Showdown at sundown

The Retreat ceremony at Attari generates a lot of interest as well as crowds from both India and Pakistan. A.J. Philip visits the border with much trepidation and enthusiasm but returns disappointed by the show of aggression and hatred at the ceremony

Bonhomie is missing from the ceremony

WHEN your guest is as dear as your daughter-in-law, where else in Punjab do you take her, except Amritsar? Harmandar Sahib or the Golden Temple is eternally bewitching. You are never tired of visiting the magnificent seat of the Sikhs’ temporal and spiritual source of solace.

On the eve of Diwali, the Golden Temple coruscated under brilliant lighting. People go there to seek the blessings of Guru or to name the newborn child from the first stanza of Guru Granth Sahib recited there on any given day or to get their wish fulfilled. I go there to see piety at its best and the large golden fish leading a life of abandon in the sarovar.

Nowhere else are fish allowed to complete their full life and die a natural death. In rivers, ponds and backwaters, they are caught and eaten little remembering that Vishnu’s first incarnation was as fish. They are not safe even in the seas where deep sea trolling reduces them to canned stuff or they are eaten by bigger fish.

In the pond in the Golden Temple, they don’t have to hunt for food as the staff feeds them. Despite warnings, devotees, too, feed them surreptitiously. Theirs is the most contented life with no worries of ending up on dining tables. Fish born in the Golden Temple sarovar are the luckiest.

Amritsar has its other attractions, too. A visit to the Durgiana temple disabused me of my belief that it was a poor cousin of the Golden Temple. It has incorporated some of the great traditions of Harmandar Sahib and is located in an area which is rich in religious history, where the Vayuputra is believed to have been caught and tied to a banyan tree. Close by is a wondrous perpetually fruit-giving tree.

Stamping out the other

What fascinated my son and daughter-in-law more was the prospect of seeing Pakistan without a visa. In popular perception, the other side is always green. The first time I saw another nation was when I visited Rameshwaram.

It was a clear night and we could see from the shores light at a distance. "It is not a flotilla but that area of Sri Lanka where the Tamils reside in large numbers," said our host. Years later, I saw the plains of Bangladesh from the heights of Cherrapunji in Meghalaya. Of course, visiting Nepal from Raxaul in Bihar is as easy as visiting Mohali from Chandigarh.

On a visit to Dalhousie, I was told that Lahore could be seen on a full moon night from a particular high point of the hill station but I was not lucky. Every time you fly to Guwahati, the pilot tells you somewhere midway, "On the left hand side, you can see Mount Everest, slightly darker than the other peaks".

But nowhere is the "other" so close as at Wagah, renamed Attari because the Wagah village, where the Radcliffe Line was arbitrarily drawn like cutting a piece of Amul butter, is located in Pakistan. Come to think of it, we took 60 years to realise this cartographical error and correct it!

The drive is through one of the most prosperous areas of Punjab. On the way is Khalsa College, an architectural marvel at its brilliant best with a fresh coat of paint. I happened to meet the contractor who "saved" the century-old building from collapse. "Rain or shine, it will remain intact for hundreds of years," he told me confidently. We can only trust him as we won’t be there hundreds of years later.

As we passed the college by, my colleague Sanjay Bhambroo told me that the famous court scenes in the Shah Rukh-Preity Zinta-Rani Mukherjee starrer Veer-Zara were shot in the college. How foolishly I had thought that they were shot in the otherwise cavernous Lahore Fort. Few other films had captured the rural beauty of Punjab as this film had.

Patriotic run: Enthusiasts from both sides race from the gallery to the iron gates

The milestones of yore still inform us of how close Lahore was to Amritsar. It was not uncommon those days for a Lahorite to have breakfast at home, visit Amritsar to have Amritsari kulcha, floating in desi ghee, for lunch and return to Lahore before dinner. Many people in Amritsar tell you that their links across the border are so strong that they feel a pull or yearning whenever they approach Wagah.

My first visit to the border to see The Retreat ceremony was a disaster. By the time we reached Attari, the ceremony was over and people were dispersing. It was a Friday. There were more people, mostly schoolchildren, on the Pakistani side — the day being a holiday there.

As we walked towards the pyramid-like structure where the Pakistani and Indian visitors come the closest, I overheard a little girl telling her mother, "Mummy, mummy dekho Pakistani bachche, hum jaise hain" (Mother, see the Pakistani children, they are just like us.)

I wondered how she imagined the Pakistani children to be until she saw them in flesh and blood. I had no clue. The children seemed to be from a "convent" school as Catholic nuns led them. Let me mention, as an aside, that even educated people refer to Christian schools as "convents" little realising that a convent is where nuns live together.

The BSF officer in charge of the Wagah post tried to make up for our loss by personally leading us along the border. My younger son suddenly had an idea. He wanted me to click his photograph straddling between India and Pakistan. His child-like demand melted the heart of the officer, who allowed all of us to walk into the Pakistani territory.

His Pakistani counterpart, who was watching us from a distance, turned his face away when the unexpected "Indian intrusion" took place. My son’s wish of a photograph with his legs in Pakistan and India was fulfilled.

I was too ashamed to tell him what I did in similar circumstances when I crossed a "border" the first time. It was at Aryankavu, which separates Kerala and Madras, as Tamil Nadu was then called. As our vehicle was being checked, I indulged in a prank – an inter-state piss with the sprinkling on Tamil Nadu.

Though we returned disappointed, we decided to visit Wagah again to see the ceremony. After all, it is the mother of such ceremonies. I had seen two such ceremonies — one at the Buckingham Palace where the change of guards takes place in the morning and in the evening and the other at the Vatican where the Swiss Guards, who protect the Pope, have a similar ceremony.

I have also visited the US-Canada border checkpoint near the Niagara waterfalls and the Checkpoint Charlie near the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin soon after the "East Germans" pulled down the Wall with their bare hands but I do not know whether there were any such ceremonies.

Once bitten twice shy, we reached Attari at least half an hour before the ceremony was due to begin. The border outpost is an elaborate complex of buildings, roads and barriers. It is more elaborate on the Indian side as I found out when I travelled to the border from Lahore once.

The gallery was already full with men, women and children. An IB official led us to the VIP area. From our enclosure, Pakistan was the closest. The gallery there was not even half full. Indian and Pakistani flags fluttered from nearby posts.

Girls and boys holding the Tricolour vied with one another in running from the gallery to the huge iron gates that separated the two nations. On the Pakistani side, a young man, attired in green, ran in similar fashion. People cheered such display of patriotism. Suddenly an old man surfaced on the Pakistani side running the full length of the road from the stand to the gate.

"Was he the same old man, who was introduced to me as a permanent fixture at Wagah", I wondered. Every day he reaches there to wave the Pakistani flag, a ritual he has been performing ever since the border gate came up soon after Partition.

A western camera crew took position right in front of us as the bugles were sounded and the Retreat ceremony began. Tall, mustachioed, fierce-looking BSF jawans marched towards the gate as people shouted Vande Mataram, the slogan coined by Bankim Chandra.

On the Pakistani side, the assembled said in a chorus the equivalent of Vande Mataram. Only two other slogans could be shouted – Bharat Mata Ki Jai and Hindustan Zindabad. In any case, people did not have much of a choice as they could only repeat what the vocal choreographer shouted through the mike.

Suddenly both the gates were opened with such rapidity and aggression that I think one of the Indian soldiers got his hand accidentally injured. The poor chap could only hide his pain and discomfort. Then a Pakistani and Indian soldier marched into each other and shook hands at the no man’s land. They purposely did not betray any sign of bonhomie.

The hallmark of the Retreat is not smart drill. It is the attempt to outdo each other in showing contempt for each other. The soldiers – khaki-clad on the Indian side and black-attired on the Pakistani side – raised their boots so high that the assembled on the other side could see their soles. And when they came face to face, they took such a deep breath that their puffed out chests almost touched each other.

They stamped the boots so hard that they could have only damaged their own roads. People waved flags and cheered the soldiers as they adopted various gestures to show their hatred for the other. "See, the Indians have lowered the intensity of their hatred. They are no longer as ferocious as they used to be. But look, the Pakistanis have not changed a wee bit", commented a middle-aged cheerleader.

He seemed to miss the olden days when the Indian soldiers raised the legs even higher and gesticulated as the Pakistani soldiers did. He would have been one of those who would have enjoyed the Gladiators fighting to the death in the Roman arenas till Emperor Constantine abolished it.

Why blame him, when each shout of command, louder than the previous, aggravated the atmosphere of hatred. What the ceremony did was to turn ordinary men and women into ferocious warriors or defenders of the state. It was so overpowering that I think I too was sucked into the madness.

Eventually, as the sun set in the west, the two flags were lowered in perfect synchrony, folded and taken for safekeeping till the next morning when they would be hoisted again. It was time to disperse.

"They are so barbaric. Did you not see the visage of the Pakistani soldier?" I heard, surprise of surprise, a lady asking her husband. A smartly dressed young man had this observation to make: "Look at that photo (Jinnah’s) on their gate. They have only one leader. We have so many, in contrast". I doubt whether he knew that the photo was of their "Father of the Nation".

What purpose does the ceremony serve except to perpetuate hatred and dislike? No two countries have such a ceremony. India shares borders with several other countries but nowhere is such madness performed at state expense.

India is a big country with big ambitions. It should take the initiative to stop this madness. I am sure Pakistan will follow suit. Let there be a beautiful Beating the Retreat ceremony like the one held in New Delhi a few days after the Republic Day parade. Let the ceremony engender love, not hatred for each other.