It is July 8, 1947.
A British lawyer lands in a country his empire has occupied for nearly two centuries.
He leaves five weeks later, after sitting in offices, parsing papers, listening to other people wearing suits, and being pushed around by data—and by the agendas of the people who collected that data.
On August 15, he leaves for his homeland.
Behind him is a line that will define and shape the fate of millions.
A line that was itself constantly pushed around by people with their own personal agendas, political ambitions and beliefs, at a time when there was already far too little time.
The millions whose fates changed were never consulted. They were never asked. Many did not even know what was happening.
All they knew was that suddenly, they had to leave home and go somewhere else.
It is some day in 2006.
During morning recess, somebody yells:
“Oye, Pakistani!”
Others join in.
“Pakistani! Pakistani! Pakistani!”
I am eight.
So are the chanters.
My fellow classmates.
I remember being confused more than anything else.
Why was a nationality being used as an insult?
Was it an insult because I was Muslim?
Would it be an insult to call a Hindu person Pakistani?
Were there Hindus in Pakistan?
Were they called Hindustani as an insult?
These were some of the many thoughts flooding my eight-year-old mind as I tried to understand what exactly made Pakistani an insult.
I was annoyed not because I was being bullied.
I was annoyed because I was confused.
Over the years, I encountered more bullies—more often than not, classmates—and developed a standard counter.
“Have you ever talked to a Pakistani before?”
No.
“Have you ever met one?”
No.
This would usually shut them up.
A bully’s mind is rarely prepared for a follow-up question. Good logic requires mental bandwidth, and if you had enough of that, perhaps you would not be standing in a schoolyard yelling the name of a country at another eight-year-old.
Over the years, my counters only got stronger.
My forefathers did not simply inherit India.
They chose it.
“You know what language they speak in Lahore?”
Punjabi.
This left people particularly confused because they had assumed everyone in Pakistan spoke Urdu.
“You know there are farms divided by the border? Places where the geography of Partition cut through land, families and communities? So what does a line make you?”
“You know Atif Aslam is Pakistani, right?”
“There are, in fact, Hindus in Pakistan.”
“Yes, I have relatives there. My great-grandmother’s uncle.”
“Advani—one of the central political figures of the Ram Janmabhoomi movement—was born in Karachi.”
So on and so forth.
The search for the meaning behind my bullies’ words only made me curious about Pakistan.
Even the endless stream of anti-Pakistan media so prevalent in India and Bollywood could not deter me.
It was almost like a Greek epic, where every step taken to prevent a prophecy becomes the very thing that fulfils it.
The more I was told not to look, the more I wanted to see.
I had always been curious.
But things did not really explode until 2019.
I was pulled into learning about Pakistan through three major channels.
The first was Mark Wiens.
He released a long series of videos travelling through Pakistan and eating its food. For the first time, I had a long-form visual map of the country—its streets, its people, its culture, its food—in a way I had never seen before.
The brazenly open-hearted people of Karachi and Peshawar.
The breathtaking valleys of Skardu.
The Punjabi accent of Lahore.
And the food.
My brain makes sense of the world through food, and suddenly all the connections started forming.
I saw karahi and, for the first time, realised what a proper karahi actually looked like.
Honourable mentions must also go to chargha, takatak, the various biryanis scattered across Karachi—shoutout to @karachikhatmal, who has created a beautiful map of Karachi’s biryanis and their stories—bong paye, Lahori channe, bun kebab, and the discovery that kids from Islamabad are apparently called burgers.
Scnz kuch aise hain.
The second was a blogger from Malir Cantt, Karachi, named Irfan Junejo.
At the time, he had a modest following on YouTube and made videos documenting the daily comings and goings of his life.
His videos became proof of the pudding.
Pakistanis were just… people.
Good people.
Funny people.
People going to work, hanging out with friends, making art, eating food, listening to music, trying to figure out their lives.
It also made me realise how many Pakistanis could be modern and cosmopolitan while remaining deeply rooted in their own identity.
The third was a meme page called Normieumer.
I originally followed it partly to brush up on my Urdu.
Instead, I discovered that Pakistanis have a great sense of humour.
Better than Indians, if I am being completely fair.
Whenever relations between the two countries deteriorated, I would watch Pakistanis respond to the situation with memes so absurdly funny that I sometimes wondered whether this country was capable of taking anything seriously.
I still remember someone posting a picture of Modi with the caption:
“Churidaar pehenne wale ko hum seriously nahi lete.”
How are you supposed to conduct decades of inherited geopolitical hatred against people who respond like this?
Then came the music.
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sent my soul hurtling into feelings I did not know existed.
Then Talha Anjum.
Hasan Raheem.
Faris Shafi.
Umair’s production.
At some point I simply had to admit:
“Man, they got better music.”
Their rappers—the flow, the writing, the production—felt light-years ahead of much of the mainstream rap I was hearing back home.
Then I went backwards.
Into the long-forgotten archives of Nescafé Basement.
Into Rohail Hyatt’s Coke Studio.
Into Fareed Ayaz and Abu Muhammad Qawwal performing qawwali with arrangements that managed to be modern without stripping the music of its soul.
Everything made me fall a little more in love with Pakistan.
Then they released Pasoori on Coke Studio and launched me straight into the stratosphere.
Even the bullies folded to the rhythm.
Then I moved to Canada.
Here, the brown colour of our skin often makes us indistinguishable until somebody asks where you are from.
For the first time, I could fulfil another part of my curiosity.
I could eat Pakistani food made by Pakistanis.
Bihari boti.
A real Pakistani karahi, served in an actual karahi.
Roghani naan.
An incredible veal biryani with aloo bukhara and tamarind.
After all these years of wondering why people had yelled Pakistani at me as an insult, I finally arrived at one major conclusion:
Sirf akhand chutiye the.
One day, I sat down with Google Maps and started looking at Pakistan.
Just looking.
Where was everything?
The last time I had done this was to check where Mohenjo-daro was and determine whether we could somehow secede that territory into India.
But this time, something broke my heart.
For the first time, I realised that my home in Gujarat was only about a day’s drive from Karachi if a normal open border and direct roads existed.
I realised that Amritsar and Lahore are so close that, metaphorically speaking, you could stand in one and lob a sufficiently hard piece of rock into the other.
I saw videos of planes landing at Amritsar airport with the glowing lights of Lahore visible beyond.
And suddenly I understood.
This was not some alien land.
It was right there.
Right there.
Everything I had been told about Pakistan had required me to imagine it as somewhere far away.
Foreign.
Hostile.
Fundamentally different.
But you look at the map and there it is.
A few hours away.
People eating the same daal.
Arguing in the same languages.
Listening to the same music.
Making the same jokes.
Calling their mothers the same things.
The whole illusion depends on never looking too closely.
All the lies that had been fed to us over the years—and that continue to be fed to us—began to collapse.
Pakistan is your enemy.
You should hate them.
Arrey, pehle dekho toh sahi.
To hate someone, you should at least start by knowing them.
When Air India Flight 171 crashed in Ahmedabad, I saw Pakistani influencers posting condolences almost immediately. Some appeared on my feed before I had seen anything from many Indian influencers I followed.
How are you going to convince me that these people are my enemy?
Maybe the propaganda exists precisely because ordinary Indians must never become too curious about how people in Faisalabad talk.
Because they might look across the border and discover that their brothers are actually funnier than them.
Jo awaam apne aap ko seriously nahi leti, woh tumhari hatred ko kya bhaav degi?
It is utterly disappointing that, as an Indian passport holder, visiting Pakistan as an ordinary tourist is extraordinarily difficult.
Because I desperately want to go.
I want to travel through Lehnda Punjab.
I want to watch neza bazi.
I want to eat apricots in Gilgit-Baltistan.
I want to get my phone stolen in Karachi while I am distracted by a plate of nalli biryani.
I want to buy Peshawari chappals.
I want to get roasted in Faisalabad.
I want to get my bike oil changed with whatever magical lubricant Pakistani mechanics advertise as being powerful enough to make it reach Modi’s house in fourth gear.
I want to see whether Jeele ke channe are actually that good.
I want to collect the poetry, threats, jokes and philosophy written on the backs of Pakistani trucks.
I want to conduct a rigorous comparative analysis of Rooh Afza from both sides of the border.
These are serious academic pursuits.
I had been churning this essay in my head for about two weeks when, this past weekend, Talwiinder made an appearance at Hasan Raheem’s concert in Toronto.
Five blocks away from where I was working my kitchen shift.
An Indian Punjabi artist walking onto the stage of a Pakistani artist.
In Canada.
A crowd singing along.
No Radcliffe Line running through the middle of the venue.
These are the things I live for.
My brother and sister-in-law recently bought a home.
Our neighbours are from Karachi.
And perhaps the best part of the whole story is that there is no border between us.
No visa.
No checkpoint.
No Wagah ceremony.
No soldiers marching with their legs thrown theatrically towards the sky.
Just neighbours.
Call me an idealist, but sometimes I wonder whether the overseas South Asian community might accidentally pave a road towards something our governments have spent decades convincing us is impossible.
Not necessarily the literal removal of borders.
Perhaps something more achievable, and in some ways more dangerous to the machinery of hatred:
the removal of the borders inside our heads.
Because when an Indian and a Pakistani meet thousands of kilometres away from home, something strange often happens.
The differences we were taught to obsess over become smaller.
The similarities become impossible to ignore.
The languages collapse into each other.
The food starts an argument.
The music ends it.
And eventually somebody says something so specifically South Asian that everyone in the room understands it without translation.
Maybe that is why I keep returning to that schoolyard in 2006.
A group of eight-year-olds yelling:
“Pakistani! Pakistani! Pakistani!”
They thought they were insulting me.
Instead, they gave me a question.
And I spent the next twenty years looking for the answer.
The answer led me through Karachi’s biryanis, Lahore’s streets, Skardu’s mountains, Faisalabad’s jokes, Nusrat’s qawwalis, Junejo’s videos, Pakistani meme pages, Hasan Raheem concerts, Google Maps, and finally to a house in Canada where my family lives next door to a family from Karachi.
After all that searching, the answer turned out to be remarkably simple.
There is no border between us.