KARACHI: Pakistan’s Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb on Wednesday acknowledged Saudi Arabia’s critical role in helping secure the country’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan package and invited his counterpart in the Kingdom to visit Pakistan during an interaction on the sidelines of the IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings in Washington, DC.

The IMF approved a $7 billion Extended Fund Facility for Pakistan in September 2024 after Saudi Arabia, alongside the United Arab Emirates and China, provided key financing assurances needed to unlock the deal.

The package was seen as essential to stabilizing Pakistan’s economy amid dwindling foreign reserves and fiscal stress.

The Pakistani finance chief acknowledged the Kingdom’s role in a meeting with his Saudi counterpart, Mohammed Aljadaan, during his trip to the United States.

“Senator Aurangzeb thanked H.E. Aljadaan for Saudi Arabia’s longstanding and strong support to Pakistan in its pursuit of economic development, including through support for the IMF program, and invited him to visit Pakistan,” the finance ministry said in a statement circulated after the meeting.

“The Finance Minister also extended an invitation to H.E. Aljadaan to visit Pakistan,” it added.

Aurangzeb reiterated Pakistan’s commitment to economic reforms and said the country welcomed Saudi investments.

The latest meeting followed Aurangzeb’s engagement with Sultan bin Abdulrahman Al-Murshid, the top Saudi Fund for Development (SFD) official, on Tuesday, where he sought faster disbursements under the $1.2 billion Saudi Oil Facility, an arrangement allowing deferred payments on oil imports to ease pressure on Pakistan’s reserves.

Aurangzeb also requested SFD’s support for the National Highway N-25 and reviewed the fund’s development portfolio in Pakistan, expressing satisfaction with its pace of implementation.

In recent months, economic cooperation between the two countries has deepened.

During Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s visit to Riyadh in October 2024, the two sides signed 34 bilateral memorandums of understanding (MoUs), with a total projected investment of $2.8 billion.

Seven of those MoUs had been converted into agreements worth $560 million by December, several of which are already being implemented.

ISLAMABAD: For Pakistani traveler and writer Shueyb Gandapur, visiting India was less a sightseeing trip and more a journey into long-held curiosity, layered with red tape and quiet moments of recognition. On one hand, it was a chance to walk through the stories his grandfather once told him about the place, but on the other, it meant checking in at police stations 10 times in 16 days.
The journey took place in 2017, when Gandapur, a chartered accountant who has traveled to over 100 countries, secured an Indian visa via an invitation arranged through personal contacts.
His experiences are now the subject of a newly released travelogue titled Coming Back: The Odyssey of a Pakistani Through India, published in January 2025 in the United Kingdom and now available in Pakistan.

“India visas are restrictive,” he told Independent Urdu in a recent interview. “They list only specific cities you can visit, and you have to report to a police station when you arrive in each one, and again when you leave.”
“During my 16-day stay, I went to police stations 10 times,” he continued. “They’d pull out an old register from a shelf and write down my details. I often wondered how many names had filled those pages, and whether anyone ever looked at them again.”
Cross-border travel between Pakistan and India is closely monitored, particularly in recent years as diplomatic ties have deteriorated. But Gandapur’s book avoids political commentary, focusing instead on moments of human connection and cultural echoes that defy national divides.
In New Delhi’s bustling Paranthe Wali Gali, he recalled, a waiter greeted him with a strangely familiar tone: “It’s been a long time since you came by.”
Gandapur had never been there before.

“It was my first time,” he said. “But the welcome felt like I was coming back to a place I’d once known.”
As he traveled through cities like Agra, Jaipur and Varanasi, Gandapur began to notice traces of a shared past, with old shops and streets bearing names from present-day Pakistan.
In the Indian capital, he found schools named after Dera Ismail Khan, his hometown. The local D.I. Khan community, he learned, still publishes newsletters and preserves its identity generations after the Partition.
His literary enthusiasm led him to the graves of Urdu greats like Mirza Ghalib and Qurratulain Hyder.
“I wanted to see how Urdu lives on in India and what Indians think of our poets and writers,” he said.
Perhaps the most surprising encounters came with Pashto-speaking Hindus, descendants of communities that once lived in Pakistan’s northwest but remained in India after 1947.
“They call themselves Hindu Pashtuns,” Gandapur said. “They’ve been largely forgotten by history, but they’re still holding on to their language, their stories and a sense of who they are.”
While Coming Back is framed as a personal narrative, it also reads as an invitation to look past borders and bureaucracy and notice what endures.
Gandapur said he hoped to return to India one day, with Lucknow, Hyderabad and Mumbai on his list.
“There’s so much still to explore,” he said. “To really understand the culture we share, one journey isn’t enough.”