Thapar flipped the page with the practiced calm of a man who knew exactly where the public blood was pooling.
"Why five dollars?" he asked. "Is this a jizya—taxing devotion?"
The room seemed to lose a degree of warmth. Even the air-conditioning felt louder, as if the building itself had become self-conscious. A few journalists leaned forward. A few handlers stiffened. Everyone understood the trap: if Musharraf sounded defensive, the headline would write itself. If he sounded religious, he would inflame his own street. If he sounded greedy, the corridor would die before it was born.
Musharraf didn't blink.
"It is a management fee, Mr. Thapar," he said, voice steady. "Nothing more."
Thapar's eyes stayed sharp. "Management of what, General?"
Musharraf's answer came like a list read from a budget file—because that was the safest way to speak when ideology was trying to hijack arithmetic.
"Management of a facility," he said. "A controlled corridor needs infrastructure. It needs road access. It needs lighting. It needs sanitation. It needs water. It needs medical posts. It needs crowd control. It needs trained security. It needs communications. It needs maintenance."
Aditya, inside, could already see the spreadsheet that didn't exist yet but would soon have to: steel barriers, fencing, floodlights, generators, toilets, water tanks, medical tents, radios, vehicles, salaries, repair budgets. A corridor was not a ribbon-cutting. It was an operating system that had to run every day, under pressure, with cameras waiting for failure.
"How can you call that jizya?" Musharraf asked calmly, without heat. "Jizya is a humiliation tax imposed because of faith. This is cost recovery for a service."
Thapar didn't let go. He was doing what he always did—taking the word that could inflame the maximum number of people and pressing it against the story until it left a bruise.
"But General," he said, "why should a pilgrim pay anything at all? Why not make it free if you claim it is a goodwill gesture?"
Musharraf allowed a brief pause—not hesitation, but emphasis.
"Because goodwill does not replace management," he said. "If you want the corridor to function safely, you fund the system that keeps it safe."
Then he added—quietly, deliberately—so it landed as reason rather than defiance:
"If India prefers, we can discuss a joint fund," Musharraf said. "Or India can cover a portion of operational costs through a formal mechanism. But someone pays. Professional systems do not run on slogans."
Aditya noted the real purpose of that line: it turned the accusation into a choice. If India kept shouting "jizya," it would look unserious. If India proposed a fund, it would tacitly admit the fee was just arithmetic.
The Land Swap Trap
Thapar shifted gears. Now he went for the argument that sounded elegantly simple on television and catastrophically naïve in real border doctrine.
"If you are sincere," he said, "why not give Kartarpur to India and take equal land in return?"
A few heads in the room tilted. For a moment, it sounded like a neat solution—like swapping pieces on a board. Thapar knew the appeal: it made Musharraf look either stubborn or insincere if he rejected it.
Musharraf's eyes narrowed—not in anger, but in the way a field officer reacts to a proposal from someone who has never walked a vulnerable perimeter at night.
"Anyone suggesting that does not understand border management," he said. "Borders are not lines in a textbook. They are living systems—terrain, access routes, observation lines, population movement, and security doctrine."
Thapar pressed. "So it's impossible?"
"It's irresponsible," Musharraf replied. "Because you are not just exchanging land. You are exchanging vulnerabilities. You create a new precedent, a new argument, and a new dispute."
He leaned forward slightly, voice still even.
"India and Pakistan have already adjusted land wherever it was possible to make the boundary manageable," Musharraf said. "What remains is not a clean rectangle. It's complicated geography. You move the line, and tomorrow someone will demand another move—another site, another pocket, another 'equal exchange.'"
Thapar tried to corner him again. "So your answer is simply 'no'?"
Musharraf answered with the kind of practical logic that doesn't look dramatic on television but survives in policy files.
"My answer is: a corridor solves access without changing sovereignty," he said. "It reduces friction without redrawing the wound."
He paused, then aimed directly at the credibility of the question.
"Ask your BSF," Musharraf said. "Can they manage Kartarpur if you shift the line? Or will it create new friction points—new patrol patterns, new gaps, new claims? A corridor is controlled. A border change is permanent."
Inside, Aditya felt the sentence lock into place like a stamped approval: access without ownership; service without surrender. A bureaucrat's solution disguised as a general's firmness.
The Offer to Be Measured
Thapar sat back, as if conceding the point for the sake of moving to the concluding strike.
"So," he said, "you want India to trust the General."
Musharraf turned his gaze toward the camera now—past Thapar, past the room, into living rooms in Delhi and Amritsar, into gurdwara courtyards where elders watched silently, into Pakistani drawing rooms where hardliners waited for a misstep.
"I want India to test the state," he said. "Not trust a man."
He let the words settle, then made the offer that Aditya knew was the only offer that could survive cynicism.
"Give me protocols," Musharraf said. "Give me conditions. Give me joint observation. If Pakistan meets them, you have evidence. If Pakistan fails them, you have proof."
He paused.
"That is how civilized states proceed," Musharraf continued. "Through verification—step by step—not hysteria."
The interview ended. Microphones clicked off. Chairs shifted. The journalists began assembling their headlines in their heads, already guessing which phrases would survive the edit room and which would be cut for time.
But Musharraf remained still for a moment, inside the uniform, feeling the weight of what had happened.
Publicly, Musharraf had offered a corridor.Privately, Aditya had offered something more dangerous: a measurable experiment that would expose saboteurs on both sides.
And measurable experiments create deadlines.
He stood, thanked the room with minimal courtesy, and walked out with one certainty that no one else in Islamabad could fully feel:
When peace becomes testable, the spoilers stop arguing.
They start manufacturing "accidents."