There is a tall brick gateway on each side of the border. One side
proclaims in Hindi, "Mera Bharat Mahan." Our India Is Great. On the
other side, the sign is written in Urdu: "Pakistan Zindabad." Long
Live Pakistan.

I had arrived in Lahore a few days before, on a Pakistan
International Airlines jet. Passport in hand, I took my place in a
line before a row of desks where customs officials sat. Two men in
mufti fell in beside me, and one of them asked for my papers. He had
recognized my Indian passport. His right eye was filmy, and it
remained fixed on something to my left while he questioned me about
my itinerary: where I was going, where I would stay, how I knew my
hosts. I looked up to notice that the line had disappeared. An
official waved me over, ignoring the plainclothes policemen. "Welcome
to Pakistan," he said.

It's a forty-minute drive from Lahore to Wagah, where the border
lies. The road to Wagah wends its way through small pastoral villages
full of brick kilns, buffaloes, and mustard fields. There were boys
playing cricket in dusty plots by the roadside. There were gaudily
decorated buses -- one of them had an F-16 painted on the driver's
side, with the word "Pilot" emblazoned underneath. There were cattle,
bullock-carts, and turbaned men on foot. Every few minutes, we passed
another emaciated dog, barking insistently, guarding its stretch of
broken highway. I was just thinking how similar this was to the
landscape on the other side of the border when Anwar Muhammad, my
driver, asked, "Do you have wide roads like this in India, too?" I
lied and said no. I was trying to be friendly to each and every
Pakistani. I was going to the border, after all.

Suddenly, Anwar pulled over. We would have to walk the rest of the
way. Anwar explained that the only vehicle allowed to cross the
border was a bus that ran between New Delhi and Lahore. The route was
opened in early 1999, and Atal Behari Vajpayee, the prime minister of
India, had made the inaugural trip. The words "Sada-e-Sarhad" (Call
of the Border) were painted on both sides of the bus. Vajpayee had
greeted his Pakistani counterpart, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, here
at Wagah. But only a few months later, war broke out. The fighting
was once again along the Line of Control that functions as the border
in the disputed territory of Kashmir. The battle was fought in and
around a town called Kargil, among snow-covered Himalayan peaks. Soon
after the cease-fire that ended the fighting in Kargil, Sharif was
deposed in a military coup. Still, the bus soldiers on, rolling
through the gates at Wagah four times a week. When we got out of the
car to walk, I noticed that Anwar was carrying a light machine gun.

As I approached the border post, a young Pakistani guy walked just
ahead of me, cigarette in hand. Two men were sitting on chairs by the
side of the road. One of them gestured sternly at the cigarette. The
azaan, the call to prayer, had just sounded from a nearby mosque.
"It's Ramzan," the man said in Urdu. The smoker quickly stamped the
cigarette out. The man on the chair told Anwar to remove the magazine
from his gun and give it to the guards farther up the road.

After passing under the arched gateway, you walk for a long stretch
toward a guard who protects a white line across the tar road. This is
the Zero Point. The border between India and Pakistan is
approximately 1,250 miles long, but the Zero Point is the only place
where you're allowed to cross. White arrows point at the line from
either side, as if you could miss it.

* * *

Wagah. Throughout the subcontinent, that single word conjures
memories of Partition, the monumental act that carved Pakistan out of
India in 1947. The idea of a separate Muslim state, free from Hindu
domination, had first been voiced in 1930 by the poet Mohammed Iqbal.
Seventeen years later, when the idea became a reality, the creation
of a new country for Indian Muslims was accompanied by unimaginable
violence. More than a million people died. Partition precipitated the
largest exodus in recorded history. How many migrated across the
brand new border? Fourteen million? Eighteen million?

The British, preparing to grant India its independence, had announced
the plan in June of 1947. Three weeks later, they set up a Boundary
Commission to separate the Muslim-majority areas from the
Hindu-majority ones. In a matter of weeks, the British had created
Pakistan. Little thought was given to the millions who lost their
homes overnight. People who had only just won their freedom from
Britain were now told that they were refugees. The principal
architect of Partition, Cyril Radcliffe, had never been to India
before. He knew nothing about it, save what he picked up in five
weeks in a New Delhi office, studying unreliable maps and outdated
census statistics. The day before Independence, Radcliffe wrote to
his nephew:

Down comes the Union Jack on Friday morning and up goes -- for the
moment I rather forget what, but it has a spinning wheel or a
spider's web in the middle. I am going to see Mountbatten sworn as
the first Governor General of the Indian Union at the Viceroy's house
in the morning and then I station myself firmly on the Delhi airport
until an aeroplane from England comes along. Nobody in India will
love me for the award about the Punjab and Bengal and there will be
roughly 80 million people with a grievance who will begin looking for
me. I do not want them to find me. I have worked and traveled and
sweated -- oh I have sweated all the time.

When you go to Wagah and stand near the white line that divides the
two countries, it is impossible not to think of Radcliffe. Perhaps
it's too easy to blame the British. The novelist Khwaja Ahmad Abbas
once asked, "Did the English whisper in your ears that you may chop
off the head of whichever Hindu you find, or that you must plunge a
knife in the stomach of whichever Muslim you find?" And yet Indian
nationalism was a response to British rule. The ideology of
nationalism is an ideology of difference, a return to roots, a vision
of wholeness. That's why so many visitors to Wagah seem to take
comfort in a white line painted on the ground. The line assures the
viewer that the border exists, clearly defined and zealously
protected. The line returns more than one-sixth of the world's
inhabitants to a moment in their history, more than fifty years ago,
when they awoke to freedom.

Those who seek such reassurance are severely tested by other lines.
I'm thinking of the lines composed by Urdu and Hindi writers who
write about Partition. Many of those visiting Wagah are familiar with
Saadat Hasan Manto's classic short story "Toba Tek Singh." It tells
of Bishan Singh, an old inmate of a lunatic asylum, who is also
called by the name of his village in Punjab: Toba Tek Singh. When he
is told about Partition, Singh exclaims, "Uper the gur gur the mung
the dal of the laltain." That is neither Punjabi nor English nor
Hindi nor Urdu -- it's just gibberish. In the story, no one seems to
know whether Toba Tek Singh belongs in India or Pakistan, and his
insanity becomes a mirror that reveals the fundamental absurdity of
maps and nations. "Toba Tek Singh" ends with an aerial view of its
eponymous character.

There, behind barbed wire, on one side, lay India and behind more
barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan. In between, on a bit of
earth which had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.

Where did Toba Tek Singh lie? If the painted line is the border, then
where is the "bit of earth" in between? In Wagah, that's what the
young man who'd been asked to extinguish his cigarette wanted to
know. He addressed his question to a Pakistani Ranger. At that
moment, the guard was showing me the hobnailed soles of his
standard-issue sandals. He looked up at the young man and gestured
vaguely toward the barbed wire.

* * *

A week later, I was at a literary festival in Delhi, listening to
Gulzar, an Urdu poet and filmmaker from Bombay. Born in a village
called Deena in what is now Pakistan, Gulzar crossed into India by
train during the riots in the months before Partition. As he
remembers it, "I was still a child then, and I had to step over the
corpses." At the festival, Gulzar sat on a panel devoted to Partition
literature, and he had invited me because he knew that I had just
been to Pakistan. The meeting was held in a sunlit brick
amphitheater, with strings of marigold hung from the surrounding
trees; mustard flowers waved in the fields beyond. Gulzar read a
series of works, concluding with a poem entitled "Toba Tek Singh."

Gulzar's poem is faithful to the details of Manto's story: the poem's
narrator wants to go to Wagah in order to tell Bishan Singh that the
ordeal of Partition still continues. There are hearts that have yet
to be divided; 1947 was only the first partition. Bishan's Muslim
friends have succeeded in crossing the border, though some only as
corpses. Bishan's daughter used to visit him once a year, an inch
taller each time; now she is diminished by an inch with every passing
year. The poem opens with the narrator hearing the call from Wagah:

I have to go to Wagah and meet Toba Tek Singh's Bishan
I have heard that he is still standing on his swollen legs
exactly where Manto had left him.
He still mutters "Uper the gur gur the mung the dal of the laltain."

Listening to Gulzar read his poem, my thoughts returned to the young
man in Wagah. The truth is, there is no neutral territory between
India and Pakistan. In his new book Amritsar to Lahore, Stephen Alter
writes:

One of the great disappointments of my own journey was to discover
that there is no such thing as a no man's land. At both the railway
and road crossings, the territory of each country is entirely
contiguous. Nothing separates these two nations, except for manmade
structures like fences and gates. . . . Pakistan ends precisely where
India begins.

So why is the myth of the no man's land so persistent? I think it has
something to do with the power of literature. Alter himself admits
that Toba Tek Singh came to mind when he visited the border. Indeed,
for many readers, Toba Tek Singh has long been the symbol that
captures the meaning of Partition. Bishan is the fool who does not
know whether he belongs to India or to Pakistan, and his no man's
land is a limbo of existential doubt and despair. But I think another
reading is possible. Maybe Bishan is staking a claim to the "bit of
earth which had no name." Maybe he is saying yes to both nations. And
maybe a no man's land is the only place where he can do that.

* * *
On May 11, 1998, three explosions rocked the desert wastes of
Rajasthan. Hours later, Prime Minister Vajpayee held a press
conference, announcing that the world's largest democracy had
conducted a test of its nuclear weapons. Of course, this was no mere
scientific experiment; the test was a threat, intended to intimidate
Pakistan. Newspapers and governments around the world denounced the
detonations, but India was unbowed. By the end of the month, Pakistan
had exploded its own nukes, realizing the dream of an "Islamic bomb"
and answering India's challenge in kind. When fighting in Kargil
erupted the following year, Indian and Pakistani leaders exchanged
nuclear threats no fewer than thirteen times. The most remarkable
thing about the contest of tests was the rhetoric, a kind of medieval
machismo. Bal Thackeray, leader of the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena
Party, was positively exuberant: "We have proved that we are not
eunuchs any more." India had named its missile system Prithvi, Hindi
for "earth." But Pakistan assumed the Prithvi in question was Prithvi
Raj Chuhan, a twelfth-century Hindu king who resisted the Afghan
invader Shahabuddin Ghauri, founder of the first Muslim kingdom in
India. As it happened, Pakistan had just named one of its own missile
programs after the aforementioned Afghan invader.

To all appearances, the two countries were more divided than ever.
And yet despite all the military posturing, ambivalence about
Partition runs deep. Indeed, even as they flaunt their nuclear
arsenal, the ultra-nationalists of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) harbor fantasies of erasing the border: their dream is to
reunite the territories, by force if necessary, in order to create an
undivided India. Theirs is a dream of unity -- albeit a murderous
dream. The dream exists on the other side of the border, too. In
Pakistan, a militant Islamic group recently resolved to wrest Kashmir
from Indian control and then use the province as a beachhead for a
jihad against the whole of India. No one better embodies this
Pakistani dream than Maulana Masood Azhar, leader of the militant
Harkat-ul-Mujahideen group, who was released from an Indian jail on
New Year's Eve 1999 in exchange for hostages from a hijacked Indian
Airlines flight. Azhar has warned India:

Allah has sent me here, and if you cast an evil eye towards my
beloved country, I will first of all enter India with 500,000 of my
mujahideen, inshallah. That is why I am touring almost the whole
nation these days. Half a million are ready, and according to the
messages I am getting from across the country, I have many more
mujahideen than these. The mothers are giving me their sons and
asking me to make them like Bin Qasim [the Arab conqueror of Sind in
710 A.D.], not the worshippers of the West. The sisters are handing
me their brothers and asking me to convert them into the warriors of
Islam. The elders are telling me that our beards are white but even
today we are ready to take up guns and come with you.

For fundamentalists on either side, the present is just a prelude to
the past. Both sides dream of rolling back the clock -- and rolling
back the border.

These competing fantasies of unity have bred a new kind of affinity
on the subcontinent. As the filmmaker and peacenik Anand Patwardhan
puts it, "Cross-border solidarity has been the only silver lining in
the mushroom cloud." We were sitting in a makeshift editing room in
Patwardhan's Bombay apartment. As we talked, I looked at a
freeze-frame on his monitor. It showed a famous Bollywood
personality, mouth open, in the midst of uttering a patriotic inanity
about how each bit of dirt is sacred to Indians. Patwardhan
continued: "Ever since India and Pakistan conducted nuclear tests in
1998, relations between peace activists in India and Pakistan have
blossomed." While much of the country was celebrating the first
nuclear blast, he explained, Pakistan-India People's Forum for Peace
and Democracy deepened a dialogue between citizens who want to work
for peace in both countries. In seven years, the forum has sponsored
four successful conferences, and peace activists now gather every New
Year's Eve at Wagah for a candlelight vigil at the border.

Do good fences make good neighbors? The peace activists certainly
want better relations between India and Pakistan, but they aren't
lobbying for unification. Although they are eager to ease
restrictions on travel and trade across the border, they nevertheless
want the border itself to remain intact. In a better world, they
suggest, borders won't mean so much; indeed, the nuclearization of
the subcontinent reveals the arbitrariness of the division. Who needs
armed guards and a white line when you can exterminate a city with
the push of a button? The white line at Wagah seems almost obsolete,
an artifact from an era when fighting a war meant moving troops
across a border.

* * *

The metal gates on both sides are pulled shut at sunset, at the same
precise instant, by opposing teams of guards. This evening ceremony
is called Beating Retreat, and it's the most popular tourist
attraction in Wagah -- on the night I saw it, there were visitors
from all over the world. Soldiers from both India and Pakistan
present arms. Then the national flags are lowered amid much blowing
of bugles. Commanders from the two border patrols march up to one
another and shake hands. The tourists applaud. Before the event is
over, spectators on both sides are allowed to rush forward and gaze
at each other from a distance of about fifteen feet. Throughout this
ceremony, the guards mirror each other perfectly: their
goose-stepping, their aggressive gestures, their shouted commands,
all in sync. But the two enemies make sure not to cross the line that
holds them apart. So how do they learn to perform this intimate
dance? How well do we know each other? How hard do we work to remain
enemies?

Amitava Kumarm, is one of the winners of the The
Daniel Pearl Award for Outstanding story on South Asia Print