Looking Over the Wall: Waging A War Upon War?

A familiar aroma wafted across from the kitchen this evening when I came home from work; I work at a museum in the university town of Cambridge, UK. The aroma belonged to a culinary preparation that we, in the lore of my family, tend to refer to, quite generically, as that “Pakistani meat dish.” My family comes from India; we have no clue about what part of our neighbouring country the dish may have sprung from. Our family also has no idea why a concoction of boiled beef, numerous slices of ginger, a generous dash of margarine or butter, and a pinch of red chili peppers, merely stewed together for hours and laced with lime juice, should have sprung into being at all. Especially sans the presence of a spice as typically South Asian as garam masala. 

The dish was being cooked by my mother today; she had learnt it from my father, who in turn had learnt the recipe in the early 1980s in Germany, in the town of Saarbrücken. He had been hosted as a dinner guest by a group of friendly young men from Pakistan residing in Germany on political asylum, perhaps hailing from the breakaway sect of the Ahmadiyya Muslims. My father had been introduced to his hosts along with a Bangladeshi friend, also a refugee. Theirs was an off-the-cuff friendship wrought largely by the common tongue of Bengali they spoke, shared between present-day Bangladesh and my father from the Indian state of West Bengal. My father was no refugee, but rather an aspirant engineer doing his doctorate in materials science at the university in town. The refugees had homed him that evening. The “Pakistani meat dish” has found a permanent residence in our Bengali family of Hindu upper-caste lineage, where the consumption of beef has been religiously taboo. Usually, we have the dish by wrapping the meat in rotis made of wheat flour. Never mixing it into rice, Bengali-style.             

Considering that India and Pakistan recently came to the terrifying brink of war, and appear to be in an uneasy state of ceasefire presently thanks to the Pahalgam terrorist attack in Kashmir, I would like to articulate here a series of personal reflections and memories. These reflections and memories may, akin to my family anecdote of the “Pakistani meat dish,” enable us to envision and perhaps remember a world which, as Rabindranath Tagore once wrote, “has not been broken up into fragments/By narrow domestic walls,” especially at a time when we may be accused of being idle—and perhaps dangerous--dreamers for doing so. We need to keep looking beyond the walls of language and the self-validating logic of war when one’s nation feels under threat--to keep waging war upon war, as it were.        

Here I am talking about looking over walls, and I confess, with some shame, that I’ve never actually crossed the border of Jammu and Kashmir. The closest I’ve ever been to Kashmir is by having lived in the bordering state of Punjab, whose high agricultural productivity in the so-called Green Revolution beginning in the 1960s led to the state formerly being called the “Food bowl of India.” Growing up for a few years in the ‘80s in the formerly princely, later fairly provincial, town of Patiala in eastern Punjab, I was once mesmerised, on a road trip from the military cantonment town of Ambala, by the sight of a peacock flaring out resplendent feathers, dancing to the monsoon amidst swaying lime-green fields, sporting freshly-bloomed florets of mustard. 

The idyll was soon to die, with the rise and peaking of the militant Khalistan movement through the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, in a period now called the “Insurgency” in Punjab. As children our school years were frequently in disarray, owing to one or the other terrorist attack on public transport and public buildings. Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs all fell victim. Almost every girl in my class wanted to grow up to be a teacher, and almost every boy wanted to become a soldier. In the evenings curfew began being declared more and more often. Now and then in the evenings one would tune in to the shrieks of police sirens. These alarms would emanate from Sangrur District Jail, situated beside a road opposite to a campus that housed an engineering research institute where my father used to work, as well as a series of apartment blocks where our family and neighbours lived. Every time my father would leave for a work trip to Delhi, my mother’s and my grandmother’s knuckles would turn white in hopes of his safe return. Paradoxically, the safest time to travel anywhere on a long-distance bus used to be a two-hour window after each terrorist attack, when every public space would be beefed up by top-level security. 

In those troubled times, some respite would be offered by a TV series, aired on the State-run network Doordarshan. This was an era when but one channel used to be the norm, except in the four metropolitan cities of New Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai and Chennai. The TV series was called Gul Gulshan Gulfam, whose alliterative title issued forth in a hummable song at the beginning of each episode. The episodes depicted the lives of a Kashmiri Muslim family which ran a business operating three houseboats on the lakes of the landscape, primarily for tourists. Mountain people being somewhat exotic to us folks from the pancake-flat landscape of Punjab, we followed closely the fictitious daily lives of the family members in the TV series. However, as the episodes proceeded, the predictable lives of the family members were slowly and surely rent asunder by the shifting epicentre of terrorism from Punjab to Kashmir through the turn of the ‘90s, echoing the sequence of events in the real world. 

In the ethereal landscape of Kashmir, entire generations may have grown up, worn out by the exhaustion of living in a state of everyday fear. But I can only speak of this legacy of fear with a conviction born of analogy, as a first-hand witness to the Insurgency in Punjab to some extent. And yet I think it might make sense for the people of both India and Pakistan to try and look over each other’s border. Were one to look over the wall, perhaps one might even find a well-watered secret garden?

By Malini Roy (“Svanhild Wall”)

Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK