Love in the Time of Kargil

Only a few hours before I met my in-laws for the first time on May 28,

two Indian fighter jets had been shot down by the Pakistan army.


I am Indian. My wife, Mona, is Pakistani. We got married in Toronto last

week where Mona's family now lives.

When I called my parents in India to tell them that I was going to marry

Mona, my mother asked, "What does her family think of the war that has

started?"

Mona's brothers and father have been waking up at five in the morning to

watch India and Pakistan battling it out -- on the cricket fields in

England, where the World Cup tournament is currently underway.


A day before our wedding, India had beaten Pakistan in the match in

Manchester. India is now out of the reckoning and Pakistan is the

favorite for winning the final on Sunday.

After the man conducting our wedding had declared us married, the

assembled guests joined their hands to pray. The bride's brother solemnly

intoned, "May Allah let Pakistan lift the World Cup...."

The next day, a writer in a Pakistani newspaper declared with much less

humor, "Whether in the playing fields or the battlefields, we cannot

accept Indian hegemony."

A younger cousin of mine, on hearing the news of my marriage, sent me an

email chain-letter calling for donations to aid the children of the

Indian pilot killed ("martyred") by the Pakistanis.

In the last few days, there have been growing reports of clashes along

the Line of Control between India and Pakistan.

The badly-mutilated bodies of six Indian soldiers were handed over by the

Pakistanis some days ago. Earlier today, the Indian army claimed to have

killed "several hundred invaders."

In this season of bloodshed -- from Kosovo to Kashmir -- am I calling for

more weddings rather than funerals?

During the India-Pakistan match in Manchester, one lone spectator had

held a sign "Cricket for Peace." I, too, could walk around with a placard

saying "Marriage for Peace."

The point, of course, is not marriage, but peace.


I like the way in which my neighborhood deli has changed the old slogan

"Make Love Not War." A large cloth banner, hung along the back of the

store, colorfully proclaims, "Make Soup Not War."

We need everything we can get to stop war. It needn't necessarily be

love. Soup will do too.

And marriage.

But, for this to happen, there have to be fewer restrictions on travel

and exchange between the peoples of India and Pakistan.

For such a large population, with deeply shared histories and passions,

it is nothing short of a tragedy that we allow only eleven men from both

countries to meet each other. Only to bowl a ball or to swing a bat.

\*\*\*

Dear reader:

What you read above was a letter I wrote a couple of months ago and
circulated on the web. It was a way of entering a debate about what was
happening in the Indian subcontinent, but also, I confess, a means of
informing friends of my hurried marriage. I return to it here to deal
with the issues in greater length and emphasize them at a distance of few
months when many of us are likely to be a little hot-headed. So, onward!

The Valentine's Day issue of The New Yorker earlier this year had a story
about an Indian girl, Dil (short for Dilshad), living in the Lefrak City
apartment complex in Queens. The report centered around the drama of
arranged marriage, although what gave the story its particular force was
the young woman Dil's conflicts and hopes about her future man. The
writer of the piece, Philip Gourevitch, had this to say about his main
dramatic prop: "Roughly one out of every six people on earth is Indian,
so it goes without saying that Indians find their mates in every
conceivable fashion. Nobody keeps track of how they all do it, but it is
widely believed that most still allow their matches to be made for them
according to family-brokered arrangements."

Although Gourevitch finds it "conceivable" that we do it in every
possible way, the point remains that arranged marriages are the quickest
and surest way for the dominant American mind to fix our identities. I
cannot remember the last time I sat in a barber's chair -- in New York,
in Florida, in Connecticut -- when I wasn't asked about arranged marriage!

With this single concept, Americans fix a bindi on our foreheads and
begin their target-practice in stereotyping.

Last year in July, a three-part series in the New York Times on new
immigrants, took great pleasure in presenting arranged marriages as the
only way in which desis settled here straddle two worlds. That story
began with the words: "Vinit Sethi, a New Yorker born and bred, was wired
from days of celebration when he mounted a small white horse to ride
toward his bride."

The Times writer, Celia W. Dugger, went on to even enlist modernity as a
bridesmaid in Indian arranged marriages. According to Dugger, the
children of Indian immigrants "have held onto their socially conservative
culture, fending off the onslaught of Americanization, by constant use of
those totems of modernity -- telephone, fax, E-mail message and jet
plane." Trust those backward, superstitious immigrants to turn even technology
into a totem!

How to explain, then, to the Duggers and Gourevitchs -- not to mention
all the barbers in New York, Florida, and Connecticut -- that my marriage
was not only not arranged but also that it turns on a host of other
questions and concerns, infinitesimally small and ineradicably huge?

When I met Mona's parents last month, I was as much worried about the
grey hairs that have begun to appear on my temple as about the enmity
that had once again erupted between India and Pakistan. And the ring that
didnUt quite fit on my finger proved as much a burden on my mind as the
fact that the Marriage Licensing office in TorontoUs York Center was less
prominently visible than the office marked Tax and Water Inquiry. What
did these questions have to do with arranged marriages?

Even the unavoidable, if not insurmountable, question of religious
difference -- Mona's family is Muslim, I was raised Hindu -- became real
only in the smallest of ways. In the hesitations and resulting confusion
of our greetings. For example, when a purely reflexive "Salaam Alaikum"
met in the air an equally automatic "Namaskar"....

I introduce these details, these minutiae of differences, not only
because I want to contest the strereotyping that occurs at the hands of
an ignorant, dominant American majority. No, more significantly, I also
want us to imagine friendship and love between Indians and Pakistanis. I
believe that what I have been telling you in this column makes the task
of imagining this relationship more concrete.

When the recent border troubles between India and Pakistan began, I
received an email from Anand Patwardhan, one of IndiaUs best-known
documentary film-makers. Anand wrote that he was unsure whether his
message had reached me because even email had become "a casualty as war
gives them the 'right' to intercept." My friend lamented that "all Pak
peacenik voices have been shut down in the last few days. So a vital link
for peace is broken."

In order to nurture links between the peoples of the two countries, we
shall have to create lines of exchange that are not in the hands of our
jingoistic political and military guardians.

The bus service started earlier this year between New Delhi and Lahore
was only a very small step in the right direction. According to a recent
news report, the Indian High Commission in Islamabad had received upto
25,000 personal visa requests after the Lahore meeting of the Indian and
Pakistani premiers in February. On both sides of the border, people wait
for weeks -- often in vain -- to receive permission to travel. They, and
the others like me, wanting to cross over to the other side, are caught
in the no-man's land of desire and waiting.

For a long time in the imagination of post-independence India, Saadat
Hasan Manto's Toba Tek Singh has been symbolic of the tragedy of
Partition. Toba Tek Singh, in Manto's story, is the name of the inmate of
the lunatic asylum who does not know whether he belongs to India or to
Pakistan. He breathes his last standing in that zone that newspapers call
the Line of Control.

To my mind, we need to find collective symbols for those who want to
occupy neither of the hyper-nationalist zones called India and Pakistan.
We hereby claim allegiance to peoples of both nations. We need a name for
those who, willingly and in full control of their senses, say no to the
lunatic war machines.

This is a very good time to give new life to Toba Tek Singh.