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The Road to Wagah ...driving to the Pakistan border Veeresh Malik
That's the figure put down by various guide books for the distance between New Delhi and the Indo-Pak border at Wagah-Attari. I do this route very often, when I need to do high speed drive checks on new cars... Somehow we always end up doing over 1,000 kilometres on the return trip. The road to Pakistan, truly, is longer than one would think it was! Ideally, we leave our home, in south Delhi, before daybreak and make it to the border in anything between seven and 10 hours, each way, depending on the vehicle, traffic and number of stoppages. Once we have done it in about six hours, and that was when we did the return leg early in the morning of August 15, 1997, with the highway absolutely empty. That was probably not the case, even for the prime minister of India, on what is one of India's busiest highways, though the security boffins surely gave it a try in the name of sanitising the route. Luckily for them, and the rest of us, the prime minister boarded his bus on February 20 from Amritsar, and then pelted straight along the last 30 odd kilometres to the border. Lucky, because for the rest of us, the Delhi-Indo-Pak border route actually bypasses Amritsar. Leaving Delhi, by Ring road and then Outer Ring road, you join up with National Highway 1, heading north out of the city. You will battle endless trucks as you exit Delhi at the Singhu border. You can get stuck, especially at night, for hours while the commercial traffic sorts out its own bedlam. Moving roughly more north than northwest, straight as an arrow, you will travel on a World Bank funded highway lined by eucalyptus on either side and bougainvillaea in the middle. Crossing tractors and trucks carrying farm produce, driving in the opposite direction on the wrong side of the road, while you touch whatever maximum speed your car can achieve, is an experience so Indian. I have seen foreign test drivers commit that cardinal sin -- they shut their eyes… luckily while sitting in the passenger seat. You will whistle past Sonepat… shoes available at factory prices… Panipat… pickles… Karnal… rice… Kurukshetra… battlefields from the Mahabharat on the left… Murthal… nothing much but rundown dhabas… and you can be at Shahabad Markanda in just about two hours. Now Shahbad Markanda is an excellent stopping place with its Prince Motel on the right side (coming from New Delhi) a little way out of the town. Here you get clean toilets, 24 hours service, cleaning service for your bug-spotted windscreen and, best of all, an amazingly filling breakfast of omelettes to order, mooli or aloo (white radish or potato) parathas, served with chunks of white butter and a vegetable pickle, that is a side dish in its own right. Outside this town is a Sufi-Muslim place of worship, much trusted by people who use this highway, called Nau Gaz Peer or the nine metre saint. Legend has it that this patron saint of long distance drivers was nine metres long. Length, not height. Right next to it is a temple. The two houses of worship share a common kitchen. Makes you wonder what you and I are fighting about, as you stand in line with burly Sikh and thick-set Tamil Christian truck drivers, amongst others, to listen to the music being played by a group of resident religious singers of an indeterminate sect. Suitably fortified, you reach the cantonment city of Ambala, and drive past miles of army trucks and railway wagons. If you're lucky you'll spot Jaguars and MIGs out from the various nearby air-bases on early morning low-level exercises. Sometimes you can even see them playing at dogfights, which is even more amazing a sight at night, with lights and dummy tracer providing an unmatched fireworks display. This is where the highway branches off, at a very oddly constructed split-level roundabout with a crazy set of traffic signals, which I've never seen anybody follow. The left turn takes you northwest towards the Indo-Pak border on NH1. While the road going straight now heads north towards Chandigarh and then northeast towards Shimla and other points Himachali. Ambala is also famous for 'mixies'. Chances are you can do without them at this juncture. It was also famous for a dhaba, which served a great chicken. But it is now infested with flies, stray dogs and unrelated drunk 'puppies' and is best avoided. You could zoom through this has-been of a city-town-village… till you come to a crashing halt at Rajpura, the Haryana-Punjab border. Experience has shown me that driving a car with a distant state registration plate gets you through faster than if you are driving one with Delhi/ Haryana/ Punjab plates. The reason? I think the cops figure you to be a returning NRI type if you have a neighbouring state number-plate. A distant state number-plate signifies armed forces. I always, but always, wear my old merchant navy beret and carry a crisply ironed set of my old uniform hanging from the rear hand-grip. It wouldn't fit half of me now, but it always works. I even get saluted sometimes as they whistle me through the express lane reserved for nincompoops and other VVIPs. At Rajpura, if you need quick succour and rest-rooms, make for the Eagle Motel-Inn, again on the right side, but bang in the middle of town. For some reason, we have never understood, our children always order noodles here that taste like the food my grandmother used to serve. They are fried/cooked in butter like everything else. Honest, you can even get Coke with butter floating in it if you want it. You're a bit more than halfway there at this stage, and if you're doing well, you've been on the roads for about three or three and a half hours now. Make tracks and soon you are passing the quaintly named town of Dhandari Kalan. This is an (inland) port city with more container traffic than Calcutta and Vizag put together, on the outskirts of Ludhiana. Legend has it that after Partition the uprooted industrialists at Ludhiana told Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru that international trade would be difficult as Karachi was no longer available to them and Bombay was too far away. Nehru apparently told them that if he knew them well, they would bring the port to Ludhiana. There is not a single shipping line that touches India that is not represented here. You see their offices all along the road and you expect to see a sea-front any moment. As a Punjabi and as a seafarer, this is my high spot on the route. But don't stop to smell the salt air. While the highway between Ludhiana and Jalandhar is probably the fastest and best laid out in the country, the traffic jams as you cross Ludhiana (woollens and hosiery) -- or the smaller towns of Sirhind (a floating restaurant), Khanna (wheat in bulk), Mandi Gobindgarh (steel) or Phagwara (alcohol) -- bring down average speeds. Turn right before you enter Jalandhar, and there is always another traffic jam right outside the Police Academy. Jalandhar is a city dedicated to war heroes and emigrants. Statues vie with airline agents. The great Punjabi diaspora has its roots in this region. But all you are interested in at this point is going straight on the road towards Amritsar. The traffic on the highways suddenly changes flavour, and you begin to see a large number of jugaads competing with you. Home-constructed jugaads are goods carriers (which also carry people) , usually unregistered, made out of steel bed frames, V-belts attached to pump-set engines and crude tiller-steering systems. Luckily the road is still very broad and you keep going. If you leave the clean town of Beas behind you and at a point where the signboard reads 'Amritsar 36 kilometres,' you will also notice a sign that says 'Lahore 62 km' and points vaguely to the right. Theory has it that the wise traders of Amritsar don't like 'easy pickings' driving straight towards the border. You can save almost 30 kilometres and a lot of city traffic by taking this route. Which also takes you through some very interesting history as far as Indo-Pak conflicts are concerned. Tarn Tarn is just one of the epic battlefields en-route. Stop to talk to elderly farmers about the 1971 war and you realise how open the terrain really is. There is plenty of riverine land, criss-crossed by canals and roads which still have complementary ones on the other side. One day I may well hire a local guide to see if I can actually drive trucks full of contraband over as is rumoured and claimed. The nomenclature on the highway gets confusing here. Locals claim that in the old days they would continue right through in the same northwester-ly direction all the way to Kabul. But that's a tall story to swallow. There's a lot of difficult terrain in between. The local transport here again changes to pre-war (pre-World War II) Dodge and Fargo semi-trucks with very Pakistani style, high-front bodies built on them; another indication that cultures span political borders with consummate ease. The highway gets even better here, lined on both sides by armed forces encampments and fields, which seem to be lush throughout the year. Arrive at Wagah-Attari border and we always manage to set up friends or relatives in the armed forces or BSF to give us place and time for a bit of rest and clean up. If you are able to rustle up such an acquaintance, then you have a chance to witness the most amazing border ceremony this side of Suez, everyday at sunset. Grab a quick bite at the divine BSF mess right on the border. And don’t forget to wave at the Pakistani Rangers who – surprise, surprise -- wave back. It should not really be a matter of astonishment because basically they are the same as us. Once one of them even threw a chocolate across for our then 11-year-old son to shouts of "Tendulkar-Tendulkar!" when he actually caught it in the dark, cleanly. Then it is time for the long night haul back to Delhi, stopping over at the Golden Temple to praise the lord for everything. Great route. Pity the prime minister and those on the road with him did not see most of it! They joined the road at one of the various army camps just short of the border on any one of the many slip-roads and made it to the border in time for the evening news!
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