The Long Walk Home

Yeh faasle teri galiyon ke humse tay na huey, hazaar baar rukey hum  hazaar baar chaley Na jaane kaun si mitti watan ki mitti thi, nazar  mein dhool, jigar mein liye ghubaar chaley - Gulzar Seventy-one-year-old Baksh wakes up one night in pain and ventures out in search of a doctor. In the time it takes him to reach a hospital, his heart irretrievably damaged, he travels down memory lane, reliving  his life lived in the border town of Ferozepur, Punjab-from  pre-Partition India, to the holocaust that accompanied independence,  the Indo-Pak wars, the Green Revolution and the rise of religious  extremism. Increasingly isolated in the terror-infested eighties, an  era of curfews, encounters and hit lists, his world all but falls  apart as his wife falls under the spell of a rabid preacher; his best  friend, a Hindu, flees the town; the Bar Council where he works  cleaves along religious lines; and he himself makes an error of  judgement that could have serious security ramifications. As he nears  the end of his walk, and his life, he wonders: will there ever be a redemption, a homecoming?  Redolent of the soil and the spirit of Punjab, The Long Walk Home is  as much one man's odyssey through tumultuous times as it is an elegiac  meditation on the passing of a way of life, on faith and  fundamentalism and misguided passions.