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No Three-Headed Monsters, Either

I met Rubina, Ismail, Tarannum, Rukhsana and several other children in a tiny upstairs room in the slum of Tulsiwadi, near Bombay Central station, some years ago. They were noisy, inquisitive, chatty, smiling -- as you might expect any gaggle of kids to be. In minutes, we were old friends. Several plonked themselves on my lap as I sat there, one or two more clambered onto my back. "Uncle, uncle," they cried when they found out I wrote, "promise us you will mention all our names in an article!" I promised. My suddenly acquired nephews and nieces smiled happily and clambered and chattered on.

So when I told them I was leaving for Pakistan in a few days, gasps rippled through the room, then a torrent of questions. Wasn't I scared? Wouldn't I get killed in Pakistan? Or at least beaten up? Aren't Pakistanis all yearning to fight a war with us? And this most interesting query: don't all Pakistanis have black faces?

How ironic, I thought to myself as I struggled to answer them. These young charmers are the very people we accuse of being closet Pakistanis; to whom we say, with an easy arrogance, "Go back to Pakistan." How almost scrumptiously, almost painfully, ironic that they nurture just the same vacuous impressions about that country that the rest of us do.

How sad.

After I returned to Bombay, I did mention my little friends in an article -- Altamas, Mehrunissa, Shaikh, Bala and all the rest. I'm back from Pakistan, I told them. My bones remain intact. I'm quite alive, thank you. And no, I did not see any black faces there.

So much for impressions. During and after that trip, I learned something well: that they are best left to decay at the border.

I don't know if, among all that must have gone into getting ready for his recent drive across that border, Atal Bihari Vajpayee had a preparatory meeting with kids as I did. If he had only cared to ask, I would have recommended one. Still, he must have rolled over the line with at least a subconscious understanding of much the same lesson I learned. That all the impressions, stereotypes, caricatures, hostility -- all of it, manufactured and promoted for half a century, is ugly baggage that has weighed us down too long. If India and Pakistan are to make a new beginning towards peace, the baggage is indeed best left to rot.

The thing is, I'm pretty confident Vajpayee, too, did not see any black faces in Pakistan.

Of course it is a tiny step, entirely symbolic too: but Vajpayee's weekend bus excursion into Pakistan is a sign of some hope. No, I don't expect it will immediately bring peace and end enmity. But at least he is not threatening Pakistan with nuclear Valhalla, as Mr Loose Kannon Advani did not so long ago. At least he is talking to Nawaz Sharif, talking of ending decades of hostility. And if the talking does actually lead us down that long and winding road to peace, more power to Vajpayee. If he finds peace with Pakistan, if he is able to turn us from staring across the border with hatred to the urgent priorities India has ignored for too long, he deserves a long stint in his chair. Yes, if it becomes necessary, I will vote to give him that stint.

For talking to Pakistan, really, is our only option. It is about time we understood that and took that option. It is about time the self-important "hawks," so supercilious about their supposed grasp of hard-nosed reality compared to the supposed airheadedness of the "doves", learned the truth: they are the ones sublimely out of touch with reality. What's worse, their pomposity is no more than a bubble that has already cost us thousands of lives. Peace is the one reality worth striving for: a honourable peace that addresses every tangled issue between us. After half a century wasted in conflict, with millions of lives left stunted by it, it is time we found peace.

There is another reality as well. Despite the hostility, Vajpayee and Sharif have enormous reserves of goodwill to build on. It is time, too, that we brought that goodwill, not hatred that never ends, to bear on our relationship with our neighbour; time we turned it into the hard-nosed touchstone of India vs Pakistan. I say that because I am tired of being told condescendingly that friendly gestures between the people are fine, but they have no bearing on how nations must behave. Nonsense: they have everything to do with how we deal with each other.

You see, all we Indians find in our press about Pakistan are pictures of Jamaat-e-Islami goons flinging stones to protest Vajpayee's visit. All Pakistanis must see are Shiv Sena thugs disrupting Ghulam Ali's concert, or Calcutta idiots rioting because Pakistan is winning a Test match. If that's all we know of the citizens of the other country, it's only natural to slide into hatred. Because both Governments have made it so difficult for their people to meet, it is that much harder to remember goodwill, build the small friendships that will lead to peace. It is also that much more crucial.

Give it a thought: If we knew the goodwill better than we know the hatred, we would have learned to live as good neighbours a long time ago.

That's something else I learned in Lahore, and most of all from many quite ordinary Pakistanis. One, in particular, left me speechless.

His name was Mohammed Nissar. A baby-faced late teen, he drove a rattletrap of a rickshaw for a living. "Twenty rupees," he had said when we told him we wanted to get to Tabaq restaurant one evening. We knew where Tabaq was; his price seemed far too much for that distance. But Mohammed refused to lower it and we were in a hurry. So the three of us squeezed in and put-putted off to the restaurant. On the way, we got talking. When he discovered we were from India, he brightened visibly and wanted to know: "What's it like to live in India? Tell me about Madhuri Dixit!" And what did he think of the decades of enmity between us? "Ham sab insaan hain," he philosophised in his singsong Urdu, "we're all human beings, and shouldn't we remember that?"

When we reached Tabaq, Mohammed refused to take his fare. "You're from India," he said, "so the ride is free."

I would really like to know why this young man is less representative of Pakistan's people than the stone-throwers of the Jamaat-e-Islami. Why is it that in simply walking around Lahore, I met far more curious, friendly, ordinary Pakistanis than I did stone-throwing maniacs?

Come to think of it, I met no stone-throwers at all. And yes, certainly no black faces.

Dilip D'Souza