Yesterday was the fourteenth of August, which is Pakistan’s independence day. Ilford marks it every year. I went to look at it.
Ten minutes from Barking. I did not go to take part. I went because I wanted to see it, which is not the same thing.
By half eight the police had shut a section of the road, walk only. I had cycled over, so I got off and pushed the bike through with my helmet still on, filming as I went. Nobody looked at me twice. There was a great deal else going on.
Underneath it all, Ilford Lane was the same as ever. Money transfer shops, a fireworks place, an immigration solicitor’s with a Pakistani flag up in the window. People walking down the middle of the road because they could, past a bus stop nobody was waiting at. A lad went by with the flag worn as a cape.
Flags first, which you would expect. What I did not expect was how many of them were not the national flag. A lot were party flags, PTI mostly, people out for Imran Khan, some of them wearing his face as a mask. Not a handful of them either. Nothing about it was tense, nobody was arguing, it was simply a rally going on inside a celebration.
A day about a country, and people had brought along the parties that spend the rest of the year fighting over it. The politics of that are not mine to sort out. I am fairly indifferent to most things, though I would not hold that up as a virtue. Being indifferent to everything is not something to aim for, and there are things I would care enough about to make noise over. This was not one of them. And it was not the celebrating that struck me as odd, it was bringing the politics into it. Of all the days to be rallying, this did not seem like the one.
Then the trumpets. Everyone had one. Long plastic things, blown constantly, no tune involved at any point, purely volume. I do not understand what a trumpet has to do with independence. I have looked for the connection and I cannot find one. The nearest I can get is that it is about making as much noise as possible in a country where noise is generally frowned upon, and that might be the entire explanation.
Everyone was out. Families, teenagers, grandparents, children, all of them eating and walking and shouting over each other and the trumpets. The only other time I have seen Ilford like this is the last day of Ramadan, with Eid the next day, and I could not tell you which of the two brings out more people. Most of those children have never been to Pakistan. Plenty of their parents have not either. Some of those families have been in this country for decades, and they were out on Ilford Lane for a country that exists for them mostly as something they have been told about.
I have spent the last while listening to books about how that country came to exist, which is probably why I could not take the evening at face value. Independence from two centuries of being taken apart, first by a company and only later by an empire, is worth marking. Nobody sane argues otherwise. But 1947 itself was horrific. A line drawn through the middle of a place by people who did not live there, trains arriving at stations full of the dead, massacres running in both directions. And the ones who drew the line got to leave. They went home and the rest of it stayed behind.
Two countries torn out of one, and even that did not hold. Pakistan came out of 1947 in two halves with a thousand miles of India lying between them, and in 1971 the eastern half broke away, after a war of its own, and became Bangladesh.
None of it has healed either. The wound was never cauterised, it was just left open, and it is still bleeding in places. The two of them have gone to war more than once since, they both have nuclear weapons now, and Kashmir is still being argued over with soldiers standing in it. This is not something that happened and finished. It is still going on.
What comes through in the videos of people going back, though, is that most of them on both sides are full of love for each other. It is not the people. It is a handful of bad ones, and governments that find division useful, which is exactly what the company and then the empire did to the place. Divide et impera, divide and rule: keep the people under you split into groups that distrust each other, and they will spend their energy on each other instead of on you. It did not leave in 1947. It changed hands.
That is the part I keep getting stuck on. Not the celebrating.
I was born in Lahore and left at six, which is a longer story than this one and not the one I am telling here.
What I keep coming back to is that I went there to understand something and did not. I stood at the edge with a camera on my head, which is where I usually end up, and watched at least a thousand people be completely certain about what they were doing, and came away with nothing except a list of things I could not account for. The trumpets. The party flags.
I have a line I have used since I was sixteen for exactly this, so I will use it again. I know that I don’t know.
I rode home. The trumpets carried most of the way.
