I have stopped putting up my weekly column for Metro Now for several months now. I just could not reconcile our imagined audience of this blog to those commuting every morning from North Delhi to Central and from Karol Bagh to Nizamuddin. The result was gaffes and mistakes. Against my better judgement but on the insistence of a fellow blogger I put up my last column. I apologise in advance for simplifying Foucault’s aesthetics of the self and Marxist dialectics. Here goes:

Home Minister Shivraj Patel, going against the popular sentiment recently stated that people who ask for Afzal Guru’s hanging cannot demand leniency for Sarabjit. This got me thinking about our relationship with the enemy country, my friends here in London and Pakistan and the past few years of joy.

I first met Adnan Sattar in the dimly lit corridors of a student housing complex in London, corridors smelling of stale smoke, cheap liquor and hurried sex. Adnan had the room opposite me and I thought it was someone’s idea of a joke, put these blokes together and lets see if they fight.

Over the months, as we stayed up late delving into our books, Adnan became my one stop for a late night smoke, struggling as I was to quit the habit. Along with the rolled Virginia Tobacco were always a smile, a cup of tea and some food which he had managed to get from the local Pakistani store. Our student allowances were hardly generous, but Adnan managed to keep that little extra for hospitality.

Not only was he the first Pakistani I met, he was the first Pakistani Marxist. I remember being surprised; today I do not know why. The evenings were spent happily discussing the Prison Notebooks of the Italian radical, Antonio Gramsci, MK Gandhi, of whom Sattar was a fan and of course Marx himself. I tended to tilt towards the more trendy post-colonial theory in social sciences, sometimes scoffing at Marxist dialectics. I remember once reading a quote from that transgressive French philosopher Michel Foucault who asked why everyone couldn’t make their lives poetic. Adnan, for once snapped and asked me if Foucault had ever met a daily wage labourer in Mumbai, struggling for his pennies and survival.

The year passed quickly, Adnan left for Pakistan and London kept changing. The Turkish ham burger joint where we had our late night food has since been turned into a High Street shopping complex, the food prices go up and Tories are threatening to come back to power.

In Pakistan, Adnan fighting for civil rights and liberties, got severely beaten and hospitalised. In India, Dr Binayak Sen, Gandhian and activist gets jailed on trumped up charges. Our histories are so similar that even our present must be intertwined.

Today, Adnan is in India, visiting his friends and activists. I know where he spends most of his time. I have seen Pakistani visitors lined up for hours at the registration office in ITO. I hope we can be kind to him for I know he will be to us.

I am scared of a bomb going off somewhere in Delhi. I know our policemen are efficient. I have worked as a journalist for too long to know how many innocent men and women are incarcerated behind the walls of Red Fort on no charges except for the passport they hold. I am no traitor but must my patriotism stop at demarcated borders?

Speaking of happier things across the border, I read one of the best novels that I have in years. A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif is a thriller, a literary juggernaut and a page-turner rolled into one. A fictional account of Gen Zia’s assassination, it is being compared to masterpieces like Catch 22 and praised by John LeCarre. If Indian writing in English had arrived decades back, sub-continental literature reaches an absolute peak with this novel.

Despite the several invitations stretching from Lahore to Multan and all the way to the North west frontiers, I still have not managed to get the Pakistani stamp on my passport. Mazhar Zaidi, Shehezad, Omar, they have all promised me stays, food, travel and companionship. Soon I must find the time and flight money.