwar kameezes in usual newspaper photos from Pak (there are no other kinds of men in salwar kameezes, a wedding party member had earlier revealed). “We recaptured most of the posts back”, retorted his Indian counterpart. “Arrey, but what’s the point? You all will anyways die of malaria… ” guffawed another Pakistani. Blanketed by sissy jokes and sniggers, the conversation simmered. “There is only one Punjab in this world. The Pakistani Punjab, the one with the real brawns…” I am not sure what caught more attention — his statement or his casualness. He came off like a sullen relative who will only come to the nikah if he is accommodated on the front row beside the bridegroom. Before the conversation could take a vile form, the bride’s octogenarian grandfather, hearing the conversation from a quiet corner, commented “There won’t be any more border wars,” he told the Pakistani bride’s uncle. “Your country has already lost three wars with India.” This was his final verdict on the topic.
Meanwhile, a girl with cropped hair and an intense green eye shadow plopped down on a chair next to me, where I was sitting in a dark corner playing a feverish game of Fruit Ninja on my phone. Whipping out a lighter she quickly turned to me and asked, “Are you okay with the smoke?”Before I could answer, she had already lit her cigarette. She was from Rawalpindi. Her idols were Benazir Bhutto, Hrithik Roshan and Paul McCartney. On Friday nights, she and her friends like to hang out on a friend’s rooftop, play guitar, smoke and spray on some Axe Body spray before heading back home. She may have easily seen more Bollywood films than I ever will. “What do you think of Kashmir?” I asked her, when she started talking about Smita Patil’s repertoire of work, a topic I couldn’t add much to. She replied, “It is all your fault, but I will forgive you guys if you promise to set up a meeting with Hrithik if and when I get a longer visa to India and come to Mumbai.” She finished her smoke, adjusted her duppatta to reveal her cleavage just a little more, re-applied her lipstick and left.
After the ban on Indian films was lifted in 2007, Pakistan is considered one of Bollywood’s top five overseas markets. Women mimic Sonam Kapoor hairdos and want Yash Chopra style weddings. Men practice their ‘Gangs of Wasseypur accent’ while the little boys practice Dabaang dialogues, essentially called “Bollywoodisation” of Pakistan. The Pakistani sportspersons’ fascination for glamorous Bollywood actresses is also legendary. Seventies pin-up Zeenat Aman is said to have had a much-written-about relationship with Imran Khan, the casanova captain of the then Pak cricket team. Bollywood actress Salma Agha, originally of Pak origin, wedded legendary squash coach Rehman Khan of Pakistan and still lives between Pakistan and the UK. The life of a Bollywood fan in Pakistan is like that of any Indian Bollywood fan. While on the other side, a new channel Zindagi TV, was launched last June for Indian viewers. The Pakistani programmes are touted to be ‘slightly more tasteful fare’ when compared to the Indian soaps, but can the choice to reject anything and everything linked with Pakistan ever be ruled out?
We learn to draw lines before we listen for the light. We draw lines before we lament for love. We make lines when we ponder, when we decide, when we travel, when we sketch. It is this basic fact that changes the elements of a substance, changes the direction of its life. The partition and the consequent division were big lines drawn on a small map, fractures whose fault lines continue to manifest in various forms. For some it is in the form of gunfire, bomb-making classes, smiling buddhas, hotlines and FDI. For most of the rest, it’s mostly Indo-Pak cricket matches and wedding visas.
This wedding went unattended by most of the Pakistani relatives because of visa issues. The Indian government needed a local sponsor for each applicant, original wedding invites (to be sent a year before the actual wedding) and a no-objection certificate from the local police station, which all Indians know can be logistical nightmare. “For the couples in love, the wedding and the move is a natural enough thing to do if you care for each other…for society at large it’s act of insanity,” the bride’s mother whispered, as I left the venue for the airport with the guests the next morning.
The anomaly here is that when the immigration officer at the airport asked the Pakistani guests for passports and then for their job profiles as they waited in a queue, the cropped haired girl sent me a text. “Maybe they’ll ask me to stay back in India till they finish their investigations. And then I meet Hrithik…” Several of the suspected militants that have been arrested in the recent past from the subcontinent have been from the Rawalpindi. But the immigration officer stamped her green book and ushered her out of India without a second glance. Security officials were mainly concerned about the consumption of alcohol on flight, confiscating a bottle of cheap vodka that she was carrying. She disappears into the shadows of people after the immigration. A fitted kurta, loose pants. A pen strung through the hair to keep the bun together. I sat back in the waiting area, scanned the other wedding fellows who were all inviting one another to their hometowns and exchanging email addresses, saying their teary goodbyes wondering all the while whether they would ever meet again. Unable to tell the Indians from the Pakistanis, the security officer came and rushed them through the security gates “Empty this place. Make way for other passengers please….”
