‘You cannot board this plane,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
‘You are Indian. Indians are supposed to report to the local police station in the city and register themselves there. You have not done so.’
‘But I did not know . . .’ I started to explain.
‘Here, take her inside.’ The immigration officer beckoned to a colleague standing close by, and pointed to a room on the other side of the immigration hall.
The room turned out to be the Lahore airport police station.
‘Should we let her go?’ one cop asked the other in what I thought was Punjabi.
‘No . . . let’s keep her,’ the other chuckled, looking at me seated across the desk.
I was allowed to pick up my luggage as I was offloaded from the aircraft.
‘I am so sorry . . . The citizens of both countries are friendly, it is just that the military and politics keep us apart,’ said a Pakistani man as I turned my suitcase around to drag it back to the airport police cell, accompanied by a few policemen.
After a few phone calls to my hosts in the city, at around dawn the following day, the police let me go and I returned to my hotel in Lahore. I didn’t sleep a wink as I waited for my worried hosts to visit me at the hotel.
‘I did not know I had to register with the police upon arrival,’ I told them.
‘Did they give you any such instructions when you were at immigration while entering the country?’ they asked.
‘I wouldn’t know—the man you had sent to the airport . . . he did my immigration procedures,’ I said.
‘Which man?’
‘The man wearing a badge, standing at the gate holding a placard with my name, the one you sent.’
‘But we sent nobody!’
After a few more visits to the police, I was finally able to fly out of Lahore the following day. Only later did I find out that the man assisting me at the airport had been sent by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, and that he had gathered all the information from my passport and probably also covertly followed me to my meetings in the country.
The following year, when the World Economic Forum again applied for a visa for me at the Pakistani consulate in Geneva, all it received were weeks of silence and inaction. Despite follow-up inquiries made at the ministerial level in Pakistan, there was no news. Until one morning when, while on my way to work, I received a phone call.
‘I am calling from the Pakistani consulate,’ a man announced at the other end.
‘Thanks for this call. I had applied for a visa for my work trip to Lahore, which is in two days!’ I exclaimed, delighted to finally hear from the consulate.
‘I am calling to tell you that there is no visa application from you,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that your application never existed. Even if you get whomsoever in Pakistan to help, you will still not get a visa,’ he explained in an icy voice.
‘Why not?’
‘Diplomatic reciprocity, beti,’ he said coldly, and disconnected the call.
This is an example of the difficulties faced in exploring India’s contentious neighbourhood. Migrants who travel to more distant countries to live there for long periods, sometimes permanently, must face even greater challenges. How ironic it is that we ourselves have cut up the planet with political borders, such that we need to take great pains to now cross them. Diplomatic relations, immigration policies, visas, national and international laws, work permits—these are all structures and procedures of our own making, intended to secure our borders in order to protect us, yet they restrict the free movement and exploration that our species was once naturally meant for.
I therefore find it admirable that in each of the eight countries—France, Germany, Belgium, the US, the UK, Egypt, China and Switzerland—I lived in over fourteen years, there has been a sizeable Indian migrant community. In Europe, where I lived for ten years, I noticed that people of particular communities in India did specific jobs in different cities to overcome the challenges of immigrant life. This was essentially the consequence of a grand chain reaction of learning from and following in the footsteps of those who had arrived earlier. In Paris, Indians worked in restaurants, set up shops selling cheap international phone calling cards and sold roses to tourists on the streets. In Berlin, a large number of Indians were nurses or medical doctors from Kerala.
To ease the hardship of living in a new country, the Indian community often live concentrated in one area, which is usually the outskirts of a city. They support each other by working together in the same area, thus creating a bustling quarter alive with Indian restaurants, the sound of loud cricket commentary, and colourful pirated Bollywood DVD stalls.
I conducted about three thousand interviews with these Indian migrants in Europe for my PhD research. I found many stories of how they courageously and painstakingly established themselves in a new country.
And so upon my return to India in 2014, I wondered more than ever why the large number of immigrants I met had made such valiant efforts to move out of the country to which I had just returned.
Our international diaspora is sixteen-million-strong, the largest in the world.1 And even within India, four out of ten Indians—the combined population of the US, Germany and Canada—are migrants.2 It seems that more than any other people in the world, we are ready to pack our bags and leave. Why?
I found all this bewildering because, first, looking at it sociologically, in a society where joint families are still the norm, a family member’s immigration to another city or country has many socio-economic consequences. Second, from a religious point of view, the Manusmriti3, the Baudhayana Dharma Sutra4 and other religious scriptures at times specifically dissuade Brahmins from sea travel and impose penalties and penances on those doing so. Third, historically, the Indian
