From ‘A Time of Madness. A Memoir of Partition’ by Salman Rashid

….to drive me to Amritsar through a landscape where men did not wear the baggy shalwar of Pakistan. They were dressed either in the narrower pyjama and shorter kurta or Western trousers and mostly chequered shirts, for some reason. And there were colourful Sikh turbans to paint the landscape. Women, other than the occasional bindi, were dressed just the same as women on our side….. However, two cultural shocks awaited me as we neared town: girls in jeans and t-shirts zooming about on scooters and pigs rooting in garbage dumps…..The surprise was that very few men ogled at them……in Afghanistan …..earlier. After years of warfare and ten years of the soul-destroying madness of Taliban misrule in which women were non-existent except as perambulating shrouds, they had suddenly reappeared in all their glamour and beauty. Yet the men in Kabul and Herat, the two cities I visited, did not stare; they simply minded their own business while the newly visible women went by in colourful glory.

Here in our own good land [Pakistan], we molest passing women with our eyes all the time. There appears a well-wrapped shrouded creature with only eyes showing through a narrow slit and all available men leave whatever they were doing to scratch their crotches and ogle. Their heads turn like radar antennas with the passing swaddle of clothing…………These staring Morlocks would very likely go berserk seeing the bare legs and arms in Amritsar…….towards the end of my Indian travels I realized that in Pakistan we hide our bellies under our voluminous shalwar-kurta suits; in north India most of the men I saw wore Western attire, making their girths apparent. In addition, Indians, it appears, do not suffer from scrotal scabies that Pakistani men are universally afflicted with…..

In Pakistan, trains are lumbering slowpokes in which it is almost impossible to manage a cup of tea without spilling even as they crawl along at less than 100 kilometres per hour. The tracks – those few that still operate after most have either been uprooted or simply closed – are antiquated …….With most lines shut down and less than a hundred serviceable locomotives, we had trains running only on four major lines and none of them operated on time. …….From more than 1,200 functioning railway stations inherited from the British at the time of Partition, there were less than 500 working in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Whereas India laid several thousand kilometres of new track (and revamped all outdated ones) to take high speed trains, Pakistan Railway continued to trundle along in an age warped to the 1940s.

Not only were no new tracks laid, some two dozen branch lines were closed and simply abandoned in the 1980s. those who lived by the side of the tracks filched the steel and fittings. Disused railway stations were permitted to be annexed as private residences by anybody who felt so inclined. No action was taken when ordinary folk took over railway land to build upon it. In a word, Pakistan Railway was a microcosm of the rest of the country, which had been turned into a free-for-all by the military dictator of sham piety.

……….down the Solan main street [near Simla] …As I was walking along the footpath …..the side door of a parked lorry suddenly flew open and I had to jump out of the way to avoid being hit. The man about to alight immediately pulled the door back in, and addressing me as ‘babu sahib’, offered a very profuse and wordy apology. In Pakistan this is never done. No one ever apologizes, especially when the other is a stranger. I have been in hundreds of situations where any decent person would express regret and the only time it ever happened was in Chaman on the Afghan frontier in Balochistan.

The air-conditioned bus left …..past …….Chandigarh, we were in countryside that could have been anywhere in Punjab on our side of the border – the only two differences being the t-shirt and jeans-clad girls riding their motor scooters and no one staring, and the ‘English Wine and Beer’ shops on the main streets of even the dumpiest little village.

….in the vicinity of Lambra, we drove by a pipal tree smack in the middle of the road with the traffic passing it on either side. For a Pakistani this was a gross aberration…….. Our district administration bureaucrats routinely destroy hundreds of years old banyan trees of huge bio-masses ………and replace them with date palm or shrubbery. ……In India they still value trees that our ancestors worshipped eight thousand years ago in the cities of the Indus Valley. In Pakistan we think nothing of destroying them. …..

…..There are no Muslims in Pakistan who do not believe in true Arab blood for themselves. Even thoroughbred Rajputs, Jats and Gujjars, all Indo-Aryan peoples, sing of some ficticious Arab ancestor, a valorous general to boot, who descended upon the subcontinent with the army of Mohammed bin Qasim……..Interestingly, this silly eagerness to claim Arab ancestry goes back to the sixteenth century. Abu’l Fazl, official chronicler of the court of …..Akbar the Great…took a derisive swipe at it.

Inured by centuries of marauding incursions by plunderers of every hue coming down after reducing Afghanistan, the Punjabi peasant has learned never to give up. If there is one virtue he, regardless of his creed or caste, can truly be celebrated for, it is the ability to toil unremittingly again and again and again….

In Pakistan, tomb-worshippers revere only those non-Muslim burials that have posthumously been converted to Islam. …All other known Hindu shrines have, at best, been neglected and at worst vandalized.

….the border remained largely porous until the 1965 war. Thereafter the security state that Pakistan quickly became clamped down hard and Punjab suffered. Indeed, it is only Punjab that suffered, first during Partition and then again with the Iron Curtain falling across the border.

Residents of districts of Balochistan bordering Iran can freely travel across the border by acquiring a rahdari – right of passage - ………the same is good for Iranians. Likewise the districts of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa abutting Afghanistan. It is another thing, however, that Pathans on either side of the border care not a whit for the document and generally come and go as they please. Similarly the people of Gilgit-Baltistan and Xinjiang province in China have a free run of the other country with a rahdari. In no case is a visa needed. The same facility was denied to Punjab on both sides of the border.

Thankfully for me the generation that harped on the ‘immense sacrifices Muslims rendered for Pakistan’ has passed. We no longer hear this slanted phrase. I could have told them that it was not Muslims alone who sacrificed for Pakistan. There were as many – if not more – Hindus, Jains and Sikhs who, being economically way better off in west Punjab than the Muslims of the east, forfeited much more for us to have Pakistan. But that is a loss we prefer to ignore.

If the Indian government quickly formulated procedures for claims of property from incoming refugees, Pakistan did nothing of the sort……Unlike India where there was not much abandoned property to go by, Pakistan, had a surfeit of rich lands and huge mansions left by fleeing zamindars and businessmen. Pakistan swiftly became a free-for-all real estate Mecca.

Even as incoming refugees enriched themselves with abandoned assets, natives broke into evacuee properties to become their owners – some of these properties were the very ones they had volunteered to protect until the madness passed and the real owners could return to reclaim them. But within days of the great divide, everyone knew that those who had departed were never returning.

The Pakistani bureaucracy became part of this culture of plunder. …….It was as if Pakistan was created as a short cut to wealth for not so rich Muslims. Affluence was not an outcome of years of hard toil, for refugees and natives alike in the new Pakistan, this sudden enrichment was windfall………What was easily acquired during the unsettled years immediately after Partition, taught Pakistanis to live by flash.

…….The same bias led us Punjabis to visit injustice upon Sindhis….. One afternoon we were driving across an utterly unpopulated scrub desert…..we came across a man on a bicycle….. the army subedar of our escort, a Punjabi from Chakwal, riding in the back seat…. ‘Oye! Come here, you!’ he barked and the poor cyclist almost froze with terror. He dismounted, let his bicycle fall to the ground, saluted and just stood there immobilized with fear.

When we were done with the poor man, I said to our subedar sahib his behavior was exactly what had alienated the Bengalis. Now it was the turn of the Sindhis. The man shocked me when he said they deserved to be treated like this for they too were Hinduized. He was referring to the Sindhi custom of joining the hands in greeting.

According to Rajmohan Gandhi, the emergence in the 1880s of a number of Punjabi, Urdu and English language journals representing the Singh Sabha, Arya Samaj and Muslim viewpoints, led to an expansion of the religious debate. Rather than mitigating the divide, political leaders on both sides were bent on deepening it. It seems this was not without a nod from wily Raj officers.