Wagha

by rajesh k. sharma

The road to Pakistan passes though Wagha, a small village on the Indian side of the border. It runs past two shining iron gates--one Indian, the other Pakistani--that face each other across 15 feet of space. A six-inch-wide white band on the land tells me that my India ends here and their Pakistan begins there. Fifty-three years and three months ago my mother's mother came from that side with her six children. She had lived in Lahore since her birth; when people began to talk about the impending Partition, she thought they were just being silly. How could anyone tear a country into pieces?

She died two winters ago. When I was a child, she used to fill my ears with her memories of Pakistan. She would tell me that one day when the relationship between the two countries improved she would take me to Lahore and show to me the houses she had lived in and the streets in which she had played. By the time some improvement began to appear, she was too old and feeble to support herself.

She died dreaming of Lahore. When the end came, she was talking to the dead: her husband, father and aunt. They had all died in Lahore, before the Partition.

A bus now plies regularly between New Delhi and Lahore, though it started too late for my grandmother.

Before I visited Wagha, I had no idea the border gates had now become theatres of aggressive icy patriotism. I merely expected to see the routine military ceremony of retreat that is performed every evening on this border check-post. What I saw, instead, was a spectacle that drove me mad with incomprehension.

There was a two-kilometer long queue of vehicles, all empty except for an odd driver in a local taxi here and there. People had arrived from distant places with the passion of pilgrims. In place of the cheerful and tranquil fatigue of a noisy pilgrimage however, here was a deep nostalgic gloom and a restrained excitement that showed in the brooding silence and subdued whispering of a crowd that must have numbered over three thousand.

Two hundred feet short of the gate on the Indian side stood a crescent-shaped pavilion in which the spectators were settling down with the premonitory gravity of accomplices. We walked past two hugely mustachioed soldiers who evoked half-terrified and half-laughing stares from little children. Their bright dark hair and spotless uniforms did not so much enhance their soldierly appearance as turned them into objects of coarse amusement--like those bogus antiques that dot the parlors of the nouveau riche.

A Border Security Force inspector offered us seats in a lawn that afforded a privileged view of the ceremony. We sat between the pavilion and the site of the ceremony. As the moment for the retreat approached, he advised us to move to the pavement along the road in order to get a closer view of the spectacle.

All of a sudden, all whispering died. It was like the silence of the sparrows when a falcon approaches. At almost precisely the same time and with choreographic coordination, hard and loud throats of officers on both sides of the border bawled out commands. The ceremony had begun.

The events that followed were so much alike and so mind-boggling that as soon as they were over I tried but failed utterly to recall the order of their occurrence. My historical perspective had momentarily twisted into a chronological labyrinth.

The soldiers on either side strode impossibly up to the gate (impossibly, because at times they attempted such a big stride that the uplifted leg nearly carried the whole soldier with it into the air) and stamped so powerfully with their big bright boots that I wondered if a pair survived half a week under such fury. Two soldiers had stationed themselves right in front of me. They glared at the soldiers across the border, spasmodically twitched their necks like agitated cocks, and threw back their elbows in distant defiance. It was a malicious ritual of cosmetic frustration, meant obviously to register their anger that the sun had set before they could prove themselves.

The soldiers on both sides pulled and flung open the great iron gates in perfect harmony, and the BSF inspector, who just a few minutes ago had been behaving quite normally, flew into a rage and marched past the gate. There, with flawless coordination, he was met by his counterpart from across the border. They shook each other's hands as if touching a live wire, recoiled with perfect hatred, turned, and marched back. More officers and soldiers went over to the gates now and the flags began to be lowered. The flags being what they are did not display any promptness or coordination. The carefully built human momentum and rhythm faced a breakdown, a defeat at the hands of mere things.

This was a critical moment. By now, however, the crowds on both sides of the border had plunged into the heady flux of the spectacle and were swimming in its circulatory rhythm. The theatrical snag required inspired innovation. A voice, tremulous and unsure, arose. It was so remote and weak that I could not make out what it said, but the crowd followed it up with a loud and clear "Jai" (Victory). Soon the only sounds to be heard were of slogans on either side: "Bharat Mata Ki Jai" (Victory to Mother India) and "Pakistan Zindabad" (Long Live Pakistan). The parrots overhead flew across the border unmindful of the frenzy below.

The people on either side were now permitted to come near the gates. I saw them looking at one another. They appeared to be trying to discover how far persons on the other side even looked different, but they were visibly disappointed. We walked into the lawn. There were school children on the other side who waved to us affectionately as soon as they saw us. We were reciprocating when some BSF soldiers noticed our impermissible conduct and politely asked us to stop. I saw the Pakistani Rangers on the other side passing similar instructions to the children.

The show was over. As we walked back to our car, I mused on the spectacle I had just witnessed. Here was a spectacle that a ritualized patriotic aggression had been enacting year after year for over half a century in order to frame and define two nation states. But the spectacle was leaking through the frame, in a hemorrhage of excessive meaning gone berserk, and it was confounding all narratives of reflexive patriotism. My friend Harbir pointed to a monument raised by the advocates of Indo-Pak friendship--a pile of concrete and two ill-sculpted hands locked in a handshake. A handshake in stone. The arms looked like they had been abruptly chopped off near the elbows.

Copyright © 2000 Rajesh K. Sharma. All Rights Reserved.

Rajesh K. Sharma is a writer hailing from Punjab, India.