A colleague at Delhi's Nehru University had a penchant for mixing up metaphors. 'Sailing in the same soup' was everyone's favourite.
In many ways Indians and Pakistanis have been sailing in the same soup for years. They share their destiny but they think they don't. This is partly because one sees the other through the haze of awkward cultural metaphors.
Sometimes their effort to size up the other becomes akin to predicting the last scene in a Hindi movie, which means the cultural punters are mostly right but they could also be completely wrong in their hurried perceptions.
A Pakistani girl was most upset that during a meeting with the young Indian actress Karishma Kapoor in Mumbai some years ago, she was asked whether girls wore jeans in Pakistan. Of course they did was the outraged reply.
It was like the young Pakistani boy asking his Indian cousin during Foreign Minister Vajpayee's trip to Karachi in the 1970s whether the journalists he had brought home were Hindus. Told that they were indeed, the perplexed host could merely mutter that they looked just like Muslims.
In Karachi the other day, I attended a meeting to celebrate the life of a veteran Pakistani journalist who passed away recently.
An elderly Indian media personality, a well known peace activist who had known the deceased colleague for some four decades, sent a message of condolence, in which he described his friend as a good Muslim.
He added that his friend was very secular and, as if to prove the point, he added that the Pakistani had more Hindu friends than Muslims.
Thereby hangs an old nagging problem. We love to see Indian-Pakistani equations from the easy Hindu-Muslim prism, a tendency that is often misleading and also embarrassing to anyone who doesn't share the common enthusiasm for religious identity.
The fact is that the Pakistani journalist in question would have described himself as anything but a good Muslim. Yes, he was a frequent visitor to India and found a lot of love and affection in Indian newspapers.
It is another matter that the remuneration he expected for his insightful columns was usually less flattering than the love he would generally receive from them.
However, on one of the trips to Delhi he gave me a useful tip on how to smuggle a certain popular commodity into Karachi.
His secret advice that I can now share involved encouraging friendly customs men into turning the Nelson's eye to an enterprise otherwise officially frowned upon.
The metaphor of humour was similarly found missing at the Lahore airport in the early days of the Musharraf regime. A group of Indian editors had arrived from Delhi on their way to meet the general in Islamabad, each one of them carrying their stuff from the Delhi duty-free.
It turned out that unlike previous occasions when such minor excesses were overlooked, and even indulged, the presence of new military overseers at the customs desk required the contraband to be confiscated, with the promise, it must be added, that they would be returned on the way back.
We gathered that the new stringent rules had more to do with Musharraf's anti-corruption stance than with his personal choices in the matter.
On their journey back when the editors sought to retrieve their cargo in Lahore, I suggested banterishly that they should forget their confiscated cargo as it would have been disposed of anyway.
At which point an airport official listening in to our conversation escorted me to a corner. He fumed that an Indian could think so poorly of the integrity of Pakistan's customs men.
The brave ones of the Indian media sensed a serious 'diplomatic incident' shaping up and in a shared reflex action moved far away from the scene of our intense powwow.
Did I really believe what I said, I was asked sternly. I replied that this was an issue over which great souls like Mirza Ghalib and Majaaz would have wavered in their integrity. Amid a collective guffaw someone ordered tea and biscuits for me. And all the stuff, seal intact, was returned to the owners.
When those that are not sensitive to others' cultural metaphors become official interlocutors in any serious dialogue, any such project will be fraught with risks.
The way our language has evolved on popular TV, for example, it is a pointer to the pitfalls we face. If an Indian TV anchor asks his Pakistani guest whether he was opposed to the last military takeover he runs the risk of conveying the opposite meaning.
'Khilafat' is the word in Hindi to mean opposition. I believe it was co-opted by a clerical error because many people thought that Gandhiji's support to the Khilafat Movement meant literal opposition to British rule.
The confusion arose because Hindi speakers generally do not know that 'mukhalifat' is the correct word for opposition. And that khilafat could mean just the opposite.
In another example of jumbled metaphors — both cultural and linguistic — Gen Musharraf was evidently bewildered by the persistent use of the term 'atoot ang' in his meeting with the Indian media.
The term means an inseparable part and is officially used to describe Kashmir as a part of India. But how was he to know?
To bridge cultural gaps that exist not just between Indians and Pakistanis but among the diverse people within their respective boundaries a questioning, curious spirit would always be more helpful than an assertive and therefore potentially pompous approach.
How many times the stereotypes come into play when they are the least expected or even desirable. It is tiring to hear well-meaning though presumptuous acquaintances who never spare a chance to remind me that their grandfathers read Urdu and Persian. Also that in their homes they would cook meat once a week even today.
The assumption in the attempt at friendly small talk, would be that my grandfather spoke Persian, which he did not, or that I am a carnivore by virtue of carrying a Muslim name.
I don't like to disappoint my interlocutors no matter how trying they can often be. So I won't tell them that I am a full-blown vegetarian and that my knowledge of Urdu is very ordinary, not to speak of Persian.
The writer is Dawn's correspondent in Delhi.
jawednaqvi@gmail.com
