Disclaimer: This is far from the perfect piece I would have liked to write, but I think I can get away with it, thanks mostly to the fact that no one reads this now that I’ve changed the link. By the way, Nikhil, I’m writing this in Lucida Grande (although I’m not sure what font it posts in)

On Pakistan

The last Tehelka was a special issue on Pakistan. I did not read any of it apart from the Mohsin Hamid interview by Shoma Chaudhry. It bugged me. I’m not sure what exactly it was about it that got to me: how deluded Hamid seemed ("I think Pakistan is right now desperate for a peace deal on Kashmir. Musharraf — like him or not — is bending over to find some compromise. But India is completely uncompromising. It prefers the status quo so any time there’s a bomb in India, it can be blamed on Pakistan"); how defensive he is when asked what he doesn’t like about Pakistan ("It’s like a neighbour you don’t have nice relations with saying, what about your mother don’t you like?"); or how right he is about some things ("I think the biggest threat Pakistan poses to India is the threat to the Indian ego, as opposed to anything more substantive").

I’ve been to Pakistan. I was there for a week last December. I visited Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. It was odd. Scratch that – it was fucking weird. That entire nation, it seemed to me, is populated by weirdos, oddballs and raving lunatics.

A caveat: The people I met were, in my opinion, the Pakistani equivalent of Malabar Hill Jains. Those who have old money, enjoy positions of power, appear modern and urbane on the outside, occasionally even speak in accents and often hold foreign passports, but are, on the inside, conservative, old-school and uncompromising.

We were treated very well, my mum and I. Their hospitality was astounding, incredible. We had nothing to worry about, we were fed the most delicious food, shown around, indulged in every way. Hell, we were even flown there business class. Sure, it was on PIA, which doesn’t serve alcohol. That’s hardly their fault, though. But something is definitely rotten in the state of Pakistan. And I think it’s the disparity.

Pakistan started their reform process three or fours years ago. We started ours in 1991. China started theirs some 15 years before us. Pakistan, like India vis-à-vis China, is playing a game of catch-up. Meanwhile, there’s an intense divide between the rich and the poor. There’s none of that much-feted middle-class that we in India go on about. And that’s where the problem lies, I think.

This has nothing to do with Islam. The most striking example, for me, is of this Hindu man I met on my first day. He took great pride in telling me that he’s a Hindu and that he has been to Bombay – much the same way an Indian will try to impress an Englishman by regaling him with stories of his one visit to Bradford or second-hand anecdotes from a cornershop-owning relative in Southall. I noted this (and more) in my journal entries at the time. I reproduce it verbatim (typos and all): “He then went on to explain that he studied at or lived at ISKCON in Juhu and that he’s a Hindu and no, he’s not from India, he lives here really, in this land of Muslims, but what do you do. And it wasn’t one of those shrugging what-do-you-dos. It was a fuck-I-hate-these-bloody-mossies-what-do- you-dos.

Some other guy also came and told me he’s a Hindu. And they both asked, separately, and quite confidently, whether I was Hindu too. I said I was and they seemed quite relieved. And I’m not sure whether it’s my imagination, but I think they expected some anti-Muslim rhetoric from me.

Just now, as I walked up to my room, the maid (or a maid) said Hare Krishna. I said "Hare Krishna?" She said “you”. I said “no”, a bit more emphatically than I should have perhaps. She said, oh I don’t know, some other Hindu sect thingie. I ran.

Maybe it’s sort of like me wanting to say salaam maleikum and khuda hafiz. You take what little bits you know of a country or a culture or a people and you work with that. I guess. But does it have to be so fucking religion based? No man, it’s nothing like that.

You know all that stuff you read about how the Pakistanis are just like us? Rubbish. They’re a very odd people.

I had a conversation with the guy who dropped me home, nephew to the lady I’m staying with. He tells me that in his estimation, 80 percent of the women in Karachi, Islamabad and Lahore aren’t virgins. And he said in a slightly conspiratorial tone, with a hint of “aren’t you scandalized?” I wasn’t. So he says groupsex is getting more and more popular here. As is daterape. I have trouble taking the word of a guy who also just told me that he’d throw his wife out if, on his wedding night, he discovered she wasn’t a virgin. “Who knows how many dicks she’s had,” he said. “Sure, she’ll say it was just the once, with her boyfriend, but what do I know? I don’t want someone who’s had ten dicks.” We got to talking about this because I asked him about alcohol. He said guys drink but then get screwed over come marriage time. I’m not too sure about the relation, but given this country’s tendency towards the decidedly odd, I’ll buy it. And this is a guy who drives a fancy Lexus with a fucking camera at the back and a screen on the dash so you don’t need to turn when you reverse. I’m assuming he forms part of the cream of Karachi society (going by his car). Oh, and he also said he’s aiming to become honourary Justice of Peace next year. His friend is handing him the title. Now he gets a police escort, fame and the power to decide which villager raped whose wife. And he’s 24.”

Then I went to Islamabad. And I met a very pretty 17-year-old girl and her 16-year-old male cousin. They live in a joint-family sort of household, except neither his parents nor hers live there. She grew up in London (although her accent sounded more Houslow than, as she claimed, Hampsted, but that’s just me). He had an accent I couldn’t place, and it led me to believe he was her brother and from Britain too, but as it turned out, he just went to one of Islamabad’s better schools, that’s all. That’s how they’re taught to speak. So I told him, “oh, I thought you were from London too.” He said “no, no, please don’t make me her brother. Don’t tell anyone this, but she’s my girlfriend.”

I thought, “great. Good for you dude, if you could land a chick like her.” As it turned out though, they were related. They were cousins. This may not be shocking for people well-acquainted with South Asian culture, but being the cultural pariah and ill-informed city slicker that I am, I was, to put it mildly, scandalised. And I used to think it takes a lot to scandalise me. So their family suspects, but hasn’t said anything yet. She’s grew up abroad, but isn’t allowed out of her conservative (but rich and ostensibly progressive) house without a salwar kameez and a man. The car drops her to school and back. She doesn’t go anywhere else. everything she does is a matter of “being allowed” or not. Holy crap. This is a family that falls in that fabled top five per cent and this is how they think? And I couldn’t figure out why this guy was telling me all this. I’d just met him. He knew nothing about me. He had no clue whether I was his aunt’s best friend or not. yet, he sought out my company, took me for long walks and told me about his entire life.

Cut to Lahore (and I’m not even going to get into the psycho driver who took us there, except that he used to be a white-collar worker in Saudi until he lost his job and suddenly found he was a driver in Islamabad. What’s he worse is that at the time, he was driving a couple of random Indians around the countryside. Can’t say I blame his animosity towards us). This is where the hospitality got a little creepy. We were “not allowed” to go to a hotel of our choice. “We will be very offended if you don’t let us take care of it,” we were told in far more polite and far less friendly words. So we landed up where we were supposed to land up (after much arguing with the driver who insisted he knew best). And we found a decrepit, run-down guest-house I wouldn’t recommend to anyone except those looking for a mattress and some cheap sex and nothing else. Naturally, we protested, and after much to-ing and fro-ing and cross-country cellphone negotiations, the oddball who was “in charge” of us agreed to let us go to the hotel we’d originally wanted to go to. His brother was supposed to “escort us” there. I jumped in his car. The first thing he told me was not to feel shy if I wanted, you know, some pot or any other drugs. Much as I appreciated the offer, I found this a little odd. He then regaled me with many stories about drinking in Dubai, drugs, sex in Lahore and so on. This is when he wasn’t trying to kill both of us by going the wrong way at a roundabout. I appreciate informality and casual male banter as much as the next guy, but I do find it a bit strange when someone I’ve just met offers me acid in a strictly non-druggie set up.

There are loads of similar instances of general strangeness, and very few instances of normalcy. There was the driver who, although very nice, like everyone in Pakistan is, stalked me on my cellphone back in Bombay for Sunny Deol’s number. There was the Pakistani soldier at the Wagah border who told me he's show me a restricted area if i gave him an "inam." There was the strange old man who got very drunk and told me about how his daughter came to Bombay to become a star, but then discovered what a sleazy world Bollywood was. “She was crying!” he yelled into my drink, like it was my fault. There was wedding I went to where all the men sat in a room at the back and drank Cutty Sark scotch while the women were at the ceremony. The groom eventually burst in yelling “Mujhe daroo do!”

I think Pakistan is a very confused nation, and one with a huge chip on its shoulder. The papers are full of India-related news. Everyone I met constantly told me about how they’ve been to India or know someone who has. The media constantly compares Pakistan to India in the subtle, insidious way that we compare ourselves to America and Britain. We are the big brother of this region. We are immensely cool, immensely powerful, immensely influential in our neck of the woods. What happens in India reverberates around the sub-continent in ways we are too oblivious to realise. Our neighbours care more about what’s going on here and what we think than they would ever admit to us, or even to themselves. Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal – it’s different for them. they’re too tiny to even try and compete. But Pakistan sees itself on an even footing, even though it isn’t, much as we do (and aren’t) when we compare ourselves to first world nations.

There are things we don’t realise either. Like the fact that, as Hamid points out in his article, Pakistan is the sixth most populous nation in the world. That the Karachi stock index is, like Mumbai’s, one of the best performing in the world. That Pakistan is full of modern people who want exactly the same things we do. But they can’t have them. Because they’re not us, much as we’re not America and we’re not the UK.

Nowhere is the distinction between the two countries more marked than at the Wagah border. Every evening, shortly before sunset, the two nations put on a wildly over-the-top, mating-peacock parade they call the lowering of the flag. With foot-stomping, yelling and flag-waving aplenty, the entire thing is basically an exercise in saying mine is bigger than yours. People, tourists mostly, come from all over to watch this. On one side, men, women and children sit together in one large stand and hoot and cheer. Across the border, men and women, boys and girls, even mothers and sons, are seated on separate stands on opposite sides, kept apart by a road in the middle. No prizes for guessing which country is which.

To conclude, this is a paragraph written in my journal on day three of my excursion, in Islamabad. “I sincerely believe that India is far better off without Pakistan as part of us. And though I’m thoroughly fascinated by this country and its people, I also can’t wait to get back home. For all the Englands and Americas that we look at enviously and admire their liberalism and freedom, there’s a Pakistan that makes me so very grateful for all that we have in our great and glorious nation.”