Still There...

Continued from HomewardBound

What sort of people are we, unable to reach conclusions?

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1430-18th April, 2004 through late night
It is now time for Sushmita Sen and Govinda on the video (Kyonki Main JhootNahin Bolta, based loosely on Jim Carrey's Liar Liar) to amuse a busload, full-house 2x2 Hinoaircon, with the middle folding seats empty. This Pakistani fascination for Bollywood masala is something Ihave only heard about in the past, and am now experiencing first hand.

The young child in the aisleseat, his mother in the window seat, and the child's father in the seat behind them, as well as everybody elsein the bus are glued to what is at best a sit-com. Concentration is at its best when Rambha as the"other woman" in Govinda's life literally out-busts the svelte western attired Sushmita.

I am in the aisle seat, while Raghu is getting an eyeful of the mountainrange flashing past, from his window seat. We have been introduced to everybody in the bus as Punjabi Hindu Indiansheading back by the conductor, and are plied with cola, oranges and chips as well as much ribbing about thepelvic sauce on display.

The largely Punjabi speaking theatre going elite onboard want to know ifall women in India are like what they see on the screen. We win this round by distributing yet another box ofkaju barfee. (Yes, we left Delhi with almost 2 dozen half-kilo packets.)

Strangely, religious piety is not on display in this bus, and the few women onboard are not wearing dupattas. Bearded salvation must be a North-bound thing. However, one talkativeclean-shaven young man does try to engage Raghu in finding common ground. On anti-Americanism. Means,Taliban not gooood. But American not gooood, too. This starts a discussion, and we discover that an opendebate on the pros and cons of USA is as wide-angle in this bus as anywhere else in the world. (But nobody in the bus.willsay one bad word about Musharraf).

The conductor sees me craning my neck to look through the front windscreen, andinvites me to sit on his left front door flip-down jump seat, while he parks himself, butt just aboutperched with legs pointing aft and facing forward on the decorated and carpeted "bonnet", inthe fashion of thin and skinny bus conductors all over our part of the world. I can't describe this, but Iwill try, he manages to not point his backside at both the driver and me, and at the same time he hastwisted his body in such a, well, spine-twisting way that he is facing forward, talking to the driver as well as tome as well as keeping an eye on the road and performing full-horizon KV duties.

Just watching a movie at a multiplex in India would cost me about 100-150Indian rupees. Here, I am getting the movie as well as a ride in an air-conditioned bus on a classy motorwayin addition, for the same price.

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The 6-lane M-2 Motorway from Islamabad to Lahore is 333 kilometres in length, andlike no other road on the Indian sub-Continent. I believe everything I've heard about it after a fewminutes of cruising at a flat 100 kmph, speed limit enforced by radar gun.

Apart from the sheerexcellence of the route (tested by Tamar Lane and Genghis Khan), pride in road design (paid for by Tata-Daewooand swallowed by Nawaz Sharif's family) and traffic management (trained by RCMP, really), there isthis sheer downhill suicide drop (in the area of the ancient Hindu temples, natch) we pelt through whenwe leave the Salt Ranges to head for the big bridge across the Jhelum. The speed limit is chopped drasticallyon this "ghat section", and the escape/slip ramps leading uphill for vehicles that have lost orfaded brakes are often occupied by overloaded trucks.

The M2 is also the only road in Pakistan where even the Pakistani Armed Forceshave to pay toll. I have these visions of a Pakistan Army trainee pilot sticking his hand out from alow-flying Super Mushshak towards a Tata-Daewoo tollbooth while a Hinduja Ashok Leyland Hino busovertakes it on the ground, chased by a Hyundai India Santro. All the while, a Maruti-Suzuki Omni 800ccrear-open van with 57 men hanging on and along it whizzes past at an even higher speed in the oppositedirection on the dusty country road a few metres away. A runaway tonga bouncing across the fields towards theadobe huts in the distance completes the canvas.

Meanwhile, a donkey brays.

M2 also has at least 10 straight and flat stretches, which are supposedlytop-secret landing strips, but can be identified by the removable central dividers. An example is at"Lahore 205 kms". The piano key markings, on which the Pakistan Air Force regularly play atbeing wonderboys, with their F-16, Mirage-2000, A-5, F-7 and C-130 aircraft, have got aviation rubber. Thefork-lifts used to remove the cement blocks stacked in the middle as well as "pushback", arealso used to lift improperly parked cars. The dumb-bells are better disguised as rest areas.

Right now, the rest areas are being used by decorated trucks, comparing plumages.I could write a separate book on the subject. It is explained to me by a smirking bus driver thatowner-drivers of these, mostly ancient Bedfords, lavish all their love and money on doing up their trucksbecause they do not have the time or the wealth to get married. Or laid.

Cars have a higher speed limit than do heavy vehicles. Every so often we spot aHighway Patrol car, radar gun ready and aimed. These cops, wearing Tom Cruise type haircuts, Jackie Chan type sunglasses,kevlar type bullet-proof jackets and driving American type Japanese high-speed sedan cars whichappear to be very heavy on the ground, are paid much more than their country cousins, and are supposed tobe absolutely incorruptible.

They have been re-designated "putrol" by the "truckmen", andare not known by the petname "thullaa" reserved for their colonial cousins. A bus with a Jhelumnumberplate that has been playing toesy with ours a while ago now lies pulled over. The copsapparently know our driver and his bus company, so they wave him on.

Our driver curses under his breath, blesseshimself with a broad grin, and starts driving much faster as soon as we have crossed. At one stage I can seethe speedometer crackling along at 180 kmph, overtaking everything else.

In the seat behind Raghu, the close friend of a man we have touched base withthrough the cabbie network abroad keeps very quiet, and does not make eye contact.

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The bus stops at the rest area off the Syal Chowk interchange, a very large andmodernistic complex, where we shall have a 15 minute halt. The father of the child in our bus tellsme that Sargodha and Jhung lie in the same direction as the setting sun. For me, for now, that will haveto be enough. For what it's worth, Delhi lies in the direction of the rising sun, tomorrow.

We freshen up, and let me assure you, the men's room at this rest area iskept very VERY clean, close to Changi standards, by a very angry man who forces people to clean up behindthem. The squatters and the standees, the turd and the splatter, nothing and nobody is safe from his broom, itseems.

Raghu heads for the food and drinks area as a guest of some people who insist; I head for the mosque inthe same compound. Minimalistic in design, airy, and in strong basic earth colours. None of thedistracting garish gaudy green/blue. This is a true House of God, in my humble opinion.

I am looking around inside when the priest-cum-caretaker comes up and verypolitely asks me if he can help me, and in the way of our people, places an unspoken question on who Iam, where am I from, and what am I doing here all within. I go through the visiting Hindu with son from India drill. Itell him that I do wish, pray, that I can come back here some day and take the road to Jhung. He looks atme in a very -- how do I put this -- soft, way. Then we both pray together, me with folded hands and he withopen palms.

I head for the parking lot with the priest. While he is explaining to me themechanics of keeping the rest area clean and safe on a 24x7 basis, a huge big ToyotaLandCruiser pulls in, half-a-dozen lumpen youth fall out, and once again I smell cheap booze as theycareen off towards the food.

These, also, are realities. An old man in an apron that has a word withmixed English and Urdu script on it walks around picking up stubs and other garbage from the Belgian pave.

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The ride from Syal Chowk to Sheikhupura is more like the Punjab that my fatherused to describe. Thickly populated low standing crops with groves and orchards in between. Green and gold arethe defining colours, and song is on breath.

Very soon, too soon, the bus slows down and we are getting off the M2towards the Sheikhupura exit, where we leave the bus, with quite a few other people. Everybody else hastheir eyes riveted on Sushmita Sen now in Punjabi suits, and Govinda.

We are chased by tongawallahs and autodrivers, so I head across the road to buy a smoke. What do you know, B&H costs less in Pakistan thanit does in India. Our contact waits till everybody else who also got off the bus disperses, and thensoundlessly motions us towards a waiting van.

Sheikhupura was, over the last few days, visited by around 3000 Sikhs from Indiaon a group pilgrimage, as well as a few hundred from other countries, and it is visibly apparent that afew have over-stayed their departure by a few days. There is talk of a one-billion dollar investment over thenext few years by ex-pat Sikhs towards setting up a super-specialty hospital as well as acquiring realestate.

On a purely perception basis, the body structure of many of the inhabitants of this part of PakistanPunjab is more towards the fair and tall, rather than the wheatish and stocky. One of theinhabitants of the van, who is a local policeman and shares a common Jat surname, claims that at leasttwo-thirds of the population of Sheikhupura had Sikh ancestors. In 1947.

But then, by the time he said this,the bottle of Indian whisky that was being circulated around in the van was almost over, too.

We are being taken on a very rapid drive to Nankana Sahib, Talwandi, and thenceinto Lahore by people who refer to themselves as "Jats". They talk about grandparents who wentto Baghdad and Shanghai and Italy but stayed back after 1947.A few sport "karas".

We argueour views on the fate of religions perishing without links to sovereignty, but agree that progress isessential for either to survive. We do not discuss cricket or movies.

We do stop, en-route, at a cattle and livestock fair where our friends plan toreplenish their stock of booze. Apart from the meat on hoof, there is street theatre with males acting out thefemale roles, "record dance" inside tents, pink cotton candy, Bollywood music, and dust mingled withthe smell of cowdung. And the menfolk are, by and large, huge.

The legacy of the sword, the evolution of the genepool towards stronger survivors,be it massacres or acquiring of land/women/livestock, and the external as well as internecine persecutionin the course of time of every religion, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and lately Ahmeddiyas as well as Christians, inand around Sheikhupura, is the stuff that legends and emotional arguments are made of.

Sheikhupura was the subject of defining episodes, during the 1947 carnages, that Ilistened to when young. Today I hear more, from various slots in history. Hindu mahants who tried tocontrol the incomes of gurudwaras by means so violent that even today their tales emerge, Sikh soldiersfrom the Dooabs and elsewhere who chased the original Bhattis and Muslims West of the Indus, Pathans who slaughteredfor whosoever paid them, Ahmeddiyas who were more recently savaged in 1989, Christians who are still routinelytreated badly, and the effects of the Sunni-Shia strife amongst Muslims.

And Muslims who apparently alwayskilled everybody. Nobody seems to recall the Buddhists, though.

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By the time we reach Talwandi, and then Nankana Sahib, it is dark. And toolate to visit the gurudwara. In the gathering dusk, we are driven past the cluster of gurudwaras which appearto be well maintained by the Wakf Board, but do not seem to be well lit. But then, along this side road, thesmell of open fires prevails everywhere anyways.

We stop for a quick snack at one of the many stalls on the periphery of one of thegurudwaras, potato and meat concoctions served with huge community naans, and it seems that the localpopulation eagerly awaits the commercial benefit of increased pilgrimages in the near future.

These are thesimple truths, it would seem, behind pilgrimages.

We do not see a single Sikh, but we are told that around ahundred Sikh families live in and around the gurudwaras, and that they don't look any different. The youngpre-teen frying our kababs is, apparently, a Sikh. He just nods as he goes about his business, though he doestell us that the stall has been rented.

West of us, unattainable for me, lies the confluence of the Chenab and Jhelum. Weturn back, eastwards into the dark horizon, and head for the bright loom of Lahore in the distance. This is abumpy ride, in silence. The new two-lane highway is being constructed slightly South of this alignment.

What's left to say, when the basics of religion, come down to the lowest common denominator, increased salesof kababs and tikkis for us tenants on this planet?

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We enter Lahore, and are dropped off at a spot where some of the buses terminate. Hirea taxi to drive us to the home of our next host, a very senior Pakistani Government person. We smell as thoughwe have come from a stable.

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(to be continued)

Veeresh Malik heads the Asia operations of Infonox. This article is also published at The Chowk