After 62 long years, Major Habib Ahmed of Pakistan returns to India...To his friend
The first time I went to Wagah, I gawked. It’s really the only thing you can do there, and you need feel no embarrassment either. All around they’re gawking, across the border in Pakistan they’re gawking. So I was just one more gawker in the crowd that gathers to watch the carefully choreographed ritual that is the lowering of the flags and the closing of the border gates.
The climax of the ceremony comes when lines of immaculately uniformed men quick-step to the gate, ending up nose-to-nose with counterparts from the other side. In their wake, random folks run to the gate carrying flags, and back again. Slogans ring out on both sides, led by young men in powerful voices. It’s “Bharat Mata ki Jai” in India, and as loud as it gets, it never quite drowns out “Pakistan Zindabad” from over there. Nevertheless, everyone is in a cheery, festive mood. This is choreographed hostility, amusing and spectacular and at least to me, a whole lot more palatable than the real kind that kills people in both countries.
And this is what happens at Wagah in the evenings.
The next time I went to Wagah, it was one morning. No ritual this time, no slogans, no nose-to-nose meetings. Just a large number of trucks parked on and to the side of the road, packed to the brim with crates. “Those?” said my driver, “They’re tomatoes, going to Pakistan.”
In the dhabas just short of the gate, clumps of truck-drivers and blue-uniformed men mill about, waiting for I can’t yet say what. I find a seat somewhere among them and sit down, for I’ve got at least an hour to wait too. Order a chai, then another. Then something to eat, and I am served the fieriest paratha ever made. Luckily it comes with a large dish of cool dahi. All around me as I sweat through the paratha, the truck drivers sit, chat, drink, munch. Wait.
Suddenly, a commotion. Someone has emerged from the gate carrying a sheet of paper. Men leap up from all around me and run to him. He’s quickly surrounded by a knot of curious drivers, more joining the parade as he walks, reeking importance, to a concrete column, sticks the paper on it, ducks back through the men and is gone. Whoops of delight now, as drivers find their names or numbers or whatever listed on the sheet. In seconds, a line of smoke-belching trucks forms and starts barrelling through the gate, some drivers playing who-blinks-first to edge the others out. The tomatoes are headed across the border.
When, months later, onion prices in India set new records and the government announces plans to buy onions from Pakistan, I remember the tomatoes. I wonder if there were similar scenes on the Pakistan side in Wagah, doughty truck-drivers jostling to rumble across the border with their loads of onions. And I also wonder, if onions and tomatoes can make the crossing, why can’t some degree of peace and goodwill do so too?
But on this crisp morning, I chomp on my paratha, using plenty of dahi to douse its spice. Trucks rattle past for the best part of an hour. I while away the time with idle estimates of how many Indian tomatoes have entered Pakistan this morning, losing track at somewhere around 154,329. I am waiting. Not for onions, not for Godot, but for 86-year-old Major Habib Ahmed, retired from the Pakistan Army.
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Habib Ahmed grew up in Kapurthala, about two hours from here. His father and grandfather were well-known doctors there, so respected that the chowk near their home was named for the grandfather. Young Habib attended Randhir College, playing tennis and basketball regularly with his friend Rattan Chand Ahluwalia and other young men in town.
When he graduated, he found work in Delhi. But Kapurthala exerted a magnetic pull. Every weekend, in that first year or two of his career, he would jump on his motorbike and tear north through the plains of Punjab to see family and keep up with tennis. It was such a wrench to return that he would often put off leaving till worryingly early on Monday morning. Five hundred kilometres southward as day broke, and by 10 a.m. he’d be at his desk in Delhi.
Came Partition, and Habib gave up the Delhi job and migrated to Pakistan. In Lahore where his family settled, India was only a couple of dozen kilometres away, Kapurthala itself only a few dozen more. But in the mind, in the consciousness of two hostile countries, it was an infinitely greater gap. Habib’s friends, his tennis-playing days, were lost to him.
We get out of the car and walk in: Past the Hindu Putri Pathshala, past M/s Roshan Lal Shuttering Material, past Krishna and Sonia Beauty Parlour and a sign with just “Gold Coins Gold Chains”, all the way to a door that says, simply, “RC Ahluwalia 1926”.
(This story appears in the 11 March, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)