Mumbai, Oct 26: Shalini Advani and her sister live just an hour’s plane ride apart, but haven’t seen each other in three years.
Between them lies a fissure, a frontier which in recent times has so hardened that to go from Mumbai to Karachi , this Sindhi family must travel through the neutral territory of another country.
“We’re near and yet so far,’’ says Ms Advani,who came to Mumbai forever as a 23-year-old bride in 1972. “Until the flights stopped, we would visit every six months.’’ She is sceptical of Delhi ’s recent efforts to revive transport links between India and Pakistan —”it starts and then fizzles out, I’m tired of hoping’’—but is thrilled with the idea of the Mumbai-Karachi ferry.

“I would love to go by ship. That’s how my parents and uncles travelled,’’ she says. The Mumbai-Karachi connection is a tale of sister cities once entwined by the bonds of trade, culture and community, now estranged by the caprice of Partition and politics. It’s not surprising, then, to find that of all the peace initiatives announced by Delhi last week, most Mumbaikars heeded just one—-the revival of the Mumbai-Karachi ferry. For a large number of Sindhis,Maharashtrians and Parsis, whose families are scattered between the two cities, the ferry invokes a gentler, more innocent past when people routinely sailed back and forth for work and play.