There’s a long straight road that goes from Amritsar in India to Lahore in Pakistan. At the border they have created two halves of a stadium, half in each country with slightly different styling as befitting the national architecture. There is an air gap of around 5m between the two sides. Let’s call it no man’s land. And blocking the road, there is a locked gate on both sides. So theoretically you could drive from Amritsar into the Indian half of the stadium, drive through the stadium and if they opened the gates on both sides you could cross no man’s land, drive through the Pakistan side of the stadium and onto Lahore. With me so far?
Every evening at about 4.30, both sides of the stadium fill up with people. Indians on one side and Pakistanis on the other. A group of soldiers are presented to the crowd from the upper stands in a kind of Hunger Games kick off, followed by some unusual marching towards the border gate. It’s part Hakka part ministry of silly walks although to be fair all armies seem to indulge in similar activities. What is very strange is that while the Indian soldiers are doing all this on the Indian side, something very similar is happening on the Pakistan side (we could see it but not very well). Sadly, the gates didn’t open and they didn’t all hug each other but maybe one day. The funny thing is that to make all of this work there must be quite a degree of cooperation on the quiet.
Oh, and did I say two dogs walked past with inexplicably three soldiers for no apparent reason.
Also worth mentioning that it is impossible to go anywhere in a taxi or rickshaw in India without incident. We took the hotel car to the border which happened to be a black jaguar. Very nice. It’s hard to believe that such a car can go very long without being pranged but that wasn’t our problem. When we got to the toll road it turned out that they hadn’t renewed their auto payment card so there was a 10 minute delay while this was rectified. Then I think the driver pocketed the parking money and parked who knows where. After the event we couldn’t find him for 20 minutes. Then, he eventually appeared in a sea of white Toyotas so all was well.
