Following are excerpts from a piece by journalist Bilal Qureshi on how it felt to be a Pakistani-Muslim in India grappling with the painful echoes of partition and strong Hindu nationalism.

“When I first landed in Delhi, the city seemed eerily familiar and welcoming. I beheld the same faces, music, spices and noisy alleyways from my childhood in Lahore... But then in the middle of introductions that first day, my driver revealed his great hope for war. He hated Pakistanis. “They’re a nation of terrorists,” he said. He wanted the new prime minister to consider using nuclear weapons against them. My instinct was to pass this off as the ramblings of an uneducated man. But I soon discovered how normalized, among all kinds of people, these views had become.”

“One day I opened the newspaper to find an image of two bodies — one a 35-year-old man, the other a 12-year-old boy — dangling from a tree. They were Muslim cattle traders who had been lynched by Hindu cow-protection vigilantes. Their corpses were meant to send a warning to those suspected of eating, transporting or selling beef. As similar attacks on Muslims grew in frequency and brutality, the leadership’s silence spoke volumes.. I adapted my parents’ Urdu to sound like Delhi’s colloquial Hindi. I was a closeted Pakistani, and only my very closest friends knew. I often wondered when and where I would be found out.”

“I never went to Pakistan from India, and nobody from my family ever came to visit. The closest I came to my Pakistani family was at the daily border ceremony at the crossing between the two countries near the city of Amritsar in Punjab. Every night at sunset, crowds gather on each side to watch Indian and Pakistani troops march toward each other as the gates are briefly flung open, then immediately shut. With soldiers in full regalia, soundtracked to military pomp and circumstance, the Indian ceremony is meant to stir audiences into a frenzy of nationalism. This was the region where my grandfather was born and where blood, rape and massacre were unleashed on an undocumented and unspeakable scale in 1947. The way that painful legacy was turned into a carnivalesque celebration of enmity made it the ugliest place I had seen in South Asia.”

“One fundamental question that haunts the relationship between Indians and Pakistanis is whether partition should have happened. Wouldn’t we be better off together? I don’t know the answer, and I find it increasingly pointless to imagine the hypothetical possibilities. The tragedy of borders is that they eventually become real. India and Pakistan have turned into two very different societies. They have had different traumas and triumphs since 1947. But they also share a much longer history and a familial bond. After living in India, I feel that the tragedy of partition is a more personal, unknowable one. What relationships, friendships and conversations never began? What ideas were unformed and unsaid that could have changed lives?”

Read the full piece here: http://wapo.st/2iuXi8p