Caught in a trap that’s difficult to walk out of

I can write this now as the person around whom this episode hinges is no more and can’t be harassed, harried, or worse. Yet, for safety’s sake, let’s not take his name and simply call him Mr X.

My father, probably egged on by an old memory, once wrote to the Headmaster of Lahore’s Central Model School. Before Partition knocked the bottom out of so many lives, this was where he had studied before moving on to Lahore’s famous Government College. The upshot was that he received a letter from Mr X, also an alumnus of the school, though much after my father. The Headmaster must have shown the letter to X, who then wrote to my father to say that he had grown up in Shimla, in Barnes’ Court, today’s Raj Bhavan of Himachal Pradesh.

His father had been on the staff of the last British Governor of undivided Punjab, Sir Evan Jenkins. With Partition, the family had moved to Pakistan. In time, Mr X left for another country and did well in business. When he aged, he sold his business and returned to Lahore. As he said, he ‘wanted to live out the rest of his life with family and friends’.

Someone vouchsafed Mr X’s credentials for a visa to India and one summer evening, both he and his wife arrived in Shimla. I helped arrange a visit to the Raj Bhavan. No matter what politicians from both sides of the border may plot and plan, the person-to-person affection between the ordinary Pakistanis and Indians is considerable — you just have to see both nationalities living it up with friendship and bonhomie when they are in another country and on neutral ground. Mr X was able to revisit the romping grounds of his childhood and the security staff were kind, yet careful, courteous and yet, cautious.

Then, one day, Mrs X and Mr X came home for dinner. Mrs X and my mother got into a conversation. The lady, trying to open a stream of talk, I assume, asked my mother, “How many servants do you have? We manage with four.” Our mother, who when she had to had been a sweeper, cook, dish-washer, wife, mother and academic rolled into one, did not know what to say. More bluntly put, I don’t think she had either the interest or the patience for conversations like this. Our guest carried on, “We pay two servants and we give the other two food.” Suddenly, our rather placid and calm mother acted as if she’d been stung. “What do you mean, ‘You give just food?’”

“Yes, we give food” was the answer.

Good manners came to the fore. My mother returned to her calm and gentle state. “How nice,” she said. “Should we have dinner now?”

After leaving India as a child, this was Mr X’s first visit to the country and it was the first time his wife had come. Expectedly, over the course of the few days they were in Shimla, the conversation turned time and again to the similarities and common ground that we had as a people. At the same time, we also spoke of how different our countries had become. The fundamental difference seemed to emerge from the fact that the Constitution of Pakistan was adopted in 1956, while India’s had come into force in 1950. Those crucial six years seem to have altered the trajectory of that country. The feudal order continued, with a limited number of individuals and families controlling both money and power.

Then, one evening, Mr X and I went out for a drink and a meal. The place where we were at had several serving and retired Army and civil officers, who were also there for a drink and a meal. One introduced Mr X. Within moments, he was surrounded. A barrage of questions was fired. That inquisition of sorts could be summarised in a single sentence, “Why does Pakistan behave the way it does with India?” He did not say so, or even indicate this, but I won’t be surprised if Mr X thought that this chance meeting was an ambush arranged by me. One tried one’s best to extricate him from this situation, but he was quite capable of holding his own. His answer to the barrage was, “I’ve lived most of my life out of Pakistan as a businessman and only returned to retire.”

As we left, Mr X was visibly upset. He said, “Don’t you realise that both our countries have become very different? You have democracy here. In Pakistan, we alternate between some sort of a democracy and military coups. There is no clear power centre. We have four: the Army, the ISI, the religious hardliners and then the weakest, the elected government.”

There is a popular song by Elvis Presley, ‘Suspicious Minds’. Apart from the mind conjecturing what it may, this has another phrase, ‘We are caught in a trap.’ That is where we are — in a snare that has snapped shut on our feet and won’t let us move. This line came to mind when one of the gentlemen who had cornered Mr X met me later and said, “Don’t be naive. How do you know the truth of anything that Mr X claimed? Or, of who he was?”

— The writer is an author based in Shimla