Visiting the Enemy
by AMITAVA KUMAR
My Pakistan trip.
Last week, let’s say, you applied for a visa to visit Pakistan. Let’s also say you are an Indian citizen.
On Massachusetts Avenue in Washington, D.C., you pass a long line of consulates and embassies, their national flags draped outside their walls, before you spot the green and white flag of Pakistan.
The massive, metal doors of the Pakistan embassy have a repeated pattern of a large bronze crescent and star. When you step in, you are face to face with Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in full military regalia, regarding you from his place on the wall.
You are told by the round-faced receptionist, her face appearing rounder because of the scarf around her head, that the visa office is located at the back of the building. You walk down a stairway, which has the faint stench of urine, and get to a small room where, flanked by portraits of Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah and Iqbal, you give your documents across a Formica counter to a Pakistani official.
The man flips open your passport and quickly looks at your name, when you say that you are married to a Pakistani citizen. He asks you to wait and disappears into an inner chamber. When the official steps back into the room, he politely tells you that the form you have filled out is not for Indian nationals. He takes out another form. This one is much longer.
On the embassy website you had learned that the visa application takes two days to process. You are now told that this schedule does not hold for Indian nationals. Your application will have to be sent to Islamabad and an inquiry needs to be conducted. You ask how long this inquiry is going to take. You are not given an answer.
You have, of course, brought Xerox copies of your ticket that shows you flying into Pakistan in a fortnight. For good measure, you also show the official the original ticket. You press into his hand your green card, a letter of permanent employment in the United States, a statement from your local bank attesting to your solvency, a copy of your Canadian marriage certificate, and, finally, the faxes from your wife’s family in Pakistan offering addresses and phone numbers.
As you look at the form you see that it has the following letters in block letters: “YOU MUST REPORT FOR POLICE REGISTRATION WITHIN 24 HRS. OF ENTRY IN PAKISTAN AND PRIOR TO DEPARTURE/ARRIVAL AT EACH SUBSEQUENT PLACE OF VISIT IN PAKISTAN.”
You fill out the form and hand it back to the official. He has nothing encouraging to say about the time required for the consulate to get back to you. In fact, he makes it clear he has nothing to say at all.
Another part of the form asks: “I belong/do not belong have previously belonged have not previously belonged to a MILITARY/SEMI MILITARY/POLICE ORGANIZATION.”
It is only when you step back outside into the street, in the fine November drizzle, that you remember that you didn’t scratch out the parts of the sentence that didn’t apply to you.
You pause in the middle of the road, wondering what you should do now. You feel for a moment that it doesn’t matter; you are not going to get the visa anyway. But, you decide to go back in and tell the official of your mistake. He disappears inside once more. He brings back your application and waits while, under his gaze, you do what you had forgotten to do before. In your nervousness and confusion, you wrongly pass your pen over the words that say “do not belong.” Now, the line reads, “I belong to a MILITARY / SEMI MILITARY / POLICE ORGANIZATION.”
You look up at the official and he is unsmiling. I have made a mistake, you want to say. I am a writer. I have nothing to do with the military. But you say nothing. You look like a liar and feel guilty as you scratch out the whole sentence now, making two small tick-marks on the parts that say “do not belong.”
You hand over the papers and rush back outside, in the open, desperate to find a cup of hot tea and, breaking the promise to your wife, a cigarette.
A few minutes later, sitting in a cafe, you think of Stephen Alter’s words in his new book: “The train journey from Amritsar to Lahore, a distance of roughly fifty kilometers, takes almost fifteen hours.” Such a long journey — when it is a step across what is only a line on a map.
In August 1997, India and Pakistan were celebrating 50 years of independence. Alter, an American who was born and grew up in India, undertook a journey during that jubilee month across the border from India into Pakistan. Amritsar to Lahore, Alter’s latest book, is an account of that journey. It also doubles as a trip into the past and into reflections on the pull of the past for those who are migrants.
What does Alter provide to those who want to cross to the other side? You are reminded that what makes the journey from one city to the other so long is not simply the fact that they are divided by a border. Rather, the truth is that the land that separates the two cities is mined with history. What you also get in the book is what can only come from travel, the encounter with a more banal order of pettiness.
Consider the Indian customs officer at Wagah who holds up Alter telling him not to hurry: “Once you go through the gate, you’ll have to wait over there. Besides, the girls are better looking on this side of the border.”
In such places, what comes across in Alter’s book is a sense of decency that the writer carries with him, and the fact of this decency is not out of place even when pondering the question of divisions between the two nations.
You, who are sitting in a cafe only a few minutes away from the embassies of several nations in Washington, D.C., suddenly begin to fantasize about already having been granted a visa. As you sip your chai-latte, you think of exploring in some ways the uncertainty that opens between people who have seen each other as enemies. And also the solidarity that springs between them, because they share a history, even if often this has been a history of hate.
There are moments in Alter’s book when he treads that ambivalent ground. In the hill-station of Murree, in Pakistan, Alter visits the Christian School. He is reminded strongly of his own youth in Mussoorie but is also overcome by an uneasy sense of estrangement. Maybe this has to do with the fact that, as in India, the missionaries are not welcomed anymore by the fundamentalists in Pakistan.
But, we are not told much by Alter. Yet, it is a loaded moment. A member of a minority, finding himself in a sense at home, also finds at that instant that he is a foreigner. Alter, however, goes on to something else. It would have been more satisfying for the reader if Alter had plumbed his unease, as it happens sometimes in the travel-writings of V.S. Naipaul, so that a pursuit of one’s fears and anxieties becomes a part of the telling of a larger story. Although lacking this, Alter’s book remains an eloquent statement by a writer who identifies himself as “a traveler who bears a longstanding grudge against borders.”
On the way back from Washington, D.C., you meet a Pakistani taxi-driver at a gas station. He is in his mid-forties and has spent ten years in America. You feel inspired to tell him about your visit to the Pakistan embassy and he roundly abuses the politicians of both nations. He believes you should have taken your wife with you to the embassy. Other friends will give you other advice. One Lahori friend suggests that you go to Kashmir and hitch a ride on a vehicle of the Pakistan army.
Then, you hear from a friend, Shahbano Aliani, who is from Karachi and works in New York City at the Center for Economic and Social Rights. She had gone to the Indian consulate to get a visa to visit her friends in India, Vineeta and Sharda. The day that Shahbano visited the consulate was November 7, Election Day in the United States, and there was a large crowd there. Just the previous day she had gone to the British consulate and matters had been sorted out fairly quickly. Here, at the Indian consulate on East 64th Street, she was not going to get her turn. She went home. Three days later, she took time off from work and returned to the consulate.
This time, the Indian official at the counter took one look at Shahbano’s form and said that she needed to fill out the correct form for Pakistani nationals. The official wanted Shahbano to fill out four copies of the same form. She was required to write the names of the places she would visit and the tehsil and police station in which those places were located. Were those places in cantonment areas, she was asked?
Shahbano was also asked to write down the names of two people in India who would be her referees and also write down their “parentage.” Shahbano said, “I had never even heard this word before. There is now way I could call up the people I knew in India and ask ‘What is your parentage?’ These people have found a strategy. If you stop friends from visiting each other, you also keep folks hating each other.”
Shahbano’s ticket is for December 7. The woman at the Indian consulate who received Shahbano’s papers said that the Indian embassy would need “four to five months” to process her application. Shahbano was asked to leave her passport, which she couldn’t because she is traveling soon. It was clear to both Shahbano and the woman across the counter that this was a futile exercise.
Wanting perhaps to make her feel better, the Indian official laughed and said to Shahbano, “Why are you going to India? You don’t even have blood relatives there!” Shahbano was stopped short by this. She said, “She was laughing at me for assuming that friendship mattered enough to apply for a visa.”
You think about those words when the days pass and no one from the embassy calls. In despair, you want to pick up the phone and talk to the visa officer. You want to say, “Look, we have been loyal enemies for the whole of my — and my parents’ — lifetime. From birth, each country has had the other, as a constant foe. We have been spilling each other’s blood for more than fifty years. Doesn’t that make us blood relatives?”