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India beckoned. My original plan was to cross the border on the so-called Friendship Express, but inevitably the train service was suspended. Instead I drove to the border through flat scrubland pimpled with military bunkers. I got my passport stamped at a deserted immigration post, then walked across the border, which was marked by a thick white line painted across the road. On the other side was a sign: "India, the world's largest democracy, welcomes you."
The Indian post was deserted too—but not for long. Every evening, thousands of people come here to watch the border-closing ceremony; similar numbers flock to the Pakistani side. By 6 p.m., Bollywood theme tunes blared from loudspeakers, and a purpose-built seating area was heaving with Indians chanting, "Long live Hindustan!" A hundred meters away, across the border, another crowd was screaming, "Long live Pakistan!" and waving its own flags. Giant, stern-faced soldiers moved among both crowds, blowing whistles to keep everything in order.
The ceremony finally began. It was quite intricate, and very, very funny. An Indian guard in a curious fluted headdress would swing on his heels, quick-march to within a meter of the border, and, with hands on hips, turn his head and pout furiously at his Pakistani counterparts. Then he pirouetted again, and goose-stepped gymnastically in the direction from which he had come. What did the Pakistani guards think of all this? It was hard to tell, since—on the other side of the thick white line—they were performing an almost identical ceremony.
A bugle sounded. The two flags were lowered, and the two crowds fell silent as two national anthems were played. Then, the Indian guards slammed the border gates shut in the faces of their Pakistani brothers, who responded in kind. And that was that. Two great nations had just delivered the best display their respective ministries of silly walks could come up with, and had nothing left to say to each other.
After 10 days bucketing through Pakistan's dreary stations, arriving in India was like switching from black-and-white to Technicolor. At the Sikh holy city of Amritsar, my first stop after the border, the station was a heaving, seething, jostling, squabbling masala of humanity. Women sported saris of every color—drab burqa territory was long gone. The Sikh men wore magnificent turbans of sky blue and electric pink, skillfully wound for a visit to the Golden Temple.
Indian trains are no more punctual than Pakistani ones, but Indian stations are much more fun to hang around in. At Amritsar there are bookstores stocked with spiritual tracts, Internet guides and—that now archetypally Indian best seller—Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. There are dozens of flashing weight machines, which, in return for a single rupee, click and whir, then spit out a little card bearing your weight and—this being India—a spiritually uplifting message. ("The end of doubt is the beginning of repose," read mine.) Other shops sell everything from souvenir toothpicks to hefty luggage chains, not to mention a women's beauty product called The Big Smile Offer—"for the removing of the public hair, sir," explained its vendor.
The platforms were clogged with huge hessian mailbags secured with Dickensian wax seals. Behind one barricade of luggage sat R.P. Singh, a high constable with the Border Security Force. He was going home after a year's posting in Kashmir, which he called "a very fine and peaceful place"—notwithstanding the fact that India and Pakistan had fought two wars over it. Was another likely? "No chance! But believe me," R.P. Singh added gravely, "we are ready to fight. We will fight Pakistan with our guns, with our bare hands, with our ... " Abruptly, he had run out of things to fight the Pakistanis with. "Cup of tea?" he inquired.
While I rarely encountered Hindus in Pakistan, Muslims in India were too numerous to ignore—too numerous, really, to be truly called a minority. There are 120 million Muslims here, nearly as many as in Pakistan. Pakistan is proud of her "Muslim bomb," and pointedly named her long-range missile systems Ghauri, Ghaznavi and Abdali, after three Muslim warlords who invaded India between the 11th and 18th centuries. But the great irony is that India's bomb is Muslim, too. The architect of India's 1998 nuclear tests was A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, a national icon recently named as the nation's third Muslim President.
Of course, not all Muslims are so celebrated. Most still rank among India's less privileged. Every day at Old Delhi Station, a group of porters gathers at a water tap on platform 12 to perform their ablutions before kneeling on mats laid out in a specially roped-off section. Their prayers are barely audible amid the grumble of departing commuter trains and the maddeningly frequent station announcements. Muslims make up one-third of Old Delhi's thousand-odd porters. Business is bad, says Azam Ali, 33, carefully folding his topee away. Yet Ali, a father of five, would rather lose customers than miss his five-times-a-day prayers. "Allah will provide," he says. Perhaps this fatalism is a key to Ali's survival, as patriotism is to Pakistan's Hindus.
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