BEYOND BULLETS AND BARBED WIRE

A recipe for Indo-Pak reconciliation?

One of the most interesting friendships I struck in my life was with a Pakistani soldier, I mean a former one, after I too had left the army. It was half a century ago and I, barely thirty then and fresh out of the army, had found myself an occupation as a transport official with a multinational firm in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, an Anglo-American-Saudi conglomeration, employing mostly Indians. The initial task I was assigned was to organize the orientation training of the largely-non-English-speaking heavy vehicle drivers from India on American built trucks and specialist vehicles, the company’s 800-strong transport fleet was made up of. I was given a team of a dozen supervisors, comprising mostly former employees of transport and automobile firms with a spattering of veteran armed forces JCOs and NCOs. Our team was flown in in advance to receive a certain amount of orientation on the vehicles ourselves, before the drivers arrived. However, as it happened, the company, in a hell-for-leather rush to launch themselves into the waste management contract they had entered into with the Saudi government, has already been flying in hundreds of other personnel, including a large number of labourers, resulting in a camp of fabricated structures they had set up in the outskirts of the city being fairly well populated when we arrived.

It soon became apparent that the logistics of the camp was poorly planned when it faced acute water shortage. The water had to be hauled by tankers from tube wells strung across the surrounding desert to the camp site and the outsourcing the company had arranged was not working out. Consequently, the transport department was tasked to employ the tankers in the company fleet and haul water. The drivers having not yet arrived, the transport manager, an Englishman who was an experienced transporter back in Britain, decided to engage our training team to drive the tankers. As he himself took the lead, driving one of the tankers, we followed suit. Tube wells were spread all across and, with tankers queuing up everywhere, we found ourselves heading out individually to different wells.

I ended up doing two to three trips driving an articulated tanker to a well 20 kilometres away. The most miserable part of the mission was waiting in the queue, as tanker after tanker at the head filled and moved out. Although I had often driven army trucks and was confident of handling a tanker, the articulated vehicle proved a bit tricky, especially having had to train myself on the job. The trickiest part was positioning the tanker accurately, with the inlet hatches on top facing the hoses for the water to be filled in. Fortunately, most of the drivers were South Asian, helping each other signaling and guiding, much for the relief of rookies like me. Meeting day after day, it was invariable that some of us struck friendships and a certain amount camaraderie evolved. Drivers often stepped off their vehicles for a cup of black tea at a nearby kiosk, while the lead tanker got filled and the queue came to a stop. It was during one of those tea breaks that I struck a conversation with the Pakistani soldier whom I befriended.

He was a big guy in his salwar-kameez with a cheery disposition. It was he who opened the conversation by asking me whether I was a ‘Hindustani’. I answered in the affirmative, which seemed to brighten him up as if he had met one of his fellow townsman or villager. “Hindustan mein kithar rahthe ho?” He wanted to know where in India I hailed from. “Madras ka hai.” I answered categorizing myself as a ‘Madrassi’ as most northerners those days identified South Indians in general. “Vo to bahut door hai”, he spoke as if he lived somewhere in India, far from the South. “Mera dada Lucknow mein raha karte dhe (My grandfather used to live in Lucknow)”, he continued. “Bahut yaad karte dhe budha Lucknow ka Zindagi (The old man used to reminisce a lot of his life in Lucknow)!” I could easily picture his ancestry of a transplanted family of partition and gave a faint smile. “Kya Hindustan-Pakistan kar ke rakh dia politics walon ne (What nonsense the politicians have done, creating Hindustan and Pakistan)!” He sounded genuine in his despair.

“Har chod do,” he changed the topic since I was hardly contributing to the conversation. “Karta kya dhe Hindustan mein (What were you occupied in in Hindustan)?”

“Fauj me dhe,” I answered briefly. “Arre!” That had him absolutely excited. “’65 ka ladai lade ho (Did you fight the 65’ War)?” I told him that I joined the army only after ’65. “To ek dam chokre ho! Hum to ’65 ka ladai ke bad discharge lia dha (Means you are too young! I had obtained discharge after the ’65 War).” The man must be at least 15 years older to me, I reckoned. He reminded me of some of the Pakistani POWs I had chatted with during the Bangladesh War. I remembered reflecting at that time, from their demeanour, how closely similar they were from our own jawans. Since the tea break was all too brief with the tanker queue inching forward whenever the lead tanker filled and moved out, we had to abruptly end the conversation, bidding bye to each other with a firm handshake, promising to meet each other whenever possible.

During the weeks that followed, we met each other off and on. Although the spells of interaction were always brief, I found a genuine warmth in his friendship. Since our conversations generally hovered around the working conditions in Saudi, we shared very little of our army lives, except my learning that he was an infantryman from the Frontier Force Regiment and my revealing that I was a ‘risalawala’. I was surprised to learn that a good number of Pakistanis had migrated to Saudi, travelling overland with no visas or passports. They didn’t seem to count it a big deal, rather deeming it more or less their right. They did not hold the Saudis in much high regard either. My friend would tell me that the Saudis had no birthright over the oil, which made them rich, since it was ‘Allah’s’ gift that belonged to all humanity. He shocked me once, while discussing the Saudi law that prohibited carrying of weapons of any kind on the person by anyone, when he coolly rolled up his salwar to reveal a long dagger strapped to his lower leg. If ever I wished to take a car home from Saudi (since the international brands were yet to appear in India), he once told me, he could help me get it right up to the Indo-Pak border near Amritsar; the rest was up to me. I politely declined the offer.

As the drivers recruited by the company in India began arriving, my supervisors and me were gradually relieved of the water hauling work to take up the orientation training of the drivers. Once the training was completed in about a month’s time, I found myself multitasking with fleet management in my role as the deputy to the transport manager. I had often had to drive out in my car to check on various work sites where my drivers were engaged, including tube wells. Once, visiting the tube well I used to frequent to haul water, I caught sight of my Pakistani friend beaming with a big smile headed towards me. “Arre Sahib”, he spoke loud accusing me humorously as I stepped out of the car to greet him.

“Bewakoof bana raha dha muche, eh (You were making a fool of me, eh)!”

“Kyon!”

“Bataya nahin aap officer hai (You didn’t tell me you are an officer).”

“Officer dha, abhi nahi hena, aur aap poocha bhi nahin hai (Was an officer, not now, and you didn’t ask me).”

What had happened was, unknown to me, he had spotted me driving in to the tube well site in the car and asked a tanker driver from my company why was I, who used to be a tanker driver, going around in a car? The driver, in all innocence, had told him that I was their manager, describing me as ‘Captain Saab’ as I was popularly referred to by my drivers. Probably the old soldier he was felt a bit embarrassed that he was treating an officer like his chum. “Asli mein muche shak dha ki aap officer hoga, lekin hum socha officer kyon tanker chalayaga (Actually I suspected that you are an officer, but then I wondered why an officer should be driving a tanker)!” I joined him for a cup of black tea to reassure him that I thoroughly enjoyed his company and our army ranks were a thing of the past.

I met him on a couple of occasions again before my brief term in Saudi ended, since rather bored with the drab existence in the place with no recreation or entertainment, in stark contrast to the vibrant army life I had just left behind, I called it a day and returned home within a few months. As I went on with my life making a living, my Pakistani friend of Saudi more or less faded from my memory that I can no more recollect his name. Nevertheless, over the years, I had had a couple of occasions to notice the strange affinity among soldiers, even if from the opposite camps, coming to the fore, call it camaraderie or brotherhood or whatever. The tale of a Pakistani senior officer’s repentance, holding himself responsible for the death of young Arun Khetarpal, even if it was in his line of duty, which I came across in the course of my research for a book, was one such instance. Then there was the story of a Pakistani brigadier, a POW of 1971, who forged an emotional bond with an Indian JCO who was guarding him. Another was the little known but laudable humane gesture by Rajinder Mohan, my regimental officer, who persevered over the years to contact the folks of a Pakistani officer who breathed his last in his arms during the battle of Ashuganj, and finally succeeded in talking to the officer’s mother. Interestingly, a Pakistani gentleman by the name of Rana, who lives in the US, got in touch with me after reading my story on Rajinder on the internet, feeling obliged to meet him personally and thank him for the noble act. Sadly, before he could fulfill his desire, Rajinder succumbed to a stroke that rendered him speechless and led to his demise thereafter. Rana sounded genuine and sincere when he told me on phone that he longed to see the day when Indians and Pakistanis live as friendly neighbours.

Why am I recollecting all these stories and writing about those? Maybe, there is room for us Indians and Pakistanis to mend fences. We are not different people. In fact, we are one people and we could be one, if only we could dump the laundry bag of mutual hatred we are lugging. Wasn’t it sweet of the mother of Arshad Nadeem to say that both Arshad and Neeraj are like her own sons? Why don’t we look for the positives. We Indians love Nazia Hassan, right? So do the Pakistanis love Shreya Ghoshal. And we both are cricket mad!