In 2016, I moved from Pakistan to India to study. It was the most unlikely place to do so because people went to the US or the UK for higher studies, but never India. And then I, a young Pakistani woman who had never thought she’d actually get to live there, however, got an opportunity to study across the border in Sonipat, Haryana. When I told people where I was going, they said, “You’ll never get a visa for India!” And yet I went, against all odds, and my life changed.

I’d always had a fascination with our neighbours when growing up, but we didn’t talk much about India in our family. My grandparents had migrated from the Indian state of Bihar to East Pakistan after the Partition of 1947, and the stories I heard in my childhood were only about their lives there and not about their time in India. The painful memories of Partition had been left alone. As a kid in the 2000s, I was entranced with everything I saw about Indian society in Bollywood movies and Star Plus on cable TV, even their ads of twenty-rupee McAloo Tikki burgers that made me wish I were in India or that McDonald’s was affordable in Pakistan. In college, when Ye Jawaani Hai Deewani was released, I wanted to live in Delhi as well, so that, just like Ranbir Kapoor and Deepika Padukone and their friends in the film, I could go to Manali for summer vacations. And one day I got to do just that: I crossed the border and saw the other side for myself.

Belongingness in India came to me as easy as breathing. Part of it could be because it was in my blood – my father had been born there. But it was more than that. It was the loose threads of history and memory and the quiet sense of familiarity – as if I were somehow home, yet not so physically – that further solidified the extreme familiarity I had come to feel in a city in a country I was supposed to hate. Most of the time, I did not have to think too much about what to wear; I didn’t have to curate a wardrobe designed to get me the least amount of attention. I did not have to think twice about going somewhere alone. I felt safe enough as a woman to traverse the streets of Delhi, whether on foot or in an auto or a cab. Life was much easier and I was a lot freer. Granted, this was in a large metropolis instead of a small town, but back home, even in Karachi – the biggest city of Pakistan – I did not enjoy such freedoms. India became my home away from home and I began to see the misalignment between my place of birth and my personality. “I was born on the wrong side of the border,” I’d tell my friends. “I was not made for Pakistan.” “What about America? You’ve lived there as well,” they’d say. But in India, I got the best of both my homes: the familiarity of Pakistan when I was away from it, along with all the liberties that I used to long for there.

I strolled on Delhi streets with a lazy relaxed gait, sometimes towards a destination and other times with no particular end in mind. I ventured into tiny lanes of Old Delhi mohallas, marvelling at old worn-down doors and architecture and slipping through crowded thoroughfares, stumbling upon centuries-old monuments. Whenever I missed Pakistan, I would go to Purani Dilli, which always felt like any busy neighbourhood in Karachi. There were men in skull caps and women in abayas walking around Matya Mahal, the smell of kababs in the air, jalebis and kulfi being served to throngs of people outside a shop. Sitting inside the Jama Masjid, looking at the pigeons suddenly fly off together, circumambulate, and gracefully land amidst strewn birdseeds and clay pots of water, was my favourite thing to do. “There are more women out on the streets!” I said to curious questioners in Pakistan when I first came back for a visit. It was why I felt safer in Delhi than in Karachi where, along with a lack of female presence outdoors, there was a surge in street crimes – a result of soaring inflation leading to economic desperation and unemployment.

Delhi also had an arts and culture scene; every day, somewhere, there were plays, concerts, and cultural walks. I discovered a special street dedicated to theatre houses, and a jazz club that celebrated upcoming jazz artists. I meditated at a Vipassana meditation centre in Dharamsala for ten days for free. My solo trip to the beautiful hill station in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh – home to the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan government-in-exile, and its people – was a testament to the fact that it was safe for me to travel alone as a woman there. I also went by myself to Kerala, couchsurfed in Kochi, and roamed the streets of Jew Town, then got onto a train to Kozhikode to see a professor of mine. Professor Mathew was so kind that even though he was leaving for a trip the very next day, he gave me his house to stay in for as long as I was there. He left his trusted companion, Santosh, to take care of me. Santosh took me around all the sights in Kozhikode, such as the seven hundred-year-old Mishkal Mosque and the beach. He introduced me to his family.

More than the place, it was the people of India who transformed my curiosity and intrigue of it into love. They accepted me as one of their own, welcoming me with love because of my Pakistani identity, and not despite it. They made space for me for the person I was, and it suddenly felt easier to belong there than it ever had in my own country.

The similarity in our cultures and hospitality made me see the absurdity of borders and nationalism. I shouldn’t have to feel like I should have been born on one side or the other; borders shouldn’t exist. Tangible boundaries on lands become walls in our minds, closing ourselves off to our neighbours. Nationalism takes that a step further, dressing up a piece of land in pride and politics. It says, “My country is better than yours” and asks us to define our worth by where we were born.

*

Borders are brutal when it comes to friendship and love. The first time I wished I hadn’t been born in Pakistan was when I got my heart broken in India. I fell in love with my Veer, but I couldn’t be his Zara. His name was Pratyush, and his grandparents had migrated from Jhang, a city on the eastern bank of the river Chenab in central Punjab, Pakistan. I had never heard of the place until he told me about it. It was fascinating to discover things about my country from people on the other side. Pratyush knew a lot about Pakistan, probably more than I did. He had attempted the competitive Indian civil service exams, but hadn’t been successful. All that general knowledge, however, was still stored somewhere in his head, and he won me over when he started singing the Pakistani national anthem once. As hard as it is for me to admit this, it’s when I truly fell for him. On Indian soil, together we belted out, “Pak sar zameen shaad baad, kishwar-e-haseen shaad baad.”

I wasn’t the first Pakistani Pratyush had befriended. He had another friend named Tariq, whom he’d met on a Facebook group for Jhang. They quickly became friends, sharing a love of the same city across the Wagah border, one still living there and the other one tracing his roots to it. After talking for months online, they finally decided to meet one day. They went to the Wagah border parade, a display of nationalism and patriotism by the Indian Border Security Forces and the Pakistan Rangers that includes coordinated marches and foot stomping complete with the flag lowering at the Wagah-Attari border every evening at sunset.

The two friends sat on their respective sides, Pratyush on the Indian side and Tariq on the Pakistan side. They watched the stiff dance of the tall men with moustaches, but their eyes kept looking for the other in the crowd. Pratyush spotted his friend. “Tariq!” he said, with his eyes because he couldn’t have shouted the name. “Pratyush!” Tariq exclaimed with his raised hand. Instinctively, Pratyush waved back. Thud, thud, thud. The men in uniforms continued stomping about on their respective sides of the border. In the end, they marched into no man’s land and shook hands. I wondered if Pratyush and Tariq too wanted to shake hands at that moment, maybe even hug. Once the parade ended and the crowd began to leave, the two friends looked at each other one last time, waved, and made their way down the stands.

As Pratyush was leaving, a BSF guard came up to him and said, “You have to come with me.” He was taken into a dimly lit room with just a table and two chairs on either side of it, and asked to sit. “It was like one of those interrogation rooms from the movies. I was shit scared,” Pratyush told me. After what seemed like forever, a man in civil clothes came in and sat in the chair opposite him.

“What is your name?” he asked.
“Pratyush, sir. Why am I here?”
“Show me your aadhar card.” The man demanded a show of national identification. Pratyush quickly fished it out of his wallet and handed it to him.
“What were you doing here today?”
“I came to watch the parade sir. Like everyone.”
“Acha? You just came to watch the parade?”
“Jee sir.”
“So who were you waving to then? We have eyes everywhere, we can see everything,” he barked.
“Oh sir that’s my friend, Tariq,” Pratyush said, taken aback.
“You have friends in Pakistan?”
“No sir, I mean just Tariq. We met on a Facebook group of the city my grandparents are from in Pakistan. Jhang,” Pratyush tried to justify his innocent friendship with his supposed ‘enemy’.
“Show me your chats with him,” the man ordered. Pratyush opened his phone and loaded Tariq’s chat in the Facebook Messenger app, then passed the mobile to the man.
The man scrolled the screen with his brow furrowed together and a focused downward gaze, pausing occasionally.
“Ye plan kab banaya milnay ka?” he looked up from the phone and asked.
“Sir, one month back. You can see in the chat,” Pratyush pointed towards the phone.
The man went back to the chats and after he was satisfied, he gave Pratyush his phone back. “You are not allowed to plan to meet someone on the other side or even wave to someone. Next time we catch you, we won’t be so lenient,” the man admonished him, then pointed to the door. “You can go now.”
“Jee sir, it won’t happen again.” Visibly shaken, Pratyush quickly got up and scurried off. “That was a really intense moment for me,” he later told me. “I didn’t think I could get into so much trouble for simply making a plan to meet Tariq at the parade and then waving at him! Can you imagine?”

The fear Indian intelligence instilled in him became so great that he could not even imagine our union happening despite his fascination with me. That year, I watched Ae Dil Hai Mushkil in the cinema thrice and cried at my unrequited love just as the Indian character Ayaan Sainger does for Alizeh, who was supposed to be from Pakistan, before the director, Karan Johar changed it out of political pressure. I despised that our countries came between us, the border like Lakshman Rekha that cannot be crossed in love.

*

After a year in India, I came back home to see my family. In the July of 2017, I met a charming young musician from Delhi in Karachi. He serenaded me with Indian classical music and, a week later, together we crossed the Wagah border as Veer-Zara did, breaking boundaries of love and becoming our own little version of a symbol of unity between our countries. We were together in India for several months while my visa was still valid, and then eventually got married in Karachi in 2018. We spent four years living in India, but sadly, our love wasn’t enough to keep us together and eventually the hatred between our countries seeped into our relationship, causing a rift beyond repair.

Gradually, the sense of belonging that coursed through my veins began to dissipate, as I witnessed India slipping through my fingers until I could no longer hold on to it. My Long Term Visa (LTV) restrictions only allowed me to stay in Delhi. Suddenly, I started to feel trapped – unable to go anywhere without the Indian state’s permission, unable to work, unable to do much except be a stay-at-home wife. Furthermore, in the six years I spent there, I saw the country change for the worse right in front of my eyes. The secular syncretic India that had welcomed a Pakistani woman was slowly disappearing, and with it the idea of belonging I had once attached to it.

Aatish Taseer, son of Punjab’s former governor Salman Taseer, writes in the introduction of his latest book, A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile, “The idea of India was a historical recognition that over time—and not always peacefully—a great diversity had collected on the Indian subcontinent. The modern republic, as a reflection of that history would belong not to any one group, but to all groups in equal measure.” Unfortunately, the very imposition of homogeneity upon a composite culture, which Taseer found across the border as a young man visiting his father’s homeland, Pakistan, was now descending over India as the Modi administration rallied for a Hindu Bharat replacing secular India. More and more in the air I could sense the Hindu nationalist Savarkar’s view that the essential Indian citizen is a Hindu and that “everyone else was at best a guest and at worst the bastard child of foreign invasion.”

With the constituency of the “idea of India” being steadily eroded, I no longer began to feel at home there. Suddenly, my experience of striving to belong in a country where I would be forever destined to feel like a fraud became strenuous. The demands of belonging outweighed the feelings of safety and security of my future in India and eventually forced me to reckon with the inevitable: should I stay or should I go? In the end, with a broken heart, I left, longing to return to the home I had made there, hoping it would still be there when I came back.

While the borders drawn between Pakistan and India continue to define our identities, I often wonder what our lives could look like if those lines were a lot softer, more a thread connecting stories than a barbed wire separating people. Perhaps I wasn’t born on the wrong side, they just drew the lines wrong.