The Hindu Business Line : Cross-border tourism

Nowhere, at any time, did we feel unwelcome as Indians; in fact, it was quite the reverse. Nowhere was I, as a differently-dressed woman, subjected to vulgar stares as in North Indian cities.

Food Street, Lahore.

Our invitation to Pakistan was for the inauguration of their first city-waste compost plant at Lahore. A personal invitation from Anwar Saifullah, the promoter and a former Environment Minister, made visas for this occasion very easy. As one deeply involved in conservation, waste management and the environment in general, one must confess that the overall impression was of cities managed much better, at least in this respect.

When we were planning our visit to Pakistan, the concerned and cautionary reactions of friends reminded me of a Bob Hope joke: "We had a successful trip to Russia. We came back!" Yet, there is such goodwill for India, and a thirst for information and interaction on both sides of our border that I feel it is essential to spread this around.

Karachi, years ago

My earliest memories of Karachi are of the six months spent in 1944, as an eight-year-old, in its gracious, leafy, Parsi Colony, being whacked on the knuckles by Miss Brooks at Grammar School whenever I secretly reverted to writing with my left hand, of the gigantic whale skeleton (no longer there) on the veranda of Frere Hall, and of peeling endless mounds of after-dinner pine-nuts (now rare and expensive) listening to pre-Independence adult conversation. My father Pheroze Sidhwa's inspiration to start a `Swaraj' industry, Bharat Tiles in 1922, had been the revered and saintly Jamshed Nusserwanji Mehta, three-term Mayor of Karachi, then the cleanest city in Asia. My father's architect brother Dinsha Daruwalla had stayed on after Partition and helped shape modern Karachi.

My next visits in the 1950s helped me reconnect with family branches, an influential relative finding an obliging immigration officer who let me through with a wink and a smile, for two days.

In 1985, there were visa hassles; my husband Hoshang, called to their Delhi Embassy for a personal interview, was outraged by his visa refusal while a steady stream of shabby women walked out with theirs. Apparently fabrics and saris were regularly smuggled, hidden in thick rajais and bedrolls. My sad memories of that visit are of indiscipline — no queues even at airports, and mobs jumping counters, as if boarding a mofussil bus. I was told not to use the highway crossing even if a car were a 100 metres away, as they race their engines to scare the unwary.

A renowned poetess cousin, and professor of English, showed me her stunning personal collection of Gandhara sculptures, purchased in secret from farmers, who were told to smash such `idols' if found while working the land — years before Bamiyan!

Karachi, now!

This time, the Koranic prayer before take-off to Karachi by PIA was the first reminder of how different the otherwise identical-looking neighbouring countries were. Newspapers on board surprised us though, openly criticising General Musharraf or commenting on opposition to him. Soon, we found them more stereotyped in their reportage of officially fed news.

Nobody had warned us that import of liquor into Pakistan was banned, but we narrowly escaped confiscation of the duty-free whisky intended as gifts thanks to the VIP police reception arranged by our hosts.

Unfortunately, comparisons between Karachi and Mumbai are inevitable; the former has a green and popular waterfront park with mangroves. The lack of encroachments may well be due to years of military rule as much as better housing policies. Karachi has surprisingly wide main roads, though the architecture is neither impressive nor modern. Despite many car assembly plants and premium prices for immediate delivery, traffic density seems to be half that of Mumbai, and traffic discipline better. It helps that there are no pigs and dogs or cows on the streets. In the outskirts, you see cute donkey-carts and occasional camel-carts. My constant gardener cousins live in a beautifully landscaped, colourful oasis in the bustling city, though around them is a different riot of colour of auto-rickshaws, tempos, buses and especially of trucks covered in an astonishing variety of glow-painted panels.

Ardeshir Cowasji, a dapper 84-year-old Parsi, goes around with a permanent bodyguard to protect him "from the mullahs", because of his outspoken Sunday column in The Dawn. And he is fiercely protective of parks and open spaces. He has personally funded a large "Gutter Bagicha" on an endangered civic amenity site, watered by tapping of a major waste-water sewer line headed for the sea, yet odourless. This Bagh-e-Rustam is elegantly open-walled, without gates, and clean.

The spacious and spotless airport at Karachi was a welcome surprise, with civilised queues. Though there were far fewer women out than in Indian cities, one saw hardly any in burqa. At the airport bookstore one could buy RK Narayan's Ramayana and a Mahabharata for our next hosts.

Clean and green Lahore

Lahore's Model Town, planned pre-Independence but completed in the 1980s, has houses on half-acre plots, with 14-ft-high ceilings, high ventilators and huge verandas for family gatherings.

I fell in love with Lahore's 20-km-long, clean, tree-lined canal, with two-lane highways flanked by wide green belts of parkland. Beyond these lie huge tree-filled gardens framing elegant old-world buildings of the many educational institutions, which Lahore is so famous for. Its Atchison College sits in 198 green acres. Set up as a junior, preparatory and high school for princelings, it now accepts children from non-aristocratic homes but still teaches riding, and fancy turbans are obligatory on Fridays. Lahore is more like a garden with heritage buildings in it, than a garden city.

On our Sunday sightseeing we first drove out of town, past ubiquitous donkey-carts to Jahangir's tomb, set in a huge garden but in need of better preservation. Its modest building materials but finely detailed wall paintings prefigure the exquisite inlay work of the Taj Mahal.

Next was the Badshahi Mosque, with a huge prayer-courtyard that is Pakistan's second-largest, with see-through decorative arches on one side to view the river alongside that has since shifted course by 14 km. The courtyard's original burnt-brick paving has now been replaced by red sandstone, while the prayer hall retains its flooring of unusual cloudy marble and yellow abri stone full of sea-shell fossils from the far northern ranges.

Next door is the huge Lahore Fort, built on many levels above and below ground, and badly in need of wheelchair access for tourists. At all three sites, there were no beggars, trinket sellers or pestering guides. In Lahore too, there were hardly any burqas, though the number of women on the streets is about 10-15 per cent of what one might see in Mumbai.

As cycle-rickshaws are banned throughout Pakistan, women are mostly seen travelling in the cost-effective, fuel-efficient Chinese-inspired Qingqi (pronounced chinchi or kwimchi), a motorcycle with its rear wheel replaced by a 6-seater front-and-back-facing rickshaw body that often carries up to ten persons.

Lahore is ideally located in the fertile canal-fed Punjab. We had a chance to view lush fields of ripening wheat and groves of kino oranges as we drove to Islamabad.

Drive to Islamabad

The divided three-lane motorway is the best constructed and maintained we have seen anywhere. Traffic is relatively light, as the Rs 140-toll makes most trucks prefer the toll-free Grand Trunk Road to Peshawar (from Calcutta, once). The 350-km stretch has four superb rest areas en route, with spacious refuelling, good restaurants, a snack shop, toilets, and an attractive mosque at each stop.

Alcohol is available somehow to those who can afford it, and an age-old Parsi brewery at Murree continues — officially allowed to cater to foreigners.

Taxila Museum - PICTURE BY S. SUBRAMANIUM

We drove straight to Taxila, a UNESCO World Heritage site. Sirkap has the well-preserved plinths of a large city with a neat grid of well laid-out lanes off a very wide central avenue that reminded us of Hampi. The unique dry stonework looks like a jewellery setting, with the spaces between large round boulders filled with longer or shorter lengths of flat stones.

Hoshang, a water-diviner who can also sense spirits, was stunned to find the place abounding in spirits of men, women and children from the earliest pre-Greek period. Later, at Jinuwali Dehri's recently excavated monastic cells consisting of tall exquisite stonewalls around a square water-tank fed by a stone-lined channel, he detected a few spirits of monks. Most amazing was everyone's matter-of-fact acceptance of the psychic powers, often telling us of their own experiences.

The young capital Islamabad has monumental new buildings and wide roads and is yet impersonal, perhaps for want of history and old trees.

Indians, always welcome

Nowhere, at any time, did we feel unwelcome as Indians; in fact, it was quite the reverse. Nowhere was I, as a differently-dressed woman, subjected to vulgar strip-stares as in North Indian cities. There is law and order without any visible evidence of military or police presence (except for the police-camera speed-traps on the motorway).

Just a hop across the border from beautiful Amritsar, Lahore especially has wonderful opportunities for tourism, inhibited perhaps by Pakistan's terrorist tag. Indo-Pak tourism, through two-way group tours if need be, has tremendous potential both for the local economies and for mutual understanding. We should be exchanging goodwill instead of sewage-polluted waters across the border.

All too soon our ten-day sojourn ended, we flew to Delhi — with an overwhelming sense of how similar we are, and how needlessly kept apart.

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