Chaand re, Chaand re,

Aajaa dil ki zameen pe tu [1]

It is exhausting to constantly have to navigate across lines that have been drawn for us – not lines that we want; neither neat ones, nor very useful for most of the people who tiptoe on either side of them – for we are intrinsically a loud people who often seep beyond boundaries. So, when these lines are drawn, with their jagged edges cutting between us, we may not be able to traverse them but we know how to yell across: sometimes declarations of love cushioned with wet rose petals, and at other times, songs of lament shrouded in pictures of dead ones. When we find too many ways to reach across, They redraw the lines, and we go back to the start.

-*-

I wish this were just a poetic start to an essay but this is the real misfortune of our lives. As neighbours who sit upon shared land, we are shepherded into our pens on either side of the approximately 450-miles of the Line of Control. I grew up in Lahore and, like many others, have witnessed the flag ceremony at sunset at the Wagah-Attari Border several times. A daily military practice that Pakistan and India have jointly followed since 1959, it performs a halwa-puri brand of Nationalism – a rush so uplifting and joyous, it successfully masks its slow poisoning. As a child, and even later, as a young adult, it was hard not to love it; unable to grasp the complexity of how I, and thousands of others, were essentially being instrumentalised for a larger apparatus.

Manic pride…it was always that, with no understanding of what, or who, was beyond the border. The only time I crossed the Wagah-Attari gates was when I was twenty-two years old and riding in a friendship bus service on my first trip to India. Every other time, I was at the stands watching the seven-foot-tall Pakistani Ranger stamp his feet into the concrete. The two spectrums of those gates (one performative, the other functional) presented the Other through the looking glass [2] – an anxiety simmering in Phir Milenge Chalte Chalte by Shanzay Subzwari and Abhishek Thapar. The work narrates their personal account of what transpired, or could have transpired, when the two decided to head to the Ganda Singh Wala-Hussainiwala border crossing. I imagine it reads like the journal entry of every Curious Shepherded Neighbour who makes eye contact across with Another. First, they cheer for their side, performing their pride and duty fiercely. Then, they walk to the gate and come close to the Other. Their eyes meet shyly and, inexplicably, a quick smile escapes. 

Shanzay and Abishek inadvertently become part of that monolithic crowd pulled into the same choreography. However, fate, privilege, luck, or a combination of all three allow them to disentangle from this mass and meet each other elsewhere – for a while, close enough to touch, to share food, to talk, knowing that this was temporary, always hovering near boiling point. Dushman dost!

Yet, in Chasing conversations, Mahvash Masood and Numair Abbasi are never quite able to cross over to something concrete, their ongoing online dialogue only allowing them to travel through imaginaries that their grandparents lived in. Through offerings from family archives, the two build narratives of lost names, stories, cities and lives. Is the exercise important? Or the fact that it led to intimate moments of kinship with someone they may never meet; moments where they are vulnerable?

Avoiding news…

Let’s talk tomorrow morning…

While the other artists dig out pathways to each other, Affan Baghpati finds that specific objects, which have become totemic in their connection to memory, can act as portals to the past. Her paandaan uses the story of his grandmother and her Gumbat-wala paandaan, journeying together from Lucknow to Lahore, as a query into fading traditions. Are we hopelessly entangled in the romance of rituals? Is that so bad?

Some years ago, I was in Chennai and found myself in an extraordinary silver shop. Spread across two floors were hundreds of handcrafted silverware objects. Large and heavier items were piled high in floor-to-ceiling shelves; smaller, more intricate objects were stocked carefully in glass display tables. I had come in looking for traditional jewellery but was immediately struck by the domestic items, including some very beautiful paandaans. For years, I had been pining after my nani’s silver one which I had played with growing up, but which had gone missing since. Nani had passed away much earlier, but caked bits of chuna and impossible-to-remove kathha stains still clung to the silvery insides of the box. I looked for the paandaan for a long time and then eventually gave up and put it at the back of my mind. Chennai dug the memory back out, fresh as chuna crumbling in my fingers. 

For much of the new generation growing up in an increasingly polarised world, intergenerational melancholia isn’t high up on their lists of things to deal with. They have their own set of grievances, which in many ways are extensions of pre-existing conditions. 

Veera Rustomji looks at her own body in displacement and focuses on The Bed as the centre upon which new surroundings pivot. As someone in a perpetual state of diasporic limbo, I connected with the quickly scribbled Kampala Bed on top of a black and white photograph of a house, the Student Ice Bed, and the Hospital Bed, and the ruptures they created in time.

The work also reminded me of a popular Punjabi line: Manji Kithay Dahwan which sways between several socio-political meanings and calls out into the void asking where one should situate themselves (literally, where should I put my bed?) Several years ago, I had heard it delivered onstage in a theatre performance by the Ajoka ensemble (though my patchy memory doesn’t bring up its name) and it just stayed with me, always resurfacing in times of humour and tragedy. 

-+- 

It is hard to contain so many of us: over a billion on one side of the line and about a few hundred million on the other – few actually agreeing on any one thing. Mostly because that’s what the screaming anchors on the news inspire: discord. Spittle frothing at the edges of their mouths, deranged eyes, pupils dilated, blood pouring out of their tear ducts, breathless, they proclaim: you are not safe from the ones across the line.

I was trying to remember some of the horrible Indian and Pakistani war/spy blockbuster films for reference but, for some reason, M. Night Shyamalan's The Village (2004) kept popping up in my mind. In it, a small community lived in fear of dangerous beings lurking at its borders and so the village was dutifully protected by its loyal watchmen at all times. We eventually learn that the ones who must be feared are actually within, and that deception is used to keep the village ‘safe’ from the pain of death even. 

Why the border? We know it isn’t simply a matter of distance, for the periphery only marks difference. How is this difference measured? Anything Other is different and, therefore, dangerous. I think of Mani Ratnam’s Bombay (1995) which spins a brutal tale of love and sexual chemistry at the Hindu-Muslim event horizon. It follows the lives, suffering and triumphs of two persons, representing Others, who decided to come together. There is a happy ending, but it is at the expense of so much personal suffering, loss and violence that one is hard-pressed to understand what triumph means. In Dil Se.. (1998), Ratnam continued the Others-in-Love Story, stumbling still on the notion of a violent, persistent, problematic, sexually charged ‘love’. In this happy ending, the coupling is completed via the act of being blown into pieces in a suicide bomb attack. 

Curiosity. Love. Violence. Politics. 

But whatever Ratnam was trying to say across the border was being echoed around me. Literally. On pirated VHS films and TDK cassette tapes, his work (and that of A. R. Rahman’s) was burning away slowly in the corners of our hearts. Fahad Naveed’s fascination with Bollywood films feels so real for those of us who grew up in the time of video shops and dial-up modems. We were at the crux of access but not quite there. We are always at the crux of access, aren’t we?

In Duur, paas, Onaiza Drabu and Fahad weave stories of two cities – Lahore and Mumbai – that may never meet even if all the pathways connect them. Onaiza enters Lahore through literature, as so many have done before her. I once knew an artist who journeyed from Mumbai to Lahore on the backs of Manto, Ismat Chughtai and Asghar Wajahat. Onaiza does it through Pran Nevile’s nostalgic memoir Lahore. I turn around and I see the book lying on my bookshelf. The black and white cover features a railway signpost with Lahore written out in four languages: English, Urdu, Hindi (Devanagari) and Punjabi (Gurmukhī). 

But, what happens when a script is taken away from us, and when we’re told that language and letters are another form of identity? Put a finger on who you want to be, confirm, adhere to what is yours, and abandon what is not. Richi Bhatia and Hira Khan revisit this idea through Lafzi Muamma, a multilingual glossary, and evoke words and visuals that are simultaneously also social and aural. You find yourself reading them aloud, rolling them around in your mouth, letting your tongue push them against your teeth. They don’t feel alien. They are home. 

And while, in Remember, Remember, there are floating tikkas searing their silhouettes onto fast food plates – the new occupants of our mouths – it’s the Habib Bank Plaza building in Shahzaib Arif Shaikh and Nusaiba Khan’s work that calls out another kind of slow erasure. It was once the tallest building in Asia, later the tallest in South Asia, and then just Pakistan, for a while. It lost its South Asian title across the line to another ambitious builder in Mumbai.

-+-

What is history but words that have won the battle of supremacy momentarily? If one looks for stories, it is often in the oral tradition that one finds shades of truth. Or, at least, those which seem agreeable. For within these stories, and their multiple imaginaries, live a vast number of inhabitants unbound by geography. 

So, no matter how hard the System tries, there will always be those who see the Line and imagine instead, a drawing, a story, a scale to measure their vocals against. Artists see borders for what they are – intangible, immaterial, incorporeal – and they spend their energies connecting beyond the officious framework set up for everyone [else]. For a long time, it worked. Even when, from time to time, it all went to hell and the two countries engaged in active conflict, somehow the cultural connections persevered. 

Until they didn’t. 

That is where we are today – remembering all that was possible before They redrew the lines. Following the tradition of resistance, the artists in this collaborative venture mobilised alternative platforms and labyrinthine networks of connections to work together, to think together. Huddled close like countless before them to find new cracks to seep through.

One here, the other there, looking each other in the eye, smiling, reaching across the border gate, putting forward their hand, offering a world full of strange coincidences and happy unpredictability. 

Chaahat hai agar
Aake mujhse mil jaa tu
Yaa phir aisaa kar,
Dharati se milaa de mujhko

---ختم شد---

[1] Lyrics from Tu Hi Re, written and composed by A. R. Rahman for Bombay (1995)

[2] Carroll, Lewis, 1832-1898. Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

Saira Ansari is an independent writer, researcher and editor.