He has a simple wish. Subhash Malhotra is a retired civil engineer, a Christian who lives in Bombay. He would like to visit the city of Quetta, in Pakistan.

"I was born in Quetta, near the Afghan border. I would love to return some day. There was a severe earthquake in that region in the late 1930s. My father went there to help the people rebuild their city, and that's when I was born."

Although tensions have eased recently in the Jammu-Kashmir region, hundreds of thousands of soldiers are still garrisoned there, concern still rides high over the possible use of nuclear weapons, and ordinary Indians and Pakistanis cannot travel freely across their shared border.

"My hope and desire and prayer is always for unity between Pakistan and India" Malhotra says. "The singers we enjoy, our dances, the movies we love, even our feelings, are exactly the same. There's no difference between us. I love to wear what we in India call Afghan dress, the kurta and salwar. I wear them on happy and ceremonial occasions. I see unity as the ideal, rather than as agreement to disagree."

For over 50 years now, political, religious, and military leaders of Pakistan and India have been like wrestlers locked in holds none can break free of. As a result of this struggle, the billion-plus people of these two countries have been denied resources that could have gone to bettering their lives. Lately they've also been denied the simple enjoyment of meeting one another face to face.

Ayesha Jalal is a Pakistani-American who teaches South Asian history at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. In a telephone Interview she explained that, in her view, "the issue of Kashmir is not a real estate issue but a people issue, in that the people of this region need to be given the opportunity for self-determination.

"Precious resources that should go toward such needs as healthcare, education, and poverty reduction are being drained away by nuclear weapons programs and military expenses. It has become a dispute over national claims, but ultimately it's about people and the resources they need to better their lives and live together peacefully."

Jalal responds with a knowing laugh when I say that the India-Pakistan struggle seems like a bad divorce that doesn't want to end—there are property settlements and custody issues to be worked out, but the principals won't even talk about it. To what extent is it a religious conflict?

"Religion," she says, "as a point of conflict, is a misconception. In the South Asian context the problem is not religion, it is politics. It's the failure to work out an acceptable power-sharing agreement under which all parties are satisfied. I'm not proposing a condominium arrangement in Kashmir [joint rule and administration by India and Pakistan]. But I still don't think religion is the stumbling block. What is needed is a way to live with each other. Peace is based on accommodation of differences, on mutual respect and dignity.

"The two governments have sought to keep their people ignorant of each other. Indians and Pakistanis get along well when given the opportunity. They have common cultural bonds: food, music, the arts, customs. What needs to be removed are the obstacles that prevent such contacts."

Professor Jalal agrees with another Pakistani-American, Shirin Tahir-Kheli, who currently directs the South Asia program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. In a 1998 interview with the Center for Defense Information, Tahir-Kheli said that the two countries should be encouraged to work on infrastructure issues that are "non-contentious, on energy, on[the] environment.... We haven't been terribly creative in the last decade. There have to be other ways of doing business in the next century, to make it more lucrative if nothing else, for [Pakistanis and Indians] to cooperate. I think they would do that."

It's less than two years into the new century, and we're still looking for creative steps toward peace in South Asia instead of underground atomic detonations, terror bombings, and cross-border artillery exchanges.

David Willis was a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor in the 1980s. He covered the famine that ravaged Ethiopia. I remember his reports more than others for one reason. Like many of his media colleagues, he described the enormous challenge of feeding so many starving people. But he also saw that the deeper challenge facing the region was, in Willis's phrase, "a famine of ideas."

Subhash Malhotra says he was freshly inspired to pray for resolution of the India-Pakistan conflict when he read the story "For the love of Jerusalem" in the Sentinel's June 3 issue. Writer Luisella Jaques-Deraney was an International Red Cross worker in Jerusalem in 1987, when the first intifadah began. That conflict looked hopeless then, and resolution may still be a long way off. "But," she wrote, "in God's eyes... there aren't two sides."

"That's the problem in Kashmir," Malhotra says, "that there appear to be no solutions." And at the moment, no movement of thought toward solutions. "But this article encouraged me to expect that solutins will appear. In the Hindi language, it's an example of what we call khichdi. That's a dish of mixed rice and lentils, and nobody knows one element from the other—a puzzle no one understands.

"If the Wall can fall in Berlin, why can't it fall between India and Pakistan? God's ways are higher than our ways, and I'm certain that wall can fall. These merciless killings that are happening, they have their basis in the general thought that life is in matter. When we understand that life is in God and is therefore eternal, and see that the man of God's creating is incapable of killing because he mirrors the divine Love that made him, then the killing on our borders will stop."

And as Professor Jalal put it, "Certainly, one needs God to direct these countries away from the brink, away from war."

Nehal Patel is Malhotra's son-in-law. Patel is a Hindu and works as an IT project manager in the Boston area. Like other South Asians who now live in the United States, he follows events in his homeland. "Both countries," he observes, "have political instability to deal with at home. Border issues are sometimes thrown at the public to obscure internal problems. People have suffered long enough. If the same money [that has been spent on the conflict] had gone to education and public welfare, we'd be light-years further ahead."

Patel believes that eventually the "common man," the masses of the two nations, will themselves put an end to the strife. "After September 11, a lot of people are turning to spiritual guidance, and I hope both sides will look toward the common good and try to resolve things. It's like two estranged brothers fighting over [who will inherit] their father's house, and they need to learn to coexist in that house."

Like his father-in-law, Patel has a connection to Pakistan. His mother-in-law's family was forced to leave for India when the partition took effect in 1947.

Subhash Malhotra says that love between Hindus and Muslims is "too deep-rooted and can't be destroyed. In my generation people always wanted their children to marry within their own religion. Now those norms are being broken down, and the resistance to unity is being destroyed," family by family.

Malhotra's career was in construction project management. He helped build big things—industrial plants and copper smelters. "When I was employed by Indo-Gulf Corporation Ltd. [to build a smelter], there were three executive presidents over finance, engineering process, and works. They wouldn't even sit together in the same room. I think God planted me in the right place at the right time. It took me three solid months of praying and listening to get them to come together. Usually, building a copper smelter takes four to eight years, and we built that one in 35 months."

Peace between nations is a much bigger thing to build. To get to lasting peace will take devotion of thought and energy, a whole subcontinent's spiritual, moral, and social energies. It will also take a new willingness to let walls fall—old walls of prejudice and remembered injuries—for the good of humanity. And for the love of both Islamabad and Delhi.