For Pakistanis and Indians, it's cricket
-A test for neighbors: For Pakistanis and Indians, it's cricket
By Somini Sengupta The New York Times
Monday, March 14, 2005
MOHALI, India After a half-century of fratricide, three wars and a nuclear buildup, now comes another battle between South Asia's blood rivals: the India versus Pakistan cricket match.
.
Except here, high up in the bleachers of the Mohali cricket stadium, under a gorgeous blue sky on Friday, Sameer Dua of India and Muhammad Amjad of Pakistan, sit side by side, waving flags and showering each other with typically subcontinental accolades.
.
Dua, 35, and Amjad, 32, both textile industry men, met at a business conference last December in Mumbai, India, and hit it off. Dua visited Pakistan for the first time in January. Amjad and his extended family of six came to India this week to watch cricket.
.
"The kind of hospitality that was extended to me was unbelievable," Dua recalled of his visit to Lahore, Pakistan, in January.
.
"He has given us five times what we gave him," Amjad gushed back.
.
"No, no, it's not like that," Dua said with a grin and patted Amjad's leg. After the cricket match, Dua planned to take Amjad home to Delhi and then to see the Taj Mahal. The first test of the three-match series ended in a draw Saturday.
.
As luck would have it, the two men shared more than cricket and textiles. Dua's grandfather had fled the newly created Pakistan from a village not too far from Lahore, where Amjad's family lives, when the subcontinent was violently partitioned in 1947, prompting one of the largest migrations in human history. Some 12 million people crossed the new border.
.
As India and Pakistan faced off here in Mohali, in the heart of a divided Punjab Province, for the first test match of a six-week-long cricket series, Indians and Pakistanis greeted each other with a mixture of intense curiosity, apprehension, guilt, affection, longing and hope.
.
Spectators wandered around the stadium with an Indian flag painted on one cheek and a Pakistani flag on the other.
.
On the streets nearby, sari shops announced discounts for "our friends from Pakistan." Local families took perfect strangers into their homes and refused to take any money. Inside Indian living rooms, Pakistanis traded stories about weddings and children, the quality of the roads, the price of chickens, and motorbikes.
.
Amid the enthusiasm, Indians and Pakistanis uttered the unthinkable.
.
"There is no difference between us," said Naveed Ahmed, of Bahalwalnagar, in the Pakistani Punjab. It was his fist time in India.
.
Adding an explicitly political flavor to the game, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan is expected to attend a match during the series, most likely on April 2 in the Indian city of Kochi.
.
A cricket match last year took the Indian team to Pakistan, prompting what people from both countries recall as an effusion of hospitality and grace.
.
"We even applauded the defeat of our own team," recalled Senator Mushahid Hussein of Pakistan.
.
If partition and cricket were among the principal gifts the British Raj bequeathed to their former subjects on the subcontinent, there was no better place to kick off the India versus Pakistan cricket series than here in Punjab, the epicenter of the bloody 1947 migration when Sikhs and Hindus had fled east into India and Muslims had streamed west into the newly created Pakistan. At the cricket match, it was impossible not to find Indians and Pakistanis who carried stories of that time.
.
For Rajinder Singh, the match, offered an occasion to pay what he considered a 50-year-old family debt. His father, a Sikh, was a teenager when their village, Rangpur, now in the Pakistani part of Punjab, broke out in a spasm of sectarian violence during the partition. One night, during the worst bloodletting, some neighbors hid his father's family in their car and ferried them to where an Indian Army truck was taking Hindus and Sikhs across the border. His family survived.
.
Settling in what became the Indian side of Punjab, the Singhs named every family enterprise in memory of their native village: Rangpuri Finance, Rangpuri Autos and Rangpuri Handloom.
.
Last week, Singh and his wife, Jaswinder Kaur, decided to repay their onetime neighbors' kindness. They went to where buses were unloading hundreds of Pakistani cricket fans and brought home an extended family of six young Pakistanis, roughly the same age as their own two sons.
.
"This was a wish in our hearts, that these people would come as our guests," said Singh, 45.
.
Ayaz Mahmood, 29, one of Singh's Pakistani guests, said, "We feel now we have a generations-old friendship."
.
Every evening last week, the Indians and the Pakistanis drank together in the Singh's living room. "I take a hard drink, they take a soft drink," Singh explained with a nod to his well-stocked bar.
.
Every morning during breakfast, a stream of inquisitive friends poured in, "just to see the Pakistanis," is how Singh put it.
.
"As the German people have broken the German wall, we too want to break the Punjab wall," Singh said. "This is one body, one heart, one language."
.
.
Indian officials said that nearly 4,000 Pakistanis were given limited nine-day visas for the test matches. More than a 1,000 of them also sought permission to visit other tourist sites in India.
.
The cricket series comes at a time when the topsy-turvy relations between the two countries are at a crucial moment. A new dispute over water rights has been referred to the World Bank for an independent opinion. Peace talks have recently yielded agreement on a bus route that would allow Indians and Pakistanis to travel between the two capitals of the disputed Kashmir region.
.
The bus services will start on April 7, Reuters reported Sunday, citing a spokesman for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India.
.
Here on the ground, cricket opened peoples' eyes. A Pakistani teenager admitted to being apprehensive about how the Indians would treat him; all through school, he said, he had been taught that they were his enemies.
.
At Roop Saree Center in Chandigarh, the state capital of Indian Punjab, Karamjit Singh and Shaista Tahir sat inspecting a pile of saris. Their families knew each other when they lived in Tanzania more than 20 years ago. Then Tahir's family had returned to Lahore, and Singh's to Chandigarh. The two women had not seen each other since.
.
As it turned out, Singh was born in present-day Pakistan and, until the partition, shuttled between family homes in Lahore and Amritsar. In 1947, when Singh was 8, the family fled to the Indian side of Punjab.
.
This week, she took her Lahori guests to the local golf club for lunch, then to see a movie, and on Friday, for an afternoon of shopping.
.
"It's nonstop catching up on things, late night chatting," she said of their week together.
.
The women picked over piles of saris. A red paisley print was rejected. An ice-blue chiffon was selected.
.
The sari shop owner, V.K. Sachdeva, was eager to welcome his Pakistani customers. He was offering cut-rate prices during the test matches and this week alone, Sachdeva said he had done hundreds of thousands of rupees worth of business.
.
But there was also this other fact. "We belong to Pakistan," said Sachdeva, whose parents had fled from a village in what is now the Pakistani side of Punjab.
.
.
See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.
.
< < Back to Start of Article For Pakistanis and Indians, it's cricket
MOHALI, India After a half-century of fratricide, three wars and a nuclear buildup, now comes another battle between South Asia's blood rivals: the India versus Pakistan cricket match.
.
Except here, high up in the bleachers of the Mohali cricket stadium, under a gorgeous blue sky on Friday, Sameer Dua of India and Muhammad Amjad of Pakistan, sit side by side, waving flags and showering each other with typically subcontinental accolades.
.
Dua, 35, and Amjad, 32, both textile industry men, met at a business conference last December in Mumbai, India, and hit it off. Dua visited Pakistan for the first time in January. Amjad and his extended family of six came to India this week to watch cricket.
.
"The kind of hospitality that was extended to me was unbelievable," Dua recalled of his visit to Lahore, Pakistan, in January.
.
"He has given us five times what we gave him," Amjad gushed back.
.
"No, no, it's not like that," Dua said with a grin and patted Amjad's leg. After the cricket match, Dua planned to take Amjad home to Delhi and then to see the Taj Mahal. The first test of the three-match series ended in a draw Saturday.
.
As luck would have it, the two men shared more than cricket and textiles. Dua's grandfather had fled the newly created Pakistan from a village not too far from Lahore, where Amjad's family lives, when the subcontinent was violently partitioned in 1947, prompting one of the largest migrations in human history. Some 12 million people crossed the new border.
.
As India and Pakistan faced off here in Mohali, in the heart of a divided Punjab Province, for the first test match of a six-week-long cricket series, Indians and Pakistanis greeted each other with a mixture of intense curiosity, apprehension, guilt, affection, longing and hope.
.
Spectators wandered around the stadium with an Indian flag painted on one cheek and a Pakistani flag on the other.
.
On the streets nearby, sari shops announced discounts for "our friends from Pakistan." Local families took perfect strangers into their homes and refused to take any money. Inside Indian living rooms, Pakistanis traded stories about weddings and children, the quality of the roads, the price of chickens, and motorbikes.
.
Amid the enthusiasm, Indians and Pakistanis uttered the unthinkable.
.
"There is no difference between us," said Naveed Ahmed, of Bahalwalnagar, in the Pakistani Punjab. It was his fist time in India.
.
Adding an explicitly political flavor to the game, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan is expected to attend a match during the series, most likely on April 2 in the Indian city of Kochi.
.
A cricket match last year took the Indian team to Pakistan, prompting what people from both countries recall as an effusion of hospitality and grace.
.
"We even applauded the defeat of our own team," recalled Senator Mushahid Hussein of Pakistan.
.
If partition and cricket were among the principal gifts the British Raj bequeathed to their former subjects on the subcontinent, there was no better place to kick off the India versus Pakistan cricket series than here in Punjab, the epicenter of the bloody 1947 migration when Sikhs and Hindus had fled east into India and Muslims had streamed west into the newly created Pakistan. At the cricket match, it was impossible not to find Indians and Pakistanis who carried stories of that time.
.
For Rajinder Singh, the match, offered an occasion to pay what he considered a 50-year-old family debt. His father, a Sikh, was a teenager when their village, Rangpur, now in the Pakistani part of Punjab, broke out in a spasm of sectarian violence during the partition. One night, during the worst bloodletting, some neighbors hid his father's family in their car and ferried them to where an Indian Army truck was taking Hindus and Sikhs across the border. His family survived.
.
Settling in what became the Indian side of Punjab, the Singhs named every family enterprise in memory of their native village: Rangpuri Finance, Rangpuri Autos and Rangpuri Handloom.
.
Last week, Singh and his wife, Jaswinder Kaur, decided to repay their onetime neighbors' kindness. They went to where buses were unloading hundreds of Pakistani cricket fans and brought home an extended family of six young Pakistanis, roughly the same age as their own two sons.
.
"This was a wish in our hearts, that these people would come as our guests," said Singh, 45.
.
Ayaz Mahmood, 29, one of Singh's Pakistani guests, said, "We feel now we have a generations-old friendship."
.
Every evening last week, the Indians and the Pakistanis drank together in the Singh's living room. "I take a hard drink, they take a soft drink," Singh explained with a nod to his well-stocked bar.
.
Every morning during breakfast, a stream of inquisitive friends poured in, "just to see the Pakistanis," is how Singh put it.
.
"As the German people have broken the German wall, we too want to break the Punjab wall," Singh said. "This is one body, one heart, one language."
.
.
Indian officials said that nearly 4,000 Pakistanis were given limited nine-day visas for the test matches. More than a 1,000 of them also sought permission to visit other tourist sites in India.
.
The cricket series comes at a time when the topsy-turvy relations between the two countries are at a crucial moment. A new dispute over water rights has been referred to the World Bank for an independent opinion. Peace talks have recently yielded agreement on a bus route that would allow Indians and Pakistanis to travel between the two capitals of the disputed Kashmir region.
.
The bus services will start on April 7, Reuters reported Sunday, citing a spokesman for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India.
.
Here on the ground, cricket opened peoples' eyes. A Pakistani teenager admitted to being apprehensive about how the Indians would treat him; all through school, he said, he had been taught that they were his enemies.
.
At Roop Saree Center in Chandigarh, the state capital of Indian Punjab, Karamjit Singh and Shaista Tahir sat inspecting a pile of saris. Their families knew each other when they lived in Tanzania more than 20 years ago. Then Tahir's family had returned to Lahore, and Singh's to Chandigarh. The two women had not seen each other since.
.
As it turned out, Singh was born in present-day Pakistan and, until the partition, shuttled between family homes in Lahore and Amritsar. In 1947, when Singh was 8, the family fled to the Indian side of Punjab.
.
This week, she took her Lahori guests to the local golf club for lunch, then to see a movie, and on Friday, for an afternoon of shopping.
.
"It's nonstop catching up on things, late night chatting," she said of their week together.
.
The women picked over piles of saris. A red paisley print was rejected. An ice-blue chiffon was selected.
.
The sari shop owner, V.K. Sachdeva, was eager to welcome his Pakistani customers. He was offering cut-rate prices during the test matches and this week alone, Sachdeva said he had done hundreds of thousands of rupees worth of business.
.
But there was also this other fact. "We belong to Pakistan," said Sachdeva, whose parents had fled from a village in what is now the Pakistani side of Punjab.
.
.
See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.
.
< < Back to Start of Article For Pakistanis and Indians, it's cricket
MOHALI, India After a half-century of fratricide, three wars and a nuclear buildup, now comes another battle between South Asia's blood rivals: the India versus Pakistan cricket match.
.
Except here, high up in the bleachers of the Mohali cricket stadium, under a gorgeous blue sky on Friday, Sameer Dua of India and Muhammad Amjad of Pakistan, sit side by side, waving flags and showering each other with typically subcontinental accolades.
.
Dua, 35, and Amjad, 32, both textile industry men, met at a business conference last December in Mumbai, India, and hit it off. Dua visited Pakistan for the first time in January. Amjad and his extended family of six came to India this week to watch cricket.
.
"The kind of hospitality that was extended to me was unbelievable," Dua recalled of his visit to Lahore, Pakistan, in January.
.
"He has given us five times what we gave him," Amjad gushed back.
.
"No, no, it's not like that," Dua said with a grin and patted Amjad's leg. After the cricket match, Dua planned to take Amjad home to Delhi and then to see the Taj Mahal. The first test of the three-match series ended in a draw Saturday.
.
As luck would have it, the two men shared more than cricket and textiles. Dua's grandfather had fled the newly created Pakistan from a village not too far from Lahore, where Amjad's family lives, when the subcontinent was violently partitioned in 1947, prompting one of the largest migrations in human history. Some 12 million people crossed the new border.
.
As India and Pakistan faced off here in Mohali, in the heart of a divided Punjab Province, for the first test match of a six-week-long cricket series, Indians and Pakistanis greeted each other with a mixture of intense curiosity, apprehension, guilt, affection, longing and hope.
.
Spectators wandered around the stadium with an Indian flag painted on one cheek and a Pakistani flag on the other.
.
On the streets nearby, sari shops announced discounts for "our friends from Pakistan." Local families took perfect strangers into their homes and refused to take any money. Inside Indian living rooms, Pakistanis traded stories about weddings and children, the quality of the roads, the price of chickens, and motorbikes.
.
Amid the enthusiasm, Indians and Pakistanis uttered the unthinkable.
.
"There is no difference between us," said Naveed Ahmed, of Bahalwalnagar, in the Pakistani Punjab. It was his fist time in India.
.
Adding an explicitly political flavor to the game, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan is expected to attend a match during the series, most likely on April 2 in the Indian city of Kochi.
.
A cricket match last year took the Indian team to Pakistan, prompting what people from both countries recall as an effusion of hospitality and grace.
.
"We even applauded the defeat of our own team," recalled Senator Mushahid Hussein of Pakistan.
.
If partition and cricket were among the principal gifts the British Raj bequeathed to their former subjects on the subcontinent, there was no better place to kick off the India versus Pakistan cricket series than here in Punjab, the epicenter of the bloody 1947 migration when Sikhs and Hindus had fled east into India and Muslims had streamed west into the newly created Pakistan. At the cricket match, it was impossible not to find Indians and Pakistanis who carried stories of that time.
.
For Rajinder Singh, the match, offered an occasion to pay what he considered a 50-year-old family debt. His father, a Sikh, was a teenager when their village, Rangpur, now in the Pakistani part of Punjab, broke out in a spasm of sectarian violence during the partition. One night, during the worst bloodletting, some neighbors hid his father's family in their car and ferried them to where an Indian Army truck was taking Hindus and Sikhs across the border. His family survived.
.
Settling in what became the Indian side of Punjab, the Singhs named every family enterprise in memory of their native village: Rangpuri Finance, Rangpuri Autos and Rangpuri Handloom.
.
Last week, Singh and his wife, Jaswinder Kaur, decided to repay their onetime neighbors' kindness. They went to where buses were unloading hundreds of Pakistani cricket fans and brought home an extended family of six young Pakistanis, roughly the same age as their own two sons.
.
"This was a wish in our hearts, that these people would come as our guests," said Singh, 45.
.
Ayaz Mahmood, 29, one of Singh's Pakistani guests, said, "We feel now we have a generations-old friendship."
.
Every evening last week, the Indians and the Pakistanis drank together in the Singh's living room. "I take a hard drink, they take a soft drink," Singh explained with a nod to his well-stocked bar.
.
Every morning during breakfast, a stream of inquisitive friends poured in, "just to see the Pakistanis," is how Singh put it.
.
"As the German people have broken the German wall, we too want to break the Punjab wall," Singh said. "This is one body, one heart, one language."
.
.
Indian officials said that nearly 4,000 Pakistanis were given limited nine-day visas for the test matches. More than a 1,000 of them also sought permission to visit other tourist sites in India.
.
The cricket series comes at a time when the topsy-turvy relations between the two countries are at a crucial moment. A new dispute over water rights has been referred to the World Bank for an independent opinion. Peace talks have recently yielded agreement on a bus route that would allow Indians and Pakistanis to travel between the two capitals of the disputed Kashmir region.
.
The bus services will start on April 7, Reuters reported Sunday, citing a spokesman for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India.
.
Here on the ground, cricket opened peoples' eyes. A Pakistani teenager admitted to being apprehensive about how the Indians would treat him; all through school, he said, he had been taught that they were his enemies.
.
At Roop Saree Center in Chandigarh, the state capital of Indian Punjab, Karamjit Singh and Shaista Tahir sat inspecting a pile of saris. Their families knew each other when they lived in Tanzania more than 20 years ago. Then Tahir's family had returned to Lahore, and Singh's to Chandigarh. The two women had not seen each other since.
.
As it turned out, Singh was born in present-day Pakistan and, until the partition, shuttled between family homes in Lahore and Amritsar. In 1947, when Singh was 8, the family fled to the Indian side of Punjab.
.
This week, she took her Lahori guests to the local golf club for lunch, then to see a movie, and on Friday, for an afternoon of shopping.
.
"It's nonstop catching up on things, late night chatting," she said of their week together.
.
The women picked over piles of saris. A red paisley print was rejected. An ice-blue chiffon was selected.
.
The sari shop owner, V.K. Sachdeva, was eager to welcome his Pakistani customers. He was offering cut-rate prices during the test matches and this week alone, Sachdeva said he had done hundreds of thousands of rupees worth of business.
.
But there was also this other fact. "We belong to Pakistan," said Sachdeva, whose parents had fled from a village in what is now the Pakistani side of Punjab.
.
.
See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.
.
< < Back to Start of Article For Pakistanis and Indians, it's cricket
MOHALI, India After a half-century of fratricide, three wars and a nuclear buildup, now comes another battle between South Asia's blood rivals: the India versus Pakistan cricket match.
.
Except here, high up in the bleachers of the Mohali cricket stadium, under a gorgeous blue sky on Friday, Sameer Dua of India and Muhammad Amjad of Pakistan, sit side by side, waving flags and showering each other with typically subcontinental accolades.
.
Dua, 35, and Amjad, 32, both textile industry men, met at a business conference last December in Mumbai, India, and hit it off. Dua visited Pakistan for the first time in January. Amjad and his extended family of six came to India this week to watch cricket.
.
"The kind of hospitality that was extended to me was unbelievable," Dua recalled of his visit to Lahore, Pakistan, in January.
.
"He has given us five times what we gave him," Amjad gushed back.
.
"No, no, it's not like that," Dua said with a grin and patted Amjad's leg. After the cricket match, Dua planned to take Amjad home to Delhi and then to see the Taj Mahal. The first test of the three-match series ended in a draw Saturday.
.
As luck would have it, the two men shared more than cricket and textiles. Dua's grandfather had fled the newly created Pakistan from a village not too far from Lahore, where Amjad's family lives, when the subcontinent was violently partitioned in 1947, prompting one of the largest migrations in human history. Some 12 million people crossed the new border.
.
As India and Pakistan faced off here in Mohali, in the heart of a divided Punjab Province, for the first test match of a six-week-long cricket series, Indians and Pakistanis greeted each other with a mixture of intense curiosity, apprehension, guilt, affection, longing and hope.
.
Spectators wandered around the stadium with an Indian flag painted on one cheek and a Pakistani flag on the other.
.
On the streets nearby, sari shops announced discounts for "our friends from Pakistan." Local families took perfect strangers into their homes and refused to take any money. Inside Indian living rooms, Pakistanis traded stories about weddings and children, the quality of the roads, the price of chickens, and motorbikes.
.
Amid the enthusiasm, Indians and Pakistanis uttered the unthinkable.
.
"There is no difference between us," said Naveed Ahmed, of Bahalwalnagar, in the Pakistani Punjab. It was his fist time in India.
.
Adding an explicitly political flavor to the game, President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan is expected to attend a match during the series, most likely on April 2 in the Indian city of Kochi.
.
A cricket match last year took the Indian team to Pakistan, prompting what people from both countries recall as an effusion of hospitality and grace.
.
"We even applauded the defeat of our own team," recalled Senator Mushahid Hussein of Pakistan.
.
If partition and cricket were among the principal gifts the British Raj bequeathed to their former subjects on the subcontinent, there was no better place to kick off the India versus Pakistan cricket series than here in Punjab, the epicenter of the bloody 1947 migration when Sikhs and Hindus had fled east into India and Muslims had streamed west into the newly created Pakistan. At the cricket match, it was impossible not to find Indians and Pakistanis who carried stories of that time.
.
For Rajinder Singh, the match, offered an occasion to pay what he considered a 50-year-old family debt. His father, a Sikh, was a teenager when their village, Rangpur, now in the Pakistani part of Punjab, broke out in a spasm of sectarian violence during the partition. One night, during the worst bloodletting, some neighbors hid his father's family in their car and ferried them to where an Indian Army truck was taking Hindus and Sikhs across the border. His family survived.
.
Settling in what became the Indian side of Punjab, the Singhs named every family enterprise in memory of their native village: Rangpuri Finance, Rangpuri Autos and Rangpuri Handloom.
.
Last week, Singh and his wife, Jaswinder Kaur, decided to repay their onetime neighbors' kindness. They went to where buses were unloading hundreds of Pakistani cricket fans and brought home an extended family of six young Pakistanis, roughly the same age as their own two sons.
.
"This was a wish in our hearts, that these people would come as our guests," said Singh, 45.
.
Ayaz Mahmood, 29, one of Singh's Pakistani guests, said, "We feel now we have a generations-old friendship."
.
Every evening last week, the Indians and the Pakistanis drank together in the Singh's living room. "I take a hard drink, they take a soft drink," Singh explained with a nod to his well-stocked bar.
.
Every morning during breakfast, a stream of inquisitive friends poured in, "just to see the Pakistanis," is how Singh put it.
.
"As the German people have broken the German wall, we too want to break the Punjab wall," Singh said. "This is one body, one heart, one language."
.
.
Indian officials said that nearly 4,000 Pakistanis were given limited nine-day visas for the test matches. More than a 1,000 of them also sought permission to visit other tourist sites in India.
.
The cricket series comes at a time when the topsy-turvy relations between the two countries are at a crucial moment. A new dispute over water rights has been referred to the World Bank for an independent opinion. Peace talks have recently yielded agreement on a bus route that would allow Indians and Pakistanis to travel between the two capitals of the disputed Kashmir region.
.
The bus services will start on April 7, Reuters reported Sunday, citing a spokesman for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India.
.
Here on the ground, cricket opened peoples' eyes. A Pakistani teenager admitted to being apprehensive about how the Indians would treat him; all through school, he said, he had been taught that they were his enemies.
.
At Roop Saree Center in Chandigarh, the state capital of Indian Punjab, Karamjit Singh and Shaista Tahir sat inspecting a pile of saris. Their families knew each other when they lived in Tanzania more than 20 years ago. Then Tahir's family had returned to Lahore, and Singh's to Chandigarh. The two women had not seen each other since.
.
As it turned out, Singh was born in present-day Pakistan and, until the partition, shuttled between family homes in Lahore and Amritsar. In 1947, when Singh was 8, the family fled to the Indian side of Punjab.
.
This week, she took her Lahori guests to the local golf club for lunch, then to see a movie, and on Friday, for an afternoon of shopping.
.
"It's nonstop catching up on things, late night chatting," she said of their week together.
.
The women picked over piles of saris. A red paisley print was rejected. An ice-blue chiffon was selected.
.
The sari shop owner, V.K. Sachdeva, was eager to welcome his Pakistani customers. He was offering cut-rate prices during the test matches and this week alone, Sachdeva said he had done hundreds of thousands of rupees worth of business.
.
But there was also this other fact. "We belong to Pakistan," said Sachdeva, whose parents had fled from a village in what is now the Pakistani side of Punjab.
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