Train to Pakistan 2004: La, Hore?

Veeresh Malik
Aug 22, 2004



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

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1430-18th April’04 through late night, 18th April’04

It is now time for Sushmita Sen and Govinda on the video (Kyonki Main Jhoot Nahin Bolta, based loosely on the Jim Carrey "Liar Liar") to amuse a busload, full-house 2x2 Hino aircon, with the middle folding seats empty. This Pakistani fascination for Bollywood masala is something I have only heard about in the past, and am now experiencing first hand. The young child in the aisle seat, his mother in the window seat, and the child’s father in the seat behind them, as well as everybody else in 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 attire clad Sushmita.

I am in the aisle seat, while Raghu is getting an eyefull of the mountain range flashing past, from his window seat. We have been introduced to everybody in the bus as Punjabi Hindu Indians heading back by the conductor, and are plied with cola, oranges and chips as well as much ribbing about the pelvic sauce on display. The largely Punjabi speaking theatre going elite onboard want to know if all in are like what they see on the screen? We win this round by distributing yet another box of kaju barfee. Yes, we left with almost 2 dozen half-kilo packets.

Strangely, religious piety is not on display in this bus, and the few on board are not wearing dupattas. Bearded salvation must be a North-bound thing? However, one talkative clean-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 open debate on the pros and cons of is as wide-angle in this bus as anywhere else in the world. But nobody will say one bad word about Musharraf in the bus.

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

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

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The 6-lane M-2 Motorway from Islamabad to is 333 kilometres in length, and like no other road on the Indian sub-Continent. I believe everything I’ve heard about it after a few minutes of cruising at a flat 100 kmph, speed limit enforced by radar gun. Apart from the sheer excellence of the route (tested by Tamar Lane and Genghis Khan), pride in road design (paid for by Tata-Daewoo and swallowed by Nawaz Sharif’s ) and traffic management (trained by RCMP, really), there is this sheer downhill drop (in the area of the ancient Hindu temples, natch) we pelt through when we leave the Salt Ranges to head for the big bridge across the Jhelum. The speed limit is chopped drastically on this "ghat section", and the escape/slip ramps leading uphill for vehicles that have lost or faded brakes are often occupied by overloaded trucks.

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

It also has at least 10 straight and flat stretches, which are supposedly top-secret landing strips, but can be identified by the removeable central dividers. An example is at " 205 kms". The piano key markings, on which the Air Force regularly play at being wonderboys, with their F-16, Mirage-2000, A-5, F-7 and C-130 aircraft, have got aviation rubber. The fork-lifts used to remove the cement blocks stacked in the middle as well as "pushback", are also 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 that owner-drivers of these, mostly ancient Bedfords, lavish all their and money on doing up their trucks because 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 a Highway 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 which appear to be very heavy on the ground, are paid much more than their country cousins, and are supposed to be absolutely incorruptible. They have been re-designated "putrol" by the "truckmen", and are not known by the petname "thullaa" reserved for their colonial cousins. A bus with a Jhelum numberplate that has been playing toesy with ours a while ago now lies pulled over. The cops apparently know our driver and his bus company, so they wave him on. Our driver curses under his breath, blesses himself with a broad grin, and starts driving much faster as soon as we have crossed. At one stage I can see the speedometer crackling along at 180 kmph, overtaking everything else.

In the seat behind Raghu, the close friend of a man we have touched base with through 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 interchange, a very large and modernistic complex, where we shall have a 15 minute halt. The father of the child in our bus tells me that Sargodha and Jhung lie in the same direction as the setting sun. For me, for now, that will have to be enough. For what it’s worth, lies in the direction of the rising sun, tommorow.

We freshen up, and let me assure you, the men’s room at this rest area is kept very VERY clean, close to Changi standards, by a very angry man who forces people to clean up behind them. The squatters and the standees, the turd and the splatter, nothing and nobody is safe from his broom, it seems. Raghu heads for the and drinks area as a guest of some people who insist; I head for the mosque in the same compound. Minimalistic in design, airy, and in strong basic earth colours. None of the distracting garish gaudy green/blue. This is a true House of , in my humble opinion.

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

I head for the parking lot with the priest. While he is explaining to me the mechanics of keeping the rest area clean and safe on a 24x7 basis, a huge big Toyota LandCruiser pulls in, half-a-dozen lumpen fall out, and once again I smell cheap booze as they careen off towards the . These, also, are realities. An old man in an apron that has a word with mixed 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 to Sheikhupura is more like the Punjab that my father used to describe. Thickly populated low standing crops with groves and orchards in between. Green and gold are the defining colours, and song is on breath.

Very soon, too soon, the bus slows down and we are getting off the M2 towards the Sheikhupura exit, where we leave the bus, with quite a few other people. Everybody else has their eyes rivetted on Sushmita Sen now in Punjabi suits, and Govinda. We are chased by tongawallahs and auto drivers, so I head across the road to buy a smoke. What do you know, B&H costs less in than it does in . Our contact waits till everybody else who also got off the bus disperses, and then soundlessly motions us towards a waiting van.


Sheikhupura was, over the last few days, visited by around 3000 Sikhs from on a group pilgrimage, as well as a few hundred from other countries, and it is visibly apparent that a few have over-stayed their departure by a few days. There is talk of a one-billion dollar investment over the next few years by ex-pat Sikhs towards setting up a super-speciality hospital as well as acquiring real estate. On a purely perception basis, the body structure of many of the inhabitants of this part of Punjab is more towards the fair and tall, rather than the wheatish and stocky. One of the inhabitants of the van, who is a local policeman and shares a common Jat surname, claims that atleast two-thirds of the of Sheikhupura had Sikh ancestors. In . 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 thence into by people who refer to themselves as "Jats". They talk about grandparents who went to Baghdad and Shanghai and Italy but stayed back after . A few sport "karas". We argue our views on the of religions perishing without links to sovereignity, but agree that progress is essential for either to survive. We do not discuss or .

We do stop, en-route, at a cattle and livestock fair where our friends plan to replenish their stock of booze. Apart from the meat on hoof, there is street theatre with males acting out the female roles, "record dance" inside tents, pink cotton candy, Bollywood , and dust mingled with the 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//livestock, and the external as well as internecine persecution in the course of time of every , Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and lately Ahmeddiyas as well as Christians, in and around Sheikhupura, is the stuff that legends and emotional arguments are made of.

Sheikhupura was the subject of defining episodes, during the carnages, that I listened to when young. Today I hear more, from various slots in history. Hindu mahants who tried to control the incomes of gurudwaras by means so violent that even today their tales emerge, Sikh soldiers from the Dooabs and elsewhere who chased the original Bhattis and Muslims West of the Indus, Pathans who slaughtered for whosoever paid them, Ahmeddiyas who were more recently savaged in 1989, Christians who are still routinely treated badly, and the effects of the Sunni-Shia strife amongst Muslims. And Muslims who apparently always killed 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 too late to visit the gurudwara. In the gathering dusk, we are driven past the cluster of gurudwaras which appear to be well maintained by the Wakf Board, but do not seem to be well lit. But then, along this side road, the smell of open fires prevails everywhere anyways.

We stop for a quick snack at one of the many stalls on the periphery of one of the gurudwaras, potato and meat concoctions served with huge community naans, and it seems that the local eagerly awaits the commercial benefit of increased pilgrimages in the near future. These are the simple truths, it would seem, behind pilgrimages. We do not see a single Sikh, but we are told that around a hundred Sikh families live in and around the gurudwaras, and that they don’t look any different. The young pre-teen frying our kababs is, apparently, a Sikh. He just nods as he goes about his business, though he does tell us that the stall has been rented.

West of us, unattainable for me, lies the confluence of the Chenab and Jhelum. We turn back, eastwards into the dark horizon, and head for the bright loom of in the distance. This is a bumpy 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 , come down to the lowest common denominator, increased sales of kababs and tikkis for us tenants on this planet?

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

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