Mea culpa: I too have eaten dinner with Pakistanis

For over a week now, my conscience has been pushing me to write this mea culpa, for I too, have eaten dinner with Pakistanis. Yes, those same Pakistanis that Indian social media insists can never be innocent or trustworthy. Alas, I too am anti-national.

I have not just had dinner with Pakistanis, I have had breakfast, lunch, mid-morning coffee, afternoon tea, anytimeisteatime chai and late night green tea with them. And also, ice cream. I won't apologise, but I do confess.

The first Pakistanis I got to know, although they then were too far away to share any meal, were my Pakistani brother and his family. I did not eat with them until 1985, but I did send the occasional rakhi across the border. In 1985, I visited my brother on his American campus, and stayed with his cousin sister who, as a very hospitable South Asian, fed me. I also ate with him and his many Pakistani friends--dal chaval and pizza, as I recall. But all that was in the US, so it may not count.

In the meanwhile, my uncle visited Ajmer Sharif and came to Bombay just to meet my parents. I was not there but I believe he did not eat anything at our home. This is a terrible thing in South Asian culture, as you know. He did not eat. But many years later, when I visited their home, I ate many meals--lunch, tea, dinner--all specially planned for the visiting vegetarian daughter. A treasured memory remains sitting at the dining table, enjoying delicious apples from Pakistani Kashmir. The apples were sweeter for the affection with which they were chosen for me.

Long before that, my only other South Asian classmate in my MA International Relations course was a Pakistani woman about ten years older than me. She and her husband were both lecturers in Political Science in Pakistan and had come to study in the US. They were shocked (him, especially) that my parents had sent me alone to the US at 20, and adopted me. I ate at their home regularly--yes, usually dinner--when my classmate would cook sabzi separately for me, and feed me dal, subzi and roti early with her two little kids. In her eyes, I think I was not much older! They would make sure I ate--and what did they have that they shared so generously, she was a student and he had a campus job, and they had a relative staying with them too--and then one of them would walk me to the bus stop and make sure I got back to my dorm. They were family. But I am told now, they could not be trusted. So maybe there was arsenic in the delicious firni I ate in their house that I miraculously survived?

You might say, these are 'ordinary' people but it is the security-diplomatic gang one should be leery of. Perhaps. Perhaps.

You see, I have eaten dinner with them as well. Many of the people whose op-eds you read and that you watch on hydra-headed TV discussions are people who were in non-official track, confidence-building programmes with me in the early 1990s. We stayed together for weeks, and ate together, and talked all night, and much more... and confidence was built. And friendships that will last a lifetime. Friendships between people who shared similar experiences, across borders, with sometimes contradictory perspectives--but friendships, anyway.

And the women peace activists I work with now, who have gone from strangers to friends to sisters, who know what sorts of bangles I like and that I want to have a blog about fabric and embroidery someday using photographs of their clothes. The alliances made when eyes meet over shared hurt--one complains, the other consoles, without words. And yes, I am so sorry, many meals have been shared with these terrific women--and a regional buffet of munchies fuels our meetings, where chilgoza meets murukku.

And many other meals all over the world with friends and professional colleagues from the Pakistani side of the border.

I forgot to tell you about the Pakistani fellow-intern from Karachi whose 1971 memories were a mirror-image of mine. But I don't think we ate dinner together, so it doesn't matter.

I meant to write a detailed, chapter and verse confession, but I realise there have been too many meals in over half a century to list here. Also, too many deep and too many silly conversations. Too many books and too many mixed tapes. Too much tea and too much laughter. Tears too, when I first moved to a city where I (still) have few friends, but I could call Islamabad on my cell-phone and share my transition travails with close friends. Too much silliness over international calls made just to get instructions on how to receive faxes on a home printer. Too much water under this friendship bridge.

Mea culpa, even though I do not understand how warmth, love and friendship can ever be anti-national.

Do you think that sharing salt and bread build mutual obligations that keep us from hurting each other? Isn't that a good thing? Isn't that why breaking bread together is a part of spiritual practice? Not eating together preserves the walls between us; Indians have used that as a way of maintaining caste difference over thousands of years.

Do you think that hearing each other's stories reminds us of how similar our struggles are, making it hard to demonise each other? Isn't that a good thing? Is it not a good thing that we get to know each other's frailties from a place of care than of enmity? That we can protect each other?

Isn't communication--over dinner or tea--especially important when you disagree? And a good friendship is not one in which you agree all the time or that you follow slavishly, but where there is enough honesty not to fake all that and enough respect to give each other space to be quite different--but not so much that a helping hand cannot reach.

All my life, I have thought these were good things, and that building the personal ties that keep us from mutually destructive policies was a fabulous idea. I still do. Mea culpa, for that too.

Let me close by sharing with you something a Bangladeshi diplomat said to me during an interview in 1985. I was being clever and asking how he defined South Asia. His brilliant reply: "South Asia stops when you go to someone's house, and the food no longer tastes like home." My South Asian home has many rooms, each quite self-sufficient and separate, but our dining tables merge under the force of that common civilisational instinct to stuff people's stomachs to the point of stupor--and food across the region tastes of spices and condiments we have traded across millennia. Wherever I move, across this table, whoever I break bread with, I am still eating at home and that is how it feels.

But have it your way--so, mea culpa.

1971

There is a new movie about the 1971 conflict, one reads, but that is not why I am thinking about the events of that year in South Asia. Last night, we were reminiscing about a little girl I used to know.

We were both little girls. Standard I or younger, St. Joseph's, RC Church, Bombay. She lived a few buildings away from me in the Port Trust compound in Colaba. Her name was Nafisa and we used to play together. The reminiscences began with my mother reminding me of how we would walk each other home. Nafisa would walk me home because I was not allowed to walk by myself. But neither was she, so I would walk her home. Then she would walk me back. The loop was endless till an adult accompanied us. Our laughter reminded me of something else.

Three girls, on the primary school platform, discussing the world around us with the gravity of seven year olds. Nafisa announced that they were going to Pakistan because they were Muslims. I did not understand the connection at all, but was impressed by her serious face. And so it was that one day we were walking each other home back and forth, the next she was making this announcement and then she was gone. To Karachi, I think. A few months later, there was war.

But 1971 in my life was not just about Nafisa and war. That hot May, we moved to a new home in Cuffe Parade, where tall apartment buildings had just come up. A few months later, we travelled abroad and my parents who never treated their children like retards took me along to see the places they always wanted to see. The United Nations Headquarters in New York, for instance. My introduction at the age of seven to the manifestation of one battle-weary generation's dream of lasting peace. A dream that captured and still holds my imagination captive.

Then Nafisa and her migration. Adult discussions about East Pakistan and the refugee crisis were in the air. I cannot claim to have understood much, but I can remember that there were surcharges on many things to pay for the refugees who were flooding West Bengal. We had to put extra stamps on envelopes, I seem to remember. And then Sukhdev's photographs of what he witnessed from his hiding place somewhere in East Pakistan, published in the Illustrated Weekly of India. No one else my age seems to remember them when I ask, but they were striking. My memory of them is not of detail but of the impression they made on me; they remain my first images of the horror of conflict after all these years.

And then war. Our buildings were five minutes from the cantonment and harbour in South Bombay and stood out like sore thumbs. We had sirens and air raid practice, black paper on doors and windows and stories by candlelight. But even the delights of daily story-telling did not obscure the fact that something horrible was going on. Everyday, fathers of schoolmates who were army or navy men were killed or went missing and we would observe a moment's silence. INS Khukri went down, and its brave captain was known to people in school and I seem to remember his daughter also went to our school.

Impossible to forget.

I carry the year with me everyday into every piece of work I do. For another generation, Partition was the defining influence but for me, it is 1971. And I am not alone, I think. I have met at least one person, growing up in Karachi, who could remember the mirror image of my experiences--school shutdown because of war, bombs on places we knew. Both our experiences are nothing at all compared to what thousands go through everyday all over the world, in the name of larger causes and principles, but this little teaser and its memory reinforce my commitment, even when I feel that my work really is irrelevant.

Postscript:

I included details here about Nafisa and school in the hope that somewhere she is surfing the net and finding this, so that on the brink of middle age, we can catch up on where we've walked since those endless excursions of childhood.

More ruminations in the same vein are to be found here. I am looking for links to Sukhdev's work and will add them when I find some that are functional.

Women in Politics

Sujata Dutta Sachdeva of the Times of India asked me two questions this week in connection with an article she wrote on women in South Asian politics. First, why is it that women in politics do not devote as much attention to development issues as we expect? Second, why are they judged so harshly for their corruption?

The answer to both questions lies in the expectations we impose on women who enter politics. These expectations are not merely unjustified but also unfair.

The general expectation is that women, as mothers, will have a natural inclination for policy fields relating to nurture (development, health, child welfare and animal welfare) and as homemakers, will excel in hospitality-oriented ministries like tourism. There is nothing wrong with being interested in these spheres and they are undeniably important. But if everyone thinks they are so important, why don't the Arjun Singhs, Laloo Prasads, Dayanidhi Marans and Arun Jaitleys lobby for these appointments?

The gendered division of labour in most homes finds its way to policy-making circles, and the men do the issues that are valorised as serious (defence, foreign affairs, finance, internal security) while women keep the home clean, healthy and hospitable (just women's work, you know!). Just as all women do not have an abiding passion for housework, and there are women who do not feel they must be mothers, so there must be female politicians for whom these ministries are just a place to serve time before they can get a really important government or party post.

And why not?

This is the perfect segue to my answer to Sachdeva's second question. Why should we expect women who enter politics to live and act by a higher morality when the game is by and large dominated and won by those who are conniving and corrupt? Is it because we think women are somehow morally superior? Or is it that we do not expect women to be ambitious and able and willing to take action to further their ambitions?

I think both sets of expectations are traps--and women see variations of them in every professional field. Pedestals are prisons and being idolized is being frozen in stone. Place a woman on a pedestal, telling her she is delicate and angelic, and somewhere you are also telling her: you are too weak, possibly too slow-witted and certainly, I don't expect that you will seriously challenge my right (as a man) to play and win the game. Tell us that women are worshipped as mothers in this civilization, but don't tell us that what that means is that we could not possibly be interested in the intricate detail of defence budgets and tax reform.

If this topic seems like old hat to you, you haven't been paying attention to the tone in which news about Mamata Banerjee or Jayalalithaa gets reported and discussed. Sonia Gandhi is now too powerful to get the same treatment but there are shades of it in the way people respond to Medha Patkar and Arundhati Roy.

As the US prepares for Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign and South Asians gleefully point out, "Been there, done that!" it is a good time to reflect on the degree to which South Asia's women leaders represent a genuine empowerment of South Asia's women and a good time to pay attention to how we handicap these politicians by telling them how much we expect of them.

Postscript: Am I advocating or condoning corruption and poor governance? No, not at all. I am advocating the woman politician's right to ambition and to an interest in all spheres of policy-making. And I am saying, if you don't like the level of corruption you get, change the game so that bad behaviour is penalized across the board.