Love Across Borders Read online

  Love Across Borders

  LOVE, CONNECTIONS AND RELATIONSHIPS ACROSS THE INDIA-PAKISTAN BORDER

  Naheed Hassan and Sabahat Muhammad

  Published by Indireads at Smashwords

  Copyright Naheed Hassan and Sabahat Muhammad 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-927826-20-1

  Cover Design by Sabahat Muhammad

  Thank you for downloading this free ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to Smashwords.com to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

  STATEMENTS OF SUPPORT

  It is wonderful to see an effort that harnesses the power of words, stories and contemporary writings to create positive change in society across two countries. Efforts like these help us all create a better future, in which we learn to respect, understand and empathize with each other. I wish the team well, and I hope it succeeds in its mission.

  Javed Akhtar

  Poet and scriptwriter

  Today more than ever before, it is critical that our two nations understand, listen, empathize and connect with ‘the other’. We know that across the globe, young people are at the forefront of driving real change; the appeal of initiatives like Love Across Borders is that it draws in, and engages, young people across the borders. I am confident that the project will play at least a small role in helping us move towards our common objective of a better tomorrow.

  Shabana Azmi

  Actor and social activist

  The common experience of life across a partitioned South Asia lies scattered throughout its literature. We do not have enough platforms to present and celebrate these writings, and Love Across Borders is a commendable effort to bring the contemporary writings from the region together, and renew the memories of a shared life and worldview.

  Musharraf Ali Farooqi

  Author of ‘Between Clay and Dust’

  The border between India and Pakistan is sealed tight against people. I grew up half an hour’s drive away, and I’ve crossed it on days when I’ve only seen four or five other people at immigration. But stories can travel more easily. They are reminders that it isn’t the width of an ocean between us, or some interstellar void, but rather a line so narrow that if it were water, it would be less than a stream.

  Mohsin Hamid

  Author of ‘Moth Smoke’ and ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’

  Naysayers have long proclaimed that Pakistanis and Indians have nothing in common but hostility towards each other. They may wish this was so but it is not fact. Despite wars and borders and a line of control, we still share expressions of hope and fear, love and sorrow, music and poetry, melodrama and cricket, and much more. Even die-hards will struggle to deny the enduring commonality of our peoples after reading the stories in this anthology.

  Dr Pervez Hoodbhoy

  Professor, nuclear physicist, essayist and defense analyst

  Romance is the beggar that appears at reality’s door at unexpected hours. We must give it the gift of our attention. For that reason, I welcome the publication of Love Across Borders. The reality at the moment, as far as India and Pakistan are concerned, is of intransigent borders and mutual accusations of killings. In the stories in these pages, those shouts are replaced by whispers. This, too, is welcome. Other stories, other lives. The grave complications of living and loving. We will all be happier if the borders are breached by trembling souls.

  Amitava Kumar

  Author of ‘Husband of a Fanatic’

  A wonderful set of perceptions, ideas, feelings, showing the truth behind the headlines in South Asia. These stories describe, above all, the power of love, of wonder, informed by the past, but reaching for the future. Indeed, Love Across Borders provides us a vision of that future, and it's a future governed by the heart.

  Ambassador Cameron Munter

  Professor, International Relations, Pomona College

  Former US Ambassador to Pakistan

  This is a heart-warming initiative that resonates with the poignancy of cross-border relations. At the human level, Love Across Borders distills the essence of the emotionally charged India-Pakistan relationship; it also delegitimatizes the otherization narrative so often manufactured by the votaries of hate.

  Ambassador Sherry Rehman

  President and Chair, Jinnah Institute

  Former Pakistani Ambassador to the US

  ABOUT INDIREADS

  Indireads aims to revolutionize the popular fiction genre in South Asia. As a channel for South Asian writers to engage readers at home and abroad, we showcase vibrant narratives that describe the lives, constraints, hopes and aspirations of modern South Asian men and women.

  The books available on Indireads (http://www.indreads.com) are exclusive to Indireads.

  Indireads’ books are written and customized for delivery in electronic format, and are only published online.

  CONTENTS

  Foreword 8

  Introduction 9

  That 70s Babe 10

  Serendipity 14

  One Stupid Comment 20

  Anjum 29

  Dressed to Kill 41

  Best Friends Forever 48

  Lost and Found 59

  Twelve Months 65

  An Unlikely Romeo 72

  The Long Interval 78

  The Old Willow 88

  Remnants of a Rainy Day 93

  Foreword

  As a newspaper publisher, I accept that words are powerful tools that are used to understand, inform and debate. Words effect change—they shift perceptions, opinions and mindsets. For two nations existing side-by-side, but in virtual isolation from each other, with a media that is focused largely on internal audiences, there are limited opportunities for a new mechanism for dialogue across the border. Differences are magnified and things are often viewed through a lens of mistrust.

  With modern digital media a new paradigm is possible, as borders are rendered increasingly obsolete. Technologies and social networks today make new connections possible, with our own imaginations constituting the only barrier to acceptance. Love Across Borders is an innovative initiative by Indireads to harness the power of words and use fiction and storytelling to open pathways of understanding between ordinary men and women on both sides of the border.

  This initiative serves a strategically critical function. While governments, media and businesses in South Asia are working—sometimes together and at other times with dissonance—to open new pathways of dialogue and engagement, real change will occur only when people begin to view, understand and relate to people on the other side of the divide as human beings, with their own emotions, fears and sensibilities. Love Across Borders is an important step in reinforcing a foundation for better understanding, relationships and connections enabling these two major South Asian nations divided by a border to hopefully co-exist and prosper side-by-side.

  Hameed Haroon

  CEO, The Dawn Media Group

  Introduction

  THE MOTIVATION

  Born in the middle of bloodshed, Pakistan and India have been uncomfortable neighbors for the past sixty-odd years. Generations have come and gone but the hurt, anger and acrimony of the past refuses to die down. Even today, most narratives—fictional and non-fictional—about India and Pakistan seem to revolve around the partition and subsequent wars between the two countries.

  Granted, such narratives are historically important, but we need to move beyond them and into the present. We are all aware of the huge costs—economic, military, social and human—that our countries pay because of this str
ained relationship. If this relationship is ever to improve, it will happen when people begin to see each other as fully functioning human beings, invested with emotions, feelings and sentiments.

  Love Across Borders is a small step in that direction. It is a collection of short stories, original works of fiction by Indian and Pakistani writers that aim to create new narratives about modern-day India and Pakistan; narratives of love, friendship, connection and relationships between ordinary people. We hope to celebrate the similarities between our nations, creating common threads with which the seeds of peace can be sown. Several of our stories are collaborations between writers from across the border, proving that no task is impossible when the collective energies of people across the divide are harnessed.

  We welcome you to read through the selection of stories we have curated for you, and let the spirit of love stay with you long after you have put the book down.

  Naheed Hassan and Sabahat Muhammad

  That 70s Babe

  MAMUN M. ADIL

  I think I fell in love with her the first time I saw her. And that doesn’t happen to me too often, let me tell you. But there was something about her—that lilting voice, those mischievous eyes and that dazzling smile—that made me fall in love with her immediately.

  Of course, there were many people who ran her down—namely, my best friends. As we sat in one of the many cafés in Saddar that Karachi could boast of back in the 70s, they would say things like “She’s too thin!” (You know what desi men are like, they like their women buxom), that she couldn’t speak Urdu properly, especially for a Muslim girl, and that she tried very hard to be like someone else we knew.

  But my love was true and my babe and I would spend many evenings together. Sometimes she’d run on the beach wearing a swimsuit, publicly. Yes, she was daring all right. And she’d smoke. It was a habit I hated; I was always worried about her health. But she didn’t care. She loved shocking people.

  Sometimes she would wear tight jumpsuits and dance the night away. She even openly slept with other men, right in front of my eyes, sharing an after-sex cigarette with one of them. And yet I forgave her. Because I knew that this was just a passing phase. This was just rebellion. It was the 70s after all, and the flower power of the 60s had come to India a decade later.

  I also knew her better than she did. I came to realize that she was traditional in some ways. She, like most desi women, wanted a man to cook for, to clean for, to take care of. I could almost hear her saying in that seductive voice of hers, “This is the way it should be—women should watch their men eat the meal that they have cooked for them.”

  For her, those honest admissions were few and far between. I knew that she wanted to run away from the world she had chosen to live in. And I would have been there for her every step of the way, to help take her there if she had let me. But she never saw me clearly. I sometimes think that she didn’t even know I existed, although at that time I thought it was impossible. As I got to know her better, I realized that my loneliness matched hers more than she would have liked to admit.

  But she just saw me as one of her many admirers. And I don’t blame her. I wasn’t tall, or handsome like the men she got involved with and nor could I give her the luxuries she was used to. Let’s face it—I was a nobody. Once I went to see her in Bombay—that’s what Mumbai was called then—and visited her flat in Juhu, but it didn’t bring us any closer.

  As time went on, I discovered that she was seeing a married man. He loved her, but I think he was using her. She didn’t care. I wrote to her. Countless letters, saying, Baby, please. He’s not worth your time. He may be an intellectual, but he won’t love you the way I do. But I might as well not have sent her those letters. She never answered them. Maybe she forgot? Or maybe she didn’t realize how much the time I had spent with her meant to me.

  I chalked it up to the obvious cliché—I was Pakistani and she was Indian—and never would the twain meet. Getting to India once was difficult enough, and we were hardly Shoaib and Sania. So as time went on, I came to terms with the fact that we were never meant to be.

  My love didn’t wane over the years. I heard that she left India for the US in the 80s, returning much later. Her beauty was gone and a haunting, almost eerie, pain had replaced the mischief in her eyes. She had gained weight, but that didn’t matter, not to me.

  I, by that time, had made something of myself. Life had been good to me; I was an investment banker, married with children, but the emptiness remained. I still caught glimpses of her whenever I could; glimpses of the past. Of her in a white dress and a pink hat; in a yellow sari; in a black dress that showed off her curves, inviting me to let the night go by without worrying about what may come.

  She continued to smoke and drink, I think. It didn’t help matters. I felt like shaking her and telling her to stop the insanity. But the distance between our worlds had grown. I could have gone to see her, but I was told that she had become a recluse. She had let life slip by her. And I was too much of a coward to tell my wife that my heart didn’t belong to her; that it belonged in India. The India we could have called home had it not been for 1947. Oh well.

  The final blow came in 2005. I heard it on the television. She was dead. My babe was dead. She had been dead for two days before her body was found. How could this be? How could I have let this happen? I blamed myself. I could do nothing else. I couldn’t rush to Santa Cruz Cemetery where she was buried, what would my wife say?

  So instead, I locked myself in my room, feigning a headache and asked not to be disturbed. A song played in my mind: Tum saath ho jab apne, duniya ko bhula denge…hum maut ko jeene ke, andaaz sikha denge.

  A tear slid down my cheek.

  Goodbye, Parveen, I said. Not just to her, but to my youth.

  ∞

  ABOUT MAMUN M. ADIL

  An intrepid traveller, Mamun M. Adil (@mamunadil) was born in Egypt and has lived in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Oman, the UAE and the US. With a bachelor’s degree in media studies and journalism from Queens College, City University of New York, Mamun has been working for the Business Development and Research Department of The Dawn Media Group in Karachi since 2004, and continues to contribute to DAWN and several magazines in Pakistan. He has also been working on Cloud89, a weekly radio show on CityFM89 for the last six years. He has helped with the production of several books including those detailing Karachi’s history for the Jewel in the Crown: Karachi under the Raj (1843-1947) Exhibition at the Mohatta Palace Museum.

  Mamun’s interests include colonial architecture, pre-Partition history and pop culture, and his obsessions include Hindi films. His first novella, Seasons of Silence, has been published by Indireads, and is available for sale on Indireads’ website.

  Serendipity

  YAMINI VASUDEVAN

  “Can I share this table with you? The rest are all taken.”

  The gentle voice makes me look up. I am not disappointed. She is as good-looking as she sounds. She seems to be in her late twenties. Soft brown hair falls in waves around her shoulders; her eyes are large, dark and alluring, and despite the scarf wrapped around her neck and the jacket, I can make out the slim waist and shapely curves. I am more than happy to have her for company. As I move my laptop to make some room on the small table, I say, “Please do. I was getting bored here on my own anyway.” She smiles as she sits down.

  The waitress comes over with a latte. As she sips her coffee, she asks, “So, what do you do?”

  I waver between telling her the truth and inventing a fantasy, and then say, “I am a writer, a novelist, in fact.” Her lips curve in a smile—women always fancy writers.

  “Really?” she says, sounding excited. “But you look so young.” I dip my head in acknowledgement of her compliment. “And what are you writing about?” she adds. I take off my glasses and polish them with the tail of my shirt.

  “I am actually looking for a good story. Do you have one to tell me?” I say.

  I am not lying. My agent h
as been pushing me for another piece and I need to come up with something real quick. There is a pause; she seems to be thinking. Then, “I could tell you a good story, but you must promise to give me credit for it when it’s published,” she says.

  “Sure,” I say. She leans back, plays with the tassels on the edge of her shawl, and begins.

  ***

  I saw him for the first time at Changi Airport in Singapore, at the check-in counter next to mine. He was tall, good-looking, and wore his jeans and black t-shirt with style. But that’s not why I turned to look at him. It was his voice that attracted me. Deep and rich it was, a man’s voice, but not one of those I-am-a-hunk types. It was a cultured man’s voice, with all the polite inflections that one would expect from a person who was brought up in a household that valued politeness.

  “Please ma’am,” he was saying, “I am willing to pay extra but it is very important that I take everything with me.” He had a strong American accent.

  The woman at the counter frowned and replied, “I am sorry, sir. The plane is full, and as our sign says we can’t take any extra baggage on this flight. Even if you are willing to pay.” She stressed the last word in a way that indicated it was meant to be a reprimand.

  I was never the helping kind but something prompted me to say, “I can take the extra baggage—I have some kilos left.” He turned to look at me. Dark brown eyes met mine. My heart skipped a beat.