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Through Punjab and Sindh ... by train ...
The road from Wagah to Lahore (25 kilometers) goes through Jallo village and there is work underway, relaying and multi-laning the road, making for a bumpy ride on the otherwise comfortable and air- conditioned bus. A forgettable Hindi song-and-dance video (or is it a movie?) that I don't recognize, blares at us. The passing countryside is exactly the same, of course - crop fields, sarson, buffaloes - but the villages and population centers, en route, strike me as resembling some towns and villages in eastern UP and Bihar that I have traveled through only a few months earlier. Wide dusty shoulders on either side of the paved road before the shacks and shops take over, stagnant water, grease and oil from tractor & truck repair shops, samosa and chai shops. Only the Persian script makes a break with Devanagari here, but even that is still seen in some UP and Bihar towns and I am reminded instantly of the town of Biharsharif, close to Nalanda. Reopen your eyes and you could be in either place. But the countryside and the fields are unmistakably Punjab.
As we enter Lahore, we pass through what are the older sections of town and then swing around a large traffic circle in front of the Lahore Railway Station. A few minutes of attention grabbing follows, as we stream out and wait to gather our luggage from the bus. Passers-by crowd around and pick up conversations. I wonder if it is the presence of turbans among us, and the sarees, that mark us out as a slightly different, and, potentially Indian, bunch. I am, at this point, a little surprised that we are so evident. But the con- versations are so convivial that the attention is only enjoyable.
The Karachi Express, is waiting for us on Platform 1. We find our seats; tickets are PRs 765, from Karachi to Lahore, about 1300 kms apart, and the folks from PILER have reserved our tickets for us. The train rolls out at exactly the scheduled 6pm. Little details about the structure of the train strike us. The 3-tier sleeper coach we are in feels brighter on the inside - the walls are a lighter shade and the coupes don't have a full partition separating them. So the upper berths of two adjacent coupes are only separated by a short 6-inch grille. The berths are narrower - leaving more legroom when you sit - and there are no side-berths, only two seats facing each other, which makes it all feel a little more open. The common lineage of both railway systems is otherwise very apparent in the layout of the railway station, organization of platforms, stalls, offices, signage and even terminology ('superintendent', 'station master', 'cloak room' ...).
As we pass through the southbound rail corridor of Lahore - the back views of buildings and life outside is quite similar to anywhere in northern India - unplastered brick and mortar, multi-storeyed structures, packed wall to wall, mazes of electrical wiring and cable crossing narrow gullies and nallahs overflowing with garbage and plastic, interrupted suddenly by the wealthier enclaves, with their neatly paved streets and shiny cars, then a large, very lush golf course just south of a well equipped sports complex.
Soon we are out of the big city and into the Punjab countryside. The villages we pass, in the remaining hour of daylight, could be anywhere in northern India and all the litter has disappeared now. Almost every habitation we pass is electrified and there is a tidy, though 'basic', feel to the villages. Our travelling companion and inadvertently-attention-grabbing, monk-in-robes, points out to me, the next morning, that there is almost no graffiti. I notice that this is true. There are very few ads on inviting, vacant walls, unlike along the railways in India which provide prime advertising space for second rung products and services that couldn't afford the more expensive highway hoardings or are just targeting a different 'rail-traveler' segment of the population ('Sablok Clinic - for Sex Disorders', 'A-One Cycles', 'Zandu Balm', 'Zalim Lotion', etc). Periodically, we run alongside the main highway. It is wide, four-laned and carrying reasonably fast moving traffic. The long-haul trucks are less ornate, multi-axle affairs - perhaps also made by Hino - and seem to be hauling their payloads quite rapidly along. Large, modern gas-stations pass by owned by companies such as Caltex and PSO (the state owned oil company) and the occasional restaurant-motel complex.
The Lahore-Karachi rail line runs through Raiwind, Okara, Sahiwal, Harappa (just a small station enroute, but I'll mention it for its fame), Khanewal, Lodhran, Bhawalpur, Khanpur, all in Punjab Province, and then crosses into Sindh Province passing through Rohri, Khairpur, Nawabshah, Tando Adam and Hyderabad. It then crosses the great Indus and enters the sprawling Karachi metropolitan area, after Jungshahi. The scheduled time of arrival in Karachi, we are told, is 10am - which would mean the train is supposed to do over 1300 kms in 16 hours. This is very quick by Indian Railway standards. The train does run pretty fast on sections of the journey - but very soon, early the next morning, we realize we are several hours late. A storm blows through the Punjab, overnight, and that slows things down, for us. It is quite evident looking out of the window that crop fields over vast tracts have been flattened by the gale and there are bunds that have broken as well. I get the feeling that the original train schedule is way too aggressive, in any case. Pakistan and Indian Railways, it strikes me, use opposite approaches. In India, the train ride from Bangalore to Mumbai takes a totally unreasonable 24 hours - for a 1000 kilometer journey. Even the bad road is faster, though much less comfortable. The train is usually on time, as a result, and has enough headroom to make up even several lost hours, en route.
Once we enter Sindh, and get further south, the landscape dries up rapidly and transforms from the lush fields of Punjab to the spare beauty of rocky, sandy hills. The landscape matches my imagination of the present day site of the great Indus city of Mohenjodaro which is not far to the west of where the rail line runs. Wish we could go visit - but our "Karachi-only" visa tells me that that is for a future occasion.
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