“The heart of a world in which all hearts are one.”

–The Universal Incarnation, Sri Aurobindo.

I waited to see where the 5-person packed auto rikshaw was going and whether I could be the 6^th. Bargaining rikshaw prices in Delhi is next to impossible for me, but I knew with 6 of us it would be much less than my own rik.

As I got on, I was still in search of how I’d cross the border by road. For the last few days people kept talking of a bus and a train from Delhi, but I hadn’t been able to find out where to catch either. I recognized one of the passengers with the driver in the front as a fellow visa applicant. I called him Uncle (as I do to anyone my Dad’s age) and asked about the bus and the train. Soon enough we were on our way to the Delhi-Lahore bus bus stand at the Dr. Ambedekar Station in Old Delhi to buy tickets.

‘Uncle’ is a Muslim from Calcutta; he’ll be crossing the border to visit much of his family which is in Karachi. Thinking about how far Calcutta is from Karachi, and remembering a friend remark earlier in the day that “only an idiot could have separated the India and Pakistan in those days because the culture is in total continuum across the border”, sent waves of a past that wasn’t too long ago.

Realizing that in the larger picture it hasn’t been so long since the two nations were one, made me discount my own uncle’s remark that later in the day, “Be careful. The country is filled with dangerous people.” What my uncle didn’t think about is just as the halves of separated families like that of the Uncle from Calcutta are in Pakistan, so are in India the halves of the “dangerous” people in Pakistan.

I didn’t make it to Pakistan in Nov. after the quake. Finally, there is another opportunity to go, see, and do. I’ll leave tomorrow morning on a bus from Delhi to Lahore. The final destination is Islamabad and the quake affected areas.

(Sparse email until May 10.)