Over to Islamabad

The sign announces, “We respect all; We suspect all,” in two straight lines, printed on an A4 sheet. My hands itch to take a picture, but there is something eerie about an immigration building that freezes the paparazzi instinct in the most hardened photographer. I am on the Pakistan side of Wagah border, waiting for its officials to clear my papers. I have never travelled to Pakistan by land before, and do not know what to expect. And Pakistan is Pakistan, the country where I am more out of place than in any other.

The crossing at Attari is almost deserted when I reach it just after nine in the morning. The infrastructure is huge, with massive warehouses for the trade between the two countries. The coolies rushed towards me, but I have only one small suitcase. The guards tell me to wait until 10, and I sit down to read a book in the waiting area, where there is nobody else. A few people dribble in and there are maybe half a dozen when the crossing opens. It is all quite smooth; the only odd thing is the polio drops we have to take. This is the gift that the CIA and the Taliban have given to the world. The CIA used medical teams to surreptitiously track Osama bin Laden, and now the Taliban kill medical workers on suspicion. Polio, which was nearly stamped out, is flowering again in the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands, and everybody entering or leaving Pakistan has to prove they have been recently vaccinated.

A bus takes us from the Attari side to the Wagah side, where we go through the process again, but the officers are still arriving. The X-ray machine for the luggage is still warming up, but the customs fellow takes a look at me and decides that if I am smuggling anything, it cannot be very profitable. He just waves me through. I thank him briefly and make my way out of immigration. The coolies on the Pakistani side are visibly poorer, thinner and with patched kurtas. It is a long walk out of the facility. No car is allowed to come close by. A suicide attack in November last year had claimed dozens of lives during the flag-lowering ceremony. The shock seems to hang in the air, although no mark remains of the carnage. I do notice, with amusement, that Wagah is spelled in three different ways within a hundred yards. Our revenge on the English language persists decades after Independence on both sides of the border.

The car that picks me up is a spanking new Toyota Camry, arranged by the office. It takes me immediately to the highway. I have only a visa to Islamabad, and Lahore would be a no-no. The drive, though, is beautiful. It is about 400km from the border to Islamabad, and the road is very smooth, with incredibly civilised traffic. The driver tackles it at average of 110kmph, and I catch a quick nap.

This is not the Indian Punjab. There are no roadside dhabas, only the expressway, with rich green fields and small village houses outside the car window. We stop once, at a modern rest stop, and then we are in Islamabad. I scramble to complete my paperwork as an Indian in the land of our most intimate strangers.

Islamabad is well laid-out, lots of space. Everybody drives. Or at least those who can. I try and walk, get lost at times, but slowly discover the city in the four days I have. I am surprised by the number of Chinese I see, and I get used to friends introducing me and adding, ‘He is from India.’ I do not get used to how hands clench a little involuntarily at the name of my country in the middle of a handshake. Along the roads the signs say, ‘ Ahista ’, in Urdu, ‘Slowly’. It makes me smile. The Indian Foreign Secretary, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, is due to arrive any day now and it seems that the city seems to be saying, ‘Slowly, slowly’.

There is something else as well. In December 2014, the Pakistani Taliban stormed a military school in Peshawar and killed 145 people, including 132 students. It has rattled Pakistan to the core. The barbed wire around girl’s colleges and the presence of heavily armed Pakistani Rangers patrolling the city in flatbed pickup trucks are a constant reminder that the ‘war’ is not far away. I have a dinner invitation at the Indian High Commission, and I shock the guards by coming on foot. They are unsure how to deal with me, and the security doors are reluctantly swung open.

The Indian High Commissioner’s residence is right next to the Danish Ambassador’s, which was the target of a 2008 suicide bomb attack. Conversation with the top diplomat and his wife, a literary editor in her own right, was about books, about Lord Wavell’s diary and how that shapes the telling of Indian history.

And then my time is up, my visa one day from expiring, I rush back to the border, to cross, to turn on my phone and call home again, to breathe, and leave our complicated, fraught neighbours behind. Until next time.

Omair Ahmad is a Delhi-based author

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