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The Rediff Special/ Kushanava Choudhury

Eighteen hours after leaving New York, the chaotic airport scene had the makings of a typical NRI homecoming. Boxes bursting with imported goods careened down the lone working conveyor belt. Men lunged for their suitcases while their wives clutched on to the children. On the television monitors, India batted against Pakistan in distant Brisbane. At the customs line, weary travellers jostled for position like school children. On the far wall, a sticker screamed in unmistakable red block letters: QUIT KASHMIR. Fifteen miles away, beyond a pair of meaningful fences, lay India.

In my mind, I had encountered the intimate enemy: I had arrived in Pakistan.

It was the morning of Eid -- the breaking of the Ramzan fast -- when I landed in Lahore. Less than a month had passed since the hijacking crisis in Kandahar, for which India had blamed Pakistan and vice versa. So-called ISI agents were routinely sniffed out of Muslim ghettos in Bombay and Delhi. Bomb blasts in Karachi bazaars were blamed on shadowy RAW operatives. From the fresh graves of Kargil's martyrs, leaders on both sides hollered threats of another "limited war." Just three months had passed since a military coup had ousted the democratically elected Nawaz Sharif and brought General Pervez Musharraf to power. Fantastically, I imagined Lahore under the generals' thumb as a giant ghetto -- cosseted by tanks and squeezed within the fanatical grip of bearded mullahs with machine guns.

The city, instead, was in a celebratory mood. Children played cricket on rooftops. The alleys were full of Bollywood tunes. Everywhere, graceful men in knee-length kurta pyjamas hugged one another in the customary Eid greeting. It was an auspicious holiday and the biryani was piled high at feasts all across the city.

As evening arrived, stores and restaurants re-opened and Lahore's broad boulevards came alive. A band of dhol players danced to the instrument's pulsating beat near the beautifully lit fountain in the ritzy section of Gulberg. Lahore's little yellow Suzuki cabs (similar to the Indian Maruti 800s) darted everywhere, leaving Fords and Mercedes in their wake. I haggled with a taxi driver over the pre-arranged fare. After about five minutes, he said in Urdu, "Why haggle today? It is Eid."

That evening, I visited Ahmed Rashid, a prominent Pakistani journalist who works for the BBC. We spoke about the real possibility of another Kargil misadventure, the heightening tensions and of the sense of uncertainty wrought by the recent coup. The events of the last six months had escaped no one. Yet, daily life went on, as unfettered as before. The journalists wrote, the politicians brayed, the dholwallahs drummed and a nation slouched onward. On the way back to my hotel, I asked Rashid's driver if he knew the day's cricket score. "Oh saab, Pakistan jeet gaya," he said, exultant, and proceeded with the details of India's thrashing Down Under.

On the flip side of the subcontinent, all was well.

The road from the airport to Lahore is a modern marvel, on par with any highway in the West. Rumour has it Nawaz Sharif built it so that he could commute from his home to the airport in two minutes. Like all his predecessors to the throne in Islamabad, Sharif treated Lahore -- and, later, Pakistan -- as if it was his personal fiefdom.

Yet he was Lahore's favourite son -- a wealthy industrialist from one of the city's elite families who first became Punjab's chief minister and, then, the prime minister of Pakistan. At heart, though, he remained a Lahori. Even as prime minister, the story went, Sharif would sometimes divert his plane to Lahore for some gajar ka halwa at his favourite restaurant.

Pakistan is the product of two cultures, the colonial and the feudal -- sometimes grand, sometimes magnanimous and often deeply authoritarian. The colonial stamp is everywhere in Lahore. The British built this handsome city in all its Gothic and Victorian glory. This was Rudyard Kipling's hometown. On the Mall Road, Lahore's main thoroughfare, Kim's gun is flanked by the Lahore Museum -- Kipling's father was its first curator -- and the historic Punjab University. All of it is designed in the redbrick British Mughal-style architecture used to build railway stations and government buildings during the colonial period throughout the subcontinent.

At the far end of the Mall Road, the Provincial Assembly Hall -- Punjab's state assembly -- remains closed, but the area teems with posh shops and offices in white columned structures that echo Connaught Place in Delhi. Mall Road has been renamed Shahrah-e-Quaid-e-Azam now. But, throughout the city, the old British names -- Davis, Egerton, Montgomery -- remain in colloquial use.

The colonial hangover is just as present in the editorial pages of the city's English dailies, where a style of writing that is becoming increasingly rare in India still survives. Suited, booted brown sahibs, the political heirs of the Anglophile, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, recycle the same doomsday pieces about rampant corruption, democratic misrule and Pakistan's ideology with great ineffectual self-righteousness. These are the men, the generals, the bureaucrats and the judges who govern Pakistan with a contempt for ordinary people that would have made Lord Mountbatten proud.

The feudal culture dominates here too. A coterie of about a dozen major families -- all well placed in the military, bureaucratic and industrial corridors of power -- continue to run Pakistan like modern-day zamindars. In the countryside, daily newspaper accounts lament the use of private jails and revenge killings as a proxy for the rule of law. In Lahore, the tactics -- bribery, tax evasion and personalistic rule -- are more sophisticated, but the despotic trait is the same. It is the same depravity one finds in politics and business in India. Except, in Pakistan, without the minimal restraints of law and democratic accountability, the rulers are more incestuous and the epidemic thrives untrammelled.

Yet, for all its colonial and feudal hangovers, Lahore is the kind of city one can fall passionately in love with. The second largest metropolis in Pakistan, it is the heart and soul of Punjab. The streets are safe and teeming till midnight. The city worships its heroes -- Imran Khan, Wasimbhai -- and prides itself on its delicacies -- biryani and mutton masala, barfis and Sharif's gajar ka halwa.

I remember ordering lunch in a restaurant on my first day. I expected an Indian meal -- skimpy portions, especially the meat. When the mountain of biryani and a veritable vat of mutton arrived, I was stupefied. "Is this for one person or two?" I asked the waiter. He simply smiled and said, "I can tell you are not from Pakistan. Here, this is how we eat."

There is little of the bootlicking obsequiousness with which the proletariat serves the middle classes in Indian cities. In Lahore, it is difficult to distinguish an executive from his driver on mere appearance. Almost all men, regardless of class, dress in elegant knee-length kurtas with pyjamas. There is dignity and pride in how men speak and carry themselves. In the streets, one rarely sees the desperation, the pollution and grime, the destitution and overcrowding, the multitudes huddled into slums and shanties that are a fixture in Delhi, Bombay or Calcutta.

In the lush Punjab, both east and west, life has always been more prosperous than elsewhere in the subcontinent. In Lahore, the voracious Punjabi appetite for life's uncomplicated pleasures -- food, drink and sport -- is matched only by their generosity. By the dictates of international relations, Pakistan is a rogue state, a strange, dangerous place, a veritable North Korea with nukes. By Indian expectations, Pakistan is a deadly menace, a country of secessionist fundamentalists bent on destroying the national fabric. Yet, in Lahore I almost felt like I had come home.

At the Lahore Press Club or the Journalists Resource Centre, ordinary Pakistanis opened their arms to me, a complete stranger, as if I was a long-lost brother. In my academic work, as a student researching the role of democracy in the Kargil conflict, they were invaluable in their assistance. They helped me arrange interviews, introduced me to key figures and spent hours helping me understand the myriad aspects of Pakistani state and society. But, most importantly, they welcomed me into their lives. I met their wives and children. I attended their social occasions. When I sick with the flu, Amjad Bhatti took me to see a doctor. When I had no hotel reservation, I stayed with Mohammad Tanveer and his family. I was received with a kind of warmth that I doubt would ever be extended in Delhi or Calcutta.

As a Bengali, I was a source of ceaseless curiosity. Had I read Geetanjali; how was it in the original? What could I tell them about Subhas Chandra Bose? What did I make of this Mamata Banerjee character? Why did Sourav Ganguly cower before Shoaib Akhtar so? And, of course, would I like to eat some fish? There were so many questions on both sides. The estrangement of one people, divided by South Asia's Iron Curtain, had simply been too long.

"We should not be friends," Aziz Mazhar, a veteran Urdu journalist and president of Lahore's chapter of the India-Pakistan People's Forum, told me one day as we scooped up keema do-peyazi with rogni naans, "We should be brothers."

For all its claims, the promise of Muslim brotherhood remains largely undelivered

The Rediff Specials

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