It was not possible to pass through Jhelum and not want to see Farooq Road and the house where I spent five years when my father was first commanding a battalion in Chhamb and later when he served at Station Headquarters in Jhelum
I am happy to report that Grand Trunk Road — between Rawalpindi and Lahore — despite some improvements, retains its old habits. So does this country, the latest wave of democracy notwithstanding.
I totally chanced upon GT Road. In Islamabad the (not quite) Beautiful for a two-day Pugwash Conference on Regional Security, Jay and I were driving back and we were supposed to take the Motorway, as we have done for many years now.
That was not to be. Approaching from Constitution Avenue, there is now a long detour in front of Serena and it requires the motorist to drive all the way to the roundabout that leads one to Murree or Rawalpindi (and Lahore) depending on whether one wants to go high or low or head back to Islamabad and get on the road connecting with the Motorway.
That gave me my chance. Jay is always averse to taking GT Road, being of the Motorway generation, and my previous two attempts over the last two years to convince him to check out the old artery had failed. This time I told him it would take more time to go back to Isloo and we were better off zooming towards GT Road. He gave in, a near-miracle.
The road looked good enough to me except for minor irritants. The area is as beautiful as ever, wind as the road does through the Potohar Plateau, a completely different sensation from the monotonous, even drive on the Motorway (the Salt Range leg excepted).
GT Road is mostly dual carriage now but remains what I would call interactive. Interactive is my term for a road on which the chances of collision are high and drivers can do the unexpected. It is also a road where more than one’s own mistake or technical failure, the other Scotties can beam you up.
Just in case you haven’t got my point, dear reader, it is a live road and in that much more fascinating than the dull, placid Motorway. There is no rule still about heavy vehicles not occupying the fast lane, just as there is none about overtaking only from the right side.
An interactive road is also a road that requires innovation since its stability threshold, in terms of the expected, is rather low. There is also no rule which says that vehicles below X speed will not be in the fast lane and since dipping lights makes no real difference to a driver going slow — the thing to do is to constantly honk the horn — and in a state of reverie, the one going fast has to swerve left and overtake from the wrong side. Pursing the lips to signal f*** you, if one has the time to do so, is also useless on a Punjabi road.
But the area’s beauty outweighs the road’s interactive character. Everything looked the same: Mandra, Gujjar Khan’s main bazaar, Rawat, Sohawa, the winding road, descending into the plateau and then ascending between Sohawa and Deena and the more-than-familiar patch between Deena and Jhelum and Jhelum and Kharian — memories came flooding back and I felt sad and refreshed simultaneously.
It was not possible to pass through Jhelum and not want to see Farooq Road and the house where I spent five years when my father was first commanding a battalion in Chhamb and later when he served at Station Headquarters in Jhelum. The house is still there, the side-lawn has another house built on it and the St. John’s Church still stands tall, though the red varnish doesn’t go well with it.
Jay is too young to cherish memories, they being a function of growing old and realising that life is like sand slipping out of a closed fist. I could see he was getting bored seeing me trying to absorb the road and the surroundings and much else. But he was gracious enough to let me have tea at Zeelaf Hotel.
The hotel and the surrounding area looked almost the same; but the tv was on and the newly sworn-in ministers were talking about the next phase. I could do without the rude pulling back from the past. The goings-on on the tv were in sharp contrast to the still-familiar and much-unchanged landscape. The lack of progress is not a bad thing, after all.
Jay looks ahead; I look back. He looks for adventure; I look for the security of the known and that only comes from the past; from moments already spent and even if not well-spent still preferable to the unknown future. In any case, memories are selective and we reconstruct them to our advantage.
The journey from Wazirabad onwards and especially the Gujranwala-Lahore leg was bad. Plains are just that — plain and unexciting. Plus, the Gujranawala-Lahore leg remains under construction. It has for one score and more. The traffic was crazy as we hit the leg at peak commuting hours.
Jay decided to sleep and I was mulling over the similarity between that patch and democracy while negotiating the traffic that became crazier and crazier as the road got bad to worse and then finally died as a road.
Those who look for theories of democratic transitions and the problem of democratic consolidation don’t need to read Stepan and Linz and Schmitter et al. They need to drive from Gujranwala to Lahore on GT Road. A road that someone is trying to widen but which is more notional than real.
It depicts the anomalies. As does GT Road in its entirety, especially when juxtaposed with the rule-bound, unexciting Motorway. If Motorway is the new civil society sensibility, GT Road is the real expression of the people of Pakistan.
Drive on both and work out the democratic problem that most think, wrongly, belongs to a political science class.
Ejaz Haider is Consulting Editor of The Friday Times and Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk
Courtesy: Daily Times, 6/4/2008
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