Coming Back: The odyssey of a Pakistani through India
Author & Photographer: Shueyb Gandapur
ISBN: 978-969-662-599-5
Book Size: 6.5" x 9.5"
Genres: Travel, Memoir, India, Subcontinent, Non-fiction, Pictorial Book

Praise for the Book:

“A charming little travelogue where our writer opens a window to our enemy’s house and discovers a home as haunted as ours.”
– Mohammad Hanif, author of A Case of Exploding Mangoes

“Shueyb Gandapur had crossed continents before he decided to visit India. He takes us on a colourful guided tour of mosques, monuments, shrines, and temples, from the Taj Mahal to the ghats of Benares, from Ghalib’s grave to a room that houses the belongings of Qurratulain Hyder. He encounters hostility and hospitality, religious differences and inclusiveness, and an end to certain preconceptions and prejudices which make him feel at once a sense of homecoming and a frequent estrangement. His gaze is both intimate in its celebration of old and new friendships, and clear eyed about the widening gap between the country of his birth and the land he longed to visit. His discoveries both in the erstwhile centres of Muslim culture and in the Hindu heartlands are oen shot through with an abiding sense of wonder.”
– Aamer Hussein, author of The Cloud Messenger

“Shueyb Gandapur’s endearing travelogue begins with a child’s yearning to visit a land he had heard about from his grandfather. He makes a cautious but nuanced foray into the space of ‘neighbourly relations’—the highs and lows of the India-Pakistan relationship. Every vignette in this travelogue is engaging. e book is a page turner.”
– Mehr Afshan Farooqi, author of Ghalib: Flowers in a Mirror

“Shueyb Gandapur’s narrative is engaging and written with immense sensitivity. The author is a keen observer and displays empathy throughout his journeys. The divided Indian subcontinent has deprived the younger generations of South Asians to freely travel and interact. Aside from its descriptive merits, this book is an important addition to texts that defy borders guarded by nationalisms.”
– Raza Rumi, author of Delhi by Heart

About the Author:
A world traveller, Shueyb Gandapur has visited more than a hundred countries. He hails from Dera Ismail Khan and lives between Dubai and London. A chartered accountant by profession, he writes about his travels occasionally and paints in his free time. This is his first travel memoir.

Preface
When I first started putting the recollections of my visit to India in writing, I had no idea that they would assume the shape of a book one day. Back in London, several months after my trip, I contin- ued to revel in my memories of the country: its sights, smells and sounds. Those memories demanded to be written down, for they seemed too significant in my life’s journey to be allowed to wear away with the corrosive forces of time. A journalist friend, who took very good care of me in Delhi, also insisted that I write down my impressions of his country with the offer of getting them pub- lished in a newspaper he worked for.
Like any modern-day traveller, I had brought back a sizeable repository of photographs, as well as some audio clips and a few random notes jotted down on my phone. But every time I thought to mould all of this raw material into a meaningful form, I reached an impasse. I realised that this was partly due to the restrictions that a long piece or a series for a newspaper or magazine placed on my writing. It was difficult to capture the breadth of what I experi- enced in India in such a narrow form.
Then came Christmas break the following year, and unchar- acteristically, I had time off from work without any plans of us- ing it to travel to a new country. This was when the reprimand of my conscience over my prolonged inertia became unbearable. I picked up my pen and let the ink flow. Flow it did, like a river that determines its own course. I do not know what came upon me, but I had never experienced such fluency in my writing before. The film of my trip to India started playing before my eyes. I kept on writing until I had recorded everything I remembered. When I finished, I heaved a sigh of relief as if a debt had been repaid. I sent the entire text to the journalist friend who had urged me to write. He responded with a promise that he would give it a read; a promise that might now get fulfilled, since the manuscript has acquired the form of a book.
Excerpts from this travel account were published in a literary journal and then it started gathering dust. A few years later, I at- tended a book launch in London at the insistence of a friend who was moderating a session with the author. The event that I attend- ed out of obligation to a friend turned out to be quite interesting for myself too. It was there that I had my first encounter with the publisher of Kantara Press, Jamil Chishti. That chance meeting led to the idea to convert my travel account into a book.
When the idea of this book was initially discussed, I was not sure if I was qualified to author a book on this subject due to my brief visit of only two and a half weeks. This is, of course, not the first volume of its kind. Books about Pakistanis visiting India and vice versa have been written before. Writers have spoken about the similarities and familiarities they found in unlikely places. Some went on a quest to rediscover family roots, others tried to uncov- er the reality of everyday existence on “the other side” that is not reflected in media reports. But then I realised that my personal experience had its own place in time and history, distinct from the perspective and experience of everyone else, so why should it not be heard by the people of our two countries as well as the wider world?
As I now had a larger canvas to work with, I revisited the se- ries and updated the narrative, unhindered by the restriction of a word count. Distance from the actual occasion of the visit be- stowed me with further insights and interpretations. The detail I had to skip previously in the interest of brevity was reincorporat- ed. A few months later, when I went back to my hometown, Dera Ismail Khan, wiser by the experiences gathered during my India trip, I looked at the crumbling houses, deserted temples and old neighbourhoods with more reverence and tenderness. They had once been inhabited and frequented by the city’s Hindu and Sikh residents, who were uprooted during the chaos of Partition, and now lived hundreds of miles away, remembering and commem- orating what they had lost. I felt like I had completed a circle and incorporated those later impressions in my account.
Relations between India and Pakistan are almost always char- acterised by varying degrees of mistrust and animosity with oc- casional efforts towards rapprochement, which rekindle over- whelming, although short-lived, feelings of warmth on both sides. The legacy of unresolved conflicts from the time of Partition has translated into four wars and many stand-offs that brought the two neighbours to the brink of war several times. At the time of my visit in the summer of 2017, the political climate was freezing cold and it has remained so, if not worsened, since then. This low period has lasted for longer than ever before during my lifetime. The forces of jingoism now act and speak with more confidence, drowning out voices calling for peace and free movement. Cross-border travel, which had picked up steam at the turn of the century, has almost dried up completely now.
I have tried to narrate my observations and impressions from many meetings and encounters in India about whether the adverse political climate between our two countries has had any effect on the attitudes and perceptions of ordinary people, about whether it is still possible, despite all the hurdles, to reach out and connect with each other based on our many cultural commonalities. What I saw and felt is told in the account that follows.