Coming Back: The Odyssey of a Pakistani Through India
By Shueyb Gandapur
Book Corner
ISBN: 978-969-662-599-5
144pp. 

For the lack of my ability to put it less prosaically, “Beautiful!” was the word that came to my mind when I first held Coming Back — The Odyssey of a Pakistani in India by Shueyb Gandapur in my hands and flipped through its pages.

The eye-catching and alluring painting on the cover, created by the author, depicts a cow sitting in the centre, with two rows of traditional Indian buildings on each side of a narrow street behind it, and a mosque and a temple facing each other in the background. Skillfully captured colour photographs with every chapter inside, enrich the text. The presentation, in general, validated my first impression. As a bibliophile who had defected to binge-watching movies, I skipped an engaging television show as this compelling book lured me — to revive my neglected first love of reading books.

According to the author, the desire to go to India started taking root in his heart at a tender age (before he turned eight), after watching an Indian movie for the first time. “My first introduction to that land was peppered with accounts of eternal animosity and ill-will existing between their people and mine, and thus ‘they’ [came] to acquire an aura of exoticism and mystery.”

Later, he learnt from his elders that a sizeable number of non-Muslims had to migrate from his hometown, Dera Ismail (D.I.) Khan in the northwest of Pakistan, to settle in India at the time of Partition. Not only that, but members of his own Muslim family, who were traders and frequent travellers to far-flung regions of the Subcontinent, which later became part of modern India, had settled over there. His “great-grandfather abandoned what he had made in India to return to his native town. After Partition, some of his [great-grandfather’s] cousins and relatives who had married Indian women stayed back.”

Coming Back covers four cities that the Indian visa allowed Gandapur to visit — Delhi, Agra, Jaipur and Varanasi — for a duration of two-and-a-half weeks. However, the profound nature and range of the exposure and events confronted by the author during this relatively short expedition, is confounding.

A beautifully presented travelogue of India by a Pakistani explores the commonalities of the histories of the two countries as well as their mutual distancing

His journey begins in the sweltering heat of June 2017, with the tricky official formalities of obtaining a visa for the visit. These are mutually made more challenging for visitors from both India and Pakistan. This visit becomes more peculiar for the first-time traveller to India because he is a Muslim and a Pakistani.

Gandapur passionately explores the common historical, cultural and social landmarks and dimensions that encompass more commonalities than deviances between both countries. To him, the diversities seem to have become more pronounced in the last seven decades, due to the political atmosphere on both sides.

“India is an incredibly diverse nation, unmatched in terms of its variety; it is a melting pot of faiths, with various strands even within those faiths. In many ways, however, our two countries, despite being cut off from each other, have grown similarly over the past three generations… one concern repeatedly raised in India was the rising wave of intolerance, instigated by the majoritarian politics of Hindu nationalism promoted under the current [Indian] government. This is not very different from what has happened in Pakistan.”

The chapter ‘The Grave of My Idol’ is dedicated to Gandapur’s search for the grave of the writer Qurratulain Hyder at Jamia Millia Islamia Delhi and offers an enlightening preview of the history of Urdu language and literature in India, as well as their current status.

Gandapur describes a fascinating series of meetings and the discoveries he made in ‘Traces of My Hometown in a Foreign Land.’ He met individuals who spoke languages inherited from their family elders who had migrated from D.I. Khan to India, without knowing what they were called. They did not realise that these inherited languages were Seraiki and Pashto, major languages in D.I. Khan. The last six of the 22 chapters of the book recount this thrilling episode.

The pain of Partition is felt on both sides, more so by those who left their homes and lives on either side of the divide. However, one cannot avoid thinking that the collective misery has been aggravated by the policies and adversarial attitude in both countries that did not help heal the wounds of the common people who were displaced. Gandapur quotes poet Bashir Badar’s couplet rendered by singer Jagjit Singh, to underline his feelings:

Mujh se bichharr kar khush rehte ho?
Meri tarha tum bhi jhootay ho

[You stay happy after parting with me, you say?/ Just like me, you are a liar, too]

The narration and the photographs in the book are captivating. On several occasions in Coming Back, I was reminded of the lucidity and realism of the writing style of my all-time favourite British author W. Somerset Maugham, particularly his short stories set in various locales.

Gandapur is a London-based chartered accountant who also paints in his free time. He has been to over 100 countries and has written extensively about his journeys in various publications. This is his first book. Including a map of the region he travelled to in India could have facilitated readers even more.

The author concludes the book by stating, “My connection, however, is with the history spanning centuries, and with my South Asian identity that is currently housed within the boundaries of Pakistan but also incorporates Afghanistan and India in its fold. A land where, on my first visit, I am greeted with the welcoming expression of ‘Bohat dinon baad aaye’ [It took you so long to come back] cannot be foreign to me.”

The reviewer is a freelance writer and translator.

He can be reached at mehwer@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, June 29th, 2025