Extracts from travel writer Salman Rashid's interview with
Christopher Lydon of Radio OpenSource.org about history,
folklore, and India Pakistan relations Salman Rashid: Sindh...
the land that takes its land from the river. Indus is Sindh in
Sanskrit, or Sindhu, which means the great river or even the
sea... You could travel east into the desert of Thar to see
these wonderful, wonderful places, like a town that comes
straight out of Lombardy, with pitched roofs, red tiles as if
there was a lot of rain, and there used to be rain at some point
in the past, that is what they tell us. This is Nagarparkar,
smack on the edge of Pakistan, which was not once on the edge of
Pakistan, it was on the trade route between Shikarpur in upper
Sindh, and port cities of Gujarat in India. But after the
Partition of India, Nagarparkar became an on-the-edge village
for Pakistan. The desert abounds with stories of legends and
treasures... There are places that even many Pakistanis don't
know about, like the Fort of Ranikot, with w