Gateway to India: Facing No man’s Land: End of the Journey?

GVK, I am left way behind by the account of your journey back from London to India in a 12 seater bus driven by Brian, your memorable if obsessive driver. I was surprised by the racism and xenophobia that you perceived in Germany. Bavarians used to be exceptionally xenophobic even towards their own East German cousins. I would very much like to compare this with my own experience or lack of any such encounters in France and England in a future blog.

GVK, since I last wrote a blog about my departure from New Delhi along with fellow journalist Subhash Chopra on our epic journey by road to Europe, quite a few readers have encouraged me to continue.

It seems that travelogues as a genre are a favourite and much esteemed form of literature with illustrious past and contemporary practitioners. One is under the pressure of a historical and literary imperative to render a fine account of one’s own journey. This is a difficult task since I kept no journals and rely entirely on what I remember after some 40 years.

Little had we realised as our train left Old Delhi for the border at Wagah holding our two tickets generously gifted by a caring friend, that we would be unceremoniously turfed out of the train at the Indian side of the border whilst the rest of the amused passengers would carry on into Pakistan. We were the only two mad hatters being forcibly disembarked, mercilessly watched by the Indian immigration and customs officers in their officious khaki uniforms. What we imagined was a simple border with a line drawn in the sand with two adjacent prefab buildings and their respective border controls. What greeted us as we were processed by the moustache-grooming Indian authorities was a vast mile wide no man’s land with the Pakistani border post a mere dot in the great distance in this featureless landscape. Our high spirits vanished when it dawned on us that we would have to cross this barren land on foot half-carrying and half-dragging our suitcases in the cruel sun. One could easily imagine a bemused group of Pakistani officials who had never seen anything like this sight of two stragglers walking the this imaginary gauntlet like in a Western movie and dragging their belongings. I imagined binoculars and perhaps guns with sights being trained on us as we walked this distance. Subhash and I debated if this was worth the risk and whether to return to New Delhi and re-plan our journey.
I cannot remember how long this perilous walk across the border took us. Finally we were ushered into a prefab building with iron bars, crowded with a self-satisfied group of officials who could not work us out. They scrutinized our passports whilst a junior official demanded the keys to our extra large suitcases and proceeded to open them and start rummaging through our belongings. I do not believe they had seen so many books being carried by any traveller. Subhash had several copies of a book he had written and published. I recall this had a solid chapter on Indo-Pakistani relations. The fact that we had a valid visa cut no ice with the chief official who made himself comfortable and started reading the book on page one, chapter one with a fresh cup of tea and his feet on the table. Were we smuggling seditious literature in to his country? Our passports showed us to be journalists. We cowered in a corner trusting fate to save the day. Subhash was interrogated from time to time to elucidate a finer point in one of the chapters of his book: what exactly did he mean by “ thaw in relationship” and so on.“ We may have to confiscate these books” said the official and “ and ask you to walk back to India, the way you came”
Hours and several phone calls and animated conversation with their HQ later, we were casually dismissed with a wave of a hand with no further interest in us. We repacked out bags as well as we could and wondered how we were going to Lahore, the first next big stop off on our journey. I remember boarding a local shuttle train service to Lahore’s grand station and having to pay for it using our depleting £3 of foreign exchange. I kept trying to improve our morale by remembering loudly that we were running alongside the famous highway that Rudyard Kipling makes the centre of action in Kim. A traveller’s romance with the new world could not be extinguished by so trivial a difficulty.
Our routine which was to become established was to leave our suitcases in the left luggage department of a railway station where it was most secure and set out to explore the city we were in. We headed straight for the coffee house which we had heard was a haven of Pakistani intelligentsia, writers and poets and hacks and political rabble rousers, in other words very much in the mould of the coffee house in New Delhi where most of our time had been spent. The contrast could not have been greater: we were doubtful if there was a single journalist among the crowd we saw, dressed not in customary shirt and trousers but in desi shirt that reached the knees and baggy billowing pyjamas. There was not a single woman present in the motley crowd and it seemed no one spoke English. We were apprehensive about approaching strangers and declaring our identities. We backtracked to the station with a new plan.
Subhash and I hatched a plan to approach the station master at Lahore and obtain permission to spend the night on the benches in the waiting room normally reserved for travellers with valid tickets. We had a major surprise in store for us. The station master, a larger than life Pathan was pleased to see two Indians and unceremoniously invited us to stay with him and partake of his hospitality. We were to spend two days with him enjoying fine home cooked rich Punjabi cuisine and he would show us the sights including the great Fortress and Shalamar gardens that Lahorians were justly proud of and the magnificent Badshahi mosque. We talked openly about Indo Pak relations under General Ayub Khan’s rule late into the evening over steaming cups of tea. We wondered about commonality between India and Pakistan and concurred that as brothers of the same cultural and ethnic roots, we must remain friends and not adversaries. During the day we wandered round Lahore, apprehensively as the town folk seemed caught in a medieval time warp: this did not help us let down our guard and announce that we were Hindu Indians in Pakistan.
Our generous host was to put us on a train bound for Quetta from where we had planned to take a two day’s and two night’s journey to Zahedan in Iran through a moonscape of deserts and mountains accompanied by an army of cross border smugglers. We were bypassing Afghanistan altogether.
I did regret not having gone to fabled Kabul. One sees Kabul in one’s mind’s eye, then, as a polyglot bazaar, teeming with scheming money changers, bandookwallas, local Mafia godfathers, European hippies hunched over steaming tea cups in dark cavernous teashops, rows of run down buses parked tightly against one another . I overstate my Indiana Jones sinister perspective. A Delhi friend of mine who worked in Kabul for a couple of years in the 60s did describe it as a University town with a dusty dignity of its own.
We had no tickets.. just the commanding verbal authorisation that we would be travelling free to Quetta from Lahore. We hoped that this would resonate enough with the station master in Quetta and result in further free tickets to Iran’s border town of Zahedan. There was trouble ahead as we had nearly run out of our meager foreign exchange even before we had left Pakistan behind with 6 more countries to cross and 38 more days to go. Most shocking news of all awaited us in Teheran on the 27th of May 1964.......,

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