One Afternoon

The fields were green and it all seemed normal till a causal glance brought into vision the watchtowers with floodlights. The towers were spaced about 100 meters apart and each had about six lights; three on the top row and three on the bottom row. The towers were on the Indian side of the border. Between the borders lay a patch of sandy dirt known as the "no man’s land" and there was a fence of old, rusted barbed wire.

The Pakistani ranger, who was walking with me, to a marker, located on the border known as "Point Zero", said each night an armed patrol would go out along the sandy dirt path. The aim was not to detect Indians, but to see if the tracks of the smugglers could be seen. He smiled and said that smugglers walked backwards so that it would seem they were coming from the opposite direction, but were in reality coming from their respective nations.

As we walked up to Point Zero, there was a Pakistani armed ranger watching a group of Indians within an arm’s length and the Indians were looking into West Punjab and scanning their handy cams across the landscape. Watching over the Indians were three mounted troopers of the Indian Border Force; one of them was a Sikh.

They were smiling, because on the Pakistani side of the fence, a group of school children were scanning their own handy cams towards them. A couple of Pakistani school children darted a quick glace at the Indians and then quickly, put their feet across the border and touched the Indian soil. The Indians on the horse back laughed and Pakistani ranger was smiling and in return, an Indian lady held out her hand, so that it was across the border and filmed the Pakistani school children from within Pakistan.

Both the Indians and Pakistanis looked at each other and smiled and silently mimicked a greeting and looked at the barbed wire separating them and shook their heads and laughed.

I walked past an Indian army personnel in battle dress, his Belgian FN leaning towards the ground, as he craned his neck over his shoulder to see what was happening about 200 meters behind him. A group of Pakistani rangers came up and walked up and relived another guard from his post, who headed back towards the barracks. The air was fresh with a hint of manure and it was nice to be away from the city and there was a smattering of a few foreigners who had also come to see the lowering of the flag ceremony.

About 300 odd meters behind the Indian side of the gate was a grand stand, where the Indians were starting to seat themselves to watch the proceedings. It was interesting to watch them, because they would walk past the Indian administrative building and take a footpath, which ran alongside the border. They would walk past the Pakistani guards and then curl back towards the Indian side and sit in the grand stand.

There were two grand stands and they faced each and were separated by the road which lay between them; a road that run over the border. They did not face the border, as did the Pakistani grand stand, which curved in a "U" shape, with the bottom of the "U" directly being opposite the Pakistani and Indian gates on the border. They were clump of old trees, on the Indian side, which obscured their vision of the border and while sitting, they had to glance at their right angles to see the border and the guards and the gates, over which the flags were limpidly wafting in a weak breeze.

Soon people started to over crowd the grand stands and they started to drift towards the gates, sitting on the ground right up to about 50 meters from the border. They were all smiling and occasionally, some one would wave and a wave would be returned. Patriotic music was playing on both sides and as the yellow sun turned a shade of red and gold, the commands were barked out. Like mindless toy soldiers, the guards went through their drills and the flags were lowered and hands were shaken and the gates were closed and bugles called the last post.

It was an interesting experience and made more interesting when one realized that men had died here and fought here. It was a place where a line on a map, drawn in the shuttered rooms of the Punjab Club in Lahore by a British lawyer, made sure that there would be this ritual at each setting of the sun. There was no sense of overt or covert hostility and it seemed that day, all the hatred existed within the rarified fantasy bubble, which enveloped New Delhi and Islamabad. There was no hatred between the men, who had armed weapons and looked at each other and it seemed that hatred only existed between those Indians and Pakistanis who were far removed from this place.

A funny thing happened and the reason why everyone was smiling as we left was because we realized that they were not the ubermench of our fears and we were not the monsters of their nightmares. We were all humans; we all had hopes and we had dreams and we all shaded our eyes from the sun, which shone like a copper tone rivet in the pale, cloud dusted sky over the plains of Punjab.

We also realized that our governments were wiser than we generally credited them. People to people contact and the more we learn about each other, will un-employ the hate mongers on both side of the divide. What will our demigods do, when there is no hate to justify their incompetence? When there is no hate, our politicians will be forced to deal and solve problems, which afflicts us all and that is how to provide us with a better life and not how to prepare to hate each other. What happens to hate, when you stop hating? God forbid, they would cry and panic as they would think of a reason to goad the foolish to state the myth of invincibility, which has been dripped into our conscience a drop at time to a point, where it has poisoned us mentally.

A Roman emperor wrote a few lines, while he was waiting for a battle with the Goths on the plains of Hungary and he said that truth is what we see and a lie is, what we hear. He wrote these words nearly 2000 years ago and his name was Marcus Aurelius. That languid late summer’s day I saw the truth and I agreed to refuse to listen to the lie. We hate, because of what we preach about each other and when we see each other for ourselves, we will see our faces looking back and our smiles being reflected in their smiles. That day, I smiled and there was smile returned in my direction and I laughed as I headed back to the parking lot, thinking that reason we are being fooled is because we chose to be fooled.

I drove through the darkness and entered the lights of Lahore a little after eight in the evening. Turned on the television and nothing had changed; the threats were still there, but I had changed.