[Reader-list] Kamila Shamsie in India

[Shivam Vij]

Stranger in a Familiar Land

by Kamila Shamsie
The Guardian / February 18, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1150276,00.html


As with so many things to do with India and Pakistan, trouble started
well before it had any business doing so. When I set about getting a
visa to go to Madras (or Chennai as its now officially called) in
order to spend a week as writer-in-residence at Stella Maris college,
I imagined that my first stumbling block would be in fulfilling the
requirements of the visa application. But as it turned out, getting
hold of the visa office in Islamabad was a mini-saga in itself. When
I finally dialled the correct number, a fax machine picked up.
Undaunted, I wrote a letter asking for details of the visa
application process and attempted to fax it across. But this time, no
fax machine picked up - there was only the ringing of the telephone.
I almost gave up right there; this is a metaphor, I decided.
Pakistani phones Indian and gets a fax machine. Indian hears ringing
phone, answers it to speak to Pakistani, and gets an incoming fax.
The desire to communicate is there, but the machinery won't allow it.

It was to see if the metaphor could stand up to scrutiny that I
dialled the number a third time, and got through to a human being.
And so it was that a few days later I found myself in
Islamabad's "diplomatic enclave" (to enter the enclave you must board
a bus which lets you off at your embassy of choice. The Indian
embassy is the closest to the entrance, but it's also the last stop
on the route. This, too, is a metaphor). In the end, the officials
duly stamped my passport with a visa for Bombay and Madras (Pakistan
and India don't give each other's nationals visas for the entire
country, only for select cities within the country). And so on
February 6 I found myself in Bombay, where I was to spend two days
with friends on my way to Madras.

Nothing had prepared me for Bombay. I don't mean the extremes of its
extremes - though its wealth and its poverty are of an acuteness, and
exist at an adjacency to each other, that are startling even to
someone from Karachi. Simply, I had never been somewhere so
completely unfamiliar that still managed to exude such a sense of
familiarity. I knew, of course, that Bombay, like Karachi, was an
overcrowded, industrial port city, with colonial architecture
dominating certain parts of town, and that a distance of just over
500 miles separated them. But it is quite something else to be
confronted with the reality of the fact.

It struck me most forcibly one evening as I was sitting on the long
verandah of the Bombay Gymkhana - almost identical to the long
verandah of the Karachi Gymkhana - and, as evening descended, a cool
breeze raced in from the sea, and carried away the heat of the
afternoon. It's one of my favourite things in Karachi, the evening
sea breeze that transforms a hot day, and to find it in Bombay was
like meeting, for the first time, the sibling of someone you love and
in that stranger's features encountering utterly beloved expressions.

But it gets stranger. It was not only Karachi that I was reminded of
in Bombay. In the architecture of some of its streets, it is London.
In its frenzy, in the ultra-coolness of its ultra-coolness and in the
constraints of geography that make it grow upward rather than
outward, it is New York. And so there were moments in Bombay when it
almost seemed possible to believe myself in a dream in which the
three cities in which I had spent the previous year all came together
in one place, and yet that one place was nothing like any of those
other places at all.

When you are in a place that is partly familiar, your attention is
drawn more than ever to the ways in which it is utterly alien. So it
was with me and Bombay. The statues, for instance, took me entirely
by surprise. In all my travels, I had never stopped to consider that
in Karachi we have no statues, but seeing the ones in Bombay made me
aware for the first time that, in my home town, our monuments are
fountains or swords or arid mountaintops in the midst of a landslide -
to commemorate Pakistan's first successful nuclear test in 1998;
when I first saw it, I didn't know whether to laugh or weep - but
never people. Perhaps, I thought, what I sensed in Bombay was just a
microcosm of what India and Pakistan encounter with each other: a
constant movement between finding intimacy amid strangeness and
difference buried within the heart of similarity.

But then I went to Madras. And there, I found nothing of metaphor and
dream - just a city that clearly belonged to the same region of the
world as Karachi, and no more. In Madras you can't help being aware
at all times that you are in southern India - and that, as a
Pakistani, most of your associations with India are with northern
India. The food, the languages, the topography were all distinct
enough from the world I have grown up in that I was able simply to be
there without overlaying images of Karachi on to any part of it.

For many of the students at Stella Maris college, as well as for many
of the faculty, I was the first Pakistani they had met, and they were
immensely curious (and never less than utterly warm and hospitable).
One day I asked a hall full of students which country in southern
Asia they felt the strongest association with. I expected many to say
Sri Lanka - Madras is, after all, the capital of Tamil Nadu, so it
seemed natural to think there would be an affinity with the Tamils in
Sri Lanka - but to my vast surprise, the entire hall called
out "Pakistan". "Why not Sri Lanka?" I asked. "Because Pakistan used
to be the same country as India," someone offered. "So was
Bangladesh," I said. "Do you feel the same affinity there?" No, they
all said, not at all.

Afterwards, one of the teachers told me that there are many people in
Madras who identify with the Sri Lankan Tamils, but not so many in
the younger generation, since they don't remember the Sri Lankan
civil war at its height in the 80s. But partition was in the 40s, I
thought afterwards. This idea of affinity can't just be about a
historical past - particularly not in Madras, which remained almost
entirely untouched by the events of partition. It is our two nations'
official state of enmity, I'm sure, that keeps us so connected - you
have only to look at both countries' defence budgets to see how much
force we exert on each others' lives. That flexing of military and
rhetorical muscle at the same time ties us together and keeps us from
really knowing each other.

That same afternoon I was having an informal lunch with a group of
students and one of them finally mentioned the K-word, which no one
had thus far uttered. "Is Kashmir your Kashmir or our Kashmir?" she
said. "It's the Kashmiris' Kashmir," I replied, andwas surprised by
the degree of assent around me. But one of the students said, "I
think of Pakistan as our Pakistan." The girls around her hushed
her. "Don't say that in front of her," one of them whispered. The
girl looked at me as though to say she meant no offence but was
simply stating a fact. "We were the same country," she said. "Yes," I
said. "We were. A while ago." A few minutes later another of the
girls said, "We didn't know what to expect when we heard you were
coming. We thought you'd be all - " and she made a gesture of someone
covered up from head to toe. Then she pointed to my V-necked kurta
with its rolled-up sleeves. "But you look just like us." I knew then
that I was to them what Bombay had been to me - something far more
familiar than anticipated.

Back in my hotel that evening, I ran into one of the women in
housekeeping who asked me where I was from. "Karachi," I said, and
could see that she wasn't quite able to place the name. "Your mother
tongue is Hindi?" she asked, which I already understood as a
shorthand for asking me if I were from northern India. "Urdu," I
replied. There was a moment's silence and then, "Karachi is on the
Pakistan side of the border?" "Yes." "What, in Pakistan itself?"
"Yes." I still can't stop thinking of the way she phrased her
questions, as though, in her mind, there existed a place on the
Pakistan side of the border that was not Pakistan itself.

Now back in Karachi, I find that the part of me which writes fiction
is utterly captivated by this idea - a city that is the border itself
rather than existing within either nation - and in my imagining, the
material of which that city, that border, is built dissolves into
abstraction or transforms into impenetrable steel as
contexts shift.



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