Chakwal district sits on the Pothohar plateau and in the Salt Range, in rainfed country with a long history of army recruitment.
Katas Raj, in the district, is a complex of Hindu temples around a sacred pond, some dating from the sixth or seventh century, associated in tradition with a tear of Shiva and with the Pandavas' exile. It is one of the most important Hindu sites in Pakistan and receives Indian pilgrim jathas under the shrine protocol.
The pond has repeatedly dried, attributed to groundwater extraction by nearby cement plants, and has been the subject of Pakistani Supreme Court proceedings.
Kallar Kahar, with its salt lake and its garden laid out by Babur, is in the same district. Babur describes it in the Baburnama.
Gah, the village Manmohan Singh was born in, is in this district, and Chakwal has more Indian connections per square kilometre than almost anywhere in Pakistan.
It is also one of the districts that sends the most men to the Pakistan Army, for exactly the reasons it sent them to the British one.
The temple and gateway at Malot, a few kilometres from Katas, are eighth century, cut in local red sandstone and built in the Kashmiri manner with fluted columns and trefoil arches. They stand on the scarp with nothing around them and are among the oldest structures still standing in Pakistan.
The country is barani, farmed on rain alone, wheat and gram and groundnut with no canal anywhere in it. Remittances from the Gulf and the pensions of retired soldiers between them carry more of the household income than the land does, which is the same arithmetic that made the place a recruiting ground to begin with.
Gah was electrified and given a metalled road and a school after Manmohan Singh became Prime Minister of India, and men who had been at school with him were flown to Delhi to meet him. He never went back. Nothing of that kind has happened to any other village on either side of the line.