between river and borders: a journey to pakistan’s margins

Pakistan is a country the world thinks it already knows enough about. Tension with India. Terrorism. Toxic politics. Names like Karachi and Lahore roll off the tongue easily; Islamabad, sometimes; Rawalpindi, perhaps. For most, Pakistan remains an idea — a place they read about in the news, talk to cab drivers about when stuck in traffic jams, pontificate to friends over a cold beer in a heated pub, but would never be crazy enough to visit.

Even its mangoes — Chaunsa, thick and custard-sweet, said to be the world’s best — are more spoken of than tasted.

But beyond the headlines, away from the main cities and into the rural, tribal-bound heartlands — canal-fed farms, wheat and mustard fields, mango orchards, fog-laden country along the Indus — a different Pakistan appears: bruised and battered, but alive, breathing, and in rare flashes, heart-achingly beautiful.

Pakistanis will go to remarkable lengths to secure another passport, yet they love their country fiercely. They will defend it without hesitation — against India, certainly; against the West, if needed; against anyone who dares question the very creation of Pakistan from the smouldering ashes and bloodletting of Partition. Yet over doodh patti chai, or a Murree poured into an opaque cup, in quieter moments they speak with disarming honesty of a nation sliding toward an abyss: irredeemably corrupt politicians, an all-powerful army that oversees and intervenes, stark feudal inequalities, and a state-sponsored religiosity that controls far more than it consoles, intimidates rather than guides, and that wounds more than it heals.

Before Pakistan, no nation in the world was founded explicitly on religion – not even Israel because Zionism framed Jews as a people, a race, not merely a faith.

The idea of Pakistan wasn’t born in the plains of Punjab, high deserts of Balochistan, or rivers of Sindh. It was forged in the dining halls of Cambridge, the intellectual heart of empire, where English-educated minds shaped the world. Allama Iqbal called for a separate Muslim state; Choudhry Rahmat Ali gave it a name. Balfour earlier pledged a future nation on someone else’s soil; decades later, Lee Kuan Yew gave expulsion as an excuse for constructing a global state on a small island. They all earned their degrees from Cambridge.

Pakistan was planned in the shadow of Lausanne and in the spirit of Versailles, in the logic that a nation needs a state, and a state needs a defined people — Islam became more than belief— it became a boundary, a line drawn between ‘us’ and ‘them.

These ideas about nation-states, nurtured at the final stage of formal empire, set the tone for modern globalist ambitions where identity, politics, and faith continue to shape the world. In Malaysia, Pakistan’s model of political Islam has exerted a deep influence — one that has steadily eroded the country’s earlier traditions of tolerance and multiculturalism.

My thirteen-day journey was not a planning or an itinerary. It was permission — and a privilege. Mr Salim, a sardar – hereditary lord of the Baloch Mazari tribe, moved us by road from Lahore to Karachi, across two-thirds of Pakistan, breaking our journey to fulfil my long-held wish of praying at the birthplace of Guru Nanak in Nankana Sahib, and in Multan to pay respects at its famed Sufi shrines. We ate well at his table, what the land gave us; slept under bundles of blankets near his frosty fields; whispered prayers at the family mausoleums; and spent long hours in his ancestral village in the tribal belt — the uneasy tri-border where Punjab and Sindh fray into Balochistan. Without him, this landscape is sealed by suspicion, guns, and clan protocol. With his name, the road opens, and understanding deepens.

سورج بُنتا ہے تارِ زر سے
دنیا کے لیے ردائے نوری
Suraj Bunta Hai Tar-e-Zar Se
Dunya Ke Liye Rida-e-Noori

عالم ہے خموش و مست گویا
ہر شے کو نصیب ہے حضوری
Alam Hai Khamosh-o-Mast Goya
Har Shay Ko Naseeb Hai Huzoori

دریا، کہسار، چاند تارے
کیا جانیں فراق و ناصبوری
Darya, Kuhsar, Chand, Tare
Kya Janain Faraaq-o-Nasaboori

شایاں ہے مجھے غمِ جدائی
یہ خاک ہے محرمِ جدائی
Shayaan Hai Mujhe Gham-e-Judai
Ye Khak Hai Mehram-e-Judai

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The sun is weaving with golden thread
A mantle of light about earthʹs head;

Creation hushed in ecstasy,
As in the presence of the Most High.

What can these know—stream, hill, moon, star—
Of separation’s torturing scar?

Mine is this golden grief alone,
To this dust only is this grief known.

Allama Iqbal, Judai (Separation) 
Bal-e-Jibril (Gabriel’s Wing) published in 1935

All texts and images are the Copyright of Kerk Boon Leng (c) January 2026. All Rights Reserved