Over 500 years ago, in the 16th century, Sultan Sher Shah Suri (1472-1545 CE) built a road from Sonargaon in Bengal to Peshawar in Pakistan.

It is said that the ancient Uttarapatha (northern road), which had been used for trade, migration and conquest was used as a guide by Sher Shah, who has left an indelible mark on our history despite his short reign.

After the takeover of India, the British revamped and renamed it to the Grand Trunk (GT) Road, which remains in use. It was a route of hectic activity, crisscrossing provinces and cultures, traversing the stunning diversity from east India to the north-west frontier.

Rudyard Kipling, the famous chronicler of colonial India, wrote in Kim: “The Grand Trunk Road is a wonderful spectacle. It runs straight, bearing without crowding India’s traffic for fifteen hundred miles - such a river of life as nowhere else exists in the world”.

The 1947 partition of India destroyed this river of people, which ran red with the blood of tens of thousands of overnight refugees for months. In less than seven weeks, millennia old bonds were shredded by the British who deployed a rookie lawyer, Cyril Radcliffe, to redraw the borders based on dated data. He snipped the GT Road at Wagah, a village lying almost halfway between what were then the twin cities of Amritsar and Lahore.

This tiny village, a dot on the border between the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and secular India, has become the most........

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