Naga’s mother, who lived alone on the ground floor of the big house (his father, Ambassador Shivashankar Hariharan, had died), advised him to let Tilo go. “She won’t be able to manage on her own, she’ll beg you to take her back.” Naga knew otherwise. Tilo would manage. And even if she didn’t, there would be no begging. He sensed she was drifting on a tide that neither he nor she could do much about. He couldn’t tell whether her restlessness, her compulsive and increasingly unsafe wandering through the city, marked the onset of an unsoundness of mind or an acute, perilous kind of sanity. Or were they both the same thing?
The only thing he could attribute her newfound restiveness to was her mother’s bizarre passing, which he thought odd, given that it was a relationship that had barely existed. True, Tilo had been at her bedside during the last two weeks in hospital. But other than that, she had seen her mother only a few times in the past several years.
Naga was right in one sense but wrong in another. Her mother’s death (she died in the winter of 2009) had released Tilo from an internment that nobody, including she herself, had been aware of because it had passed itself off as something quite the opposite—a peculiar, insular independence. For all of her adult life Tilo had defined and shaped herself by marking off and maintaining a distance between herself and her mother—her real foster-mother. When that was no longer necessary, something frozen began to thaw and something unfamiliar began to take its place.
Naga’s pursuit of Tilo had not turned out as planned. She was meant to be just another easy conquest, yet another woman who succumbed to his irreverent brilliance and edgy charm and had her heart broken. But Tilo had crept up on him, and become a kind of compulsion, an addiction almost. Addiction has its own mnemonics—skin, smell, the length of the loved one’s fingers. In Tilo’s case it was the slant of her eyes, the shape of her mouth, the almost-invisible scar that slightly altered the symmetry of her lips and made her look defiant even when she did not mean to, the way her nostrils flared, announcing her displeasure even before her eyes did. The way she held her shoulders. The way she sat on the pot stark naked and smoked cigarettes. So many years of marriage, the fact that she was not young any more—and did nothing to pretend otherwise—didn’t change the way he felt. Because it had to do with more than all that. It was the haughtiness (despite the question mark over her “stock,” as his mother had not hesitated to put it). It had to do with the way she lived, in the country of her own skin. A country that issued no visas and seemed to have no consulates.
True, it had never been a particularly friendly country even at the best of times. But its borders were sealed and the regime of more or less complete isolationism began only after the train-wreck at the Shiraz Cinema. Naga married Tilo because he was never really able to reach her. And because he couldn’t reach her he couldn’t let her go. (Of course that raises another question: Why did Tilo marry Naga? A generous person would say it was because she needed shelter. A less generous view would be that it was because she needed cover.)
Although his was only a small part in the story, in Naga’s mind, “Before” and “After” Shiraz sometimes took on the overtones of BC and AD.
AFTER THE MIDNIGHT CALL from Biplab Das-Goose-da in Dachigam, it took Naga a few hours and several discreet phone calls to make the necessary arrangements to get from Ahdoos to the Shiraz. Curfew had been declared. Srinagar was locked down. Security was being put in place for the funeral procession for the people who had been killed over the weekend, which would rage through the streets the next morning. There were shoot-on-sight orders. Moving around the city that night was next to impossible. By the time Naga managed to organize a vehicle, a curfew pass, checkpoint waivers and an entry-permit to the Shiraz, it was almost dawn.
An orderly was waiting for him outside the cinema lobby, near what had once been the ticket booth and was now a sentry post. He said the Major Sahib (Amrik Singh) had left, but that his deputy would meet him in his office. The orderly escorted Naga to the back of the building, up the fire escape to a dim, makeshift office on the first floor. He asked Naga to take a seat, saying that “Sahib” would be there in a minute. When he entered the room Naga had no means of knowing that the figure in a pheran and balaclava sitting on a chair with her back to the door was Tilo. He hadn’t seen her in a while. When she turned around, what alarmed him more than the look in her eyes was the effort she made to smile and say hello. That, to him, was a sign of breakage. It wasn’t her. She wasn’t a woman who smiled and said hello. Her close friends had learned over time that with Tilo the absence of a greeting was actually a brusque declaration of intimacy. Thanks to the balaclava, what they later came to call “the haircut” wasn’t immediately evident. Naga assumed the balaclava was just a South Indian’s exaggerated response to the cold. (He had a cache of jokes about South Indians and monkey caps that he used to tell with accents and aplomb, without fear of causing offense, because he was half South Indian himself.) As soon as Tilo saw him she stood up and moved quickly to the door.
“It’s you! I thought Garson—”
“He called me. He’s in Dachigam with the Governor. I happened to be in town. Are you OK? And Musa…? Was it…?”
He put an arm around her shoulder. She wasn’t shivering so much as vibrating, as though there was a motor just underneath her skin. A pulse jumped on the side of her mouth.
“Can we go now? Shall we leave…?”
Before Naga could reply, Ashfaq Mir, Deputy Commandant of the Shiraz Cinema JIC, walked in, heralded by the overpowering scent of his cologne. Naga dropped his arm from Tilo’s shoulder, feeling guilty for an imagined misdemeanor. (In Kashmir in those days, the difference between what constituted guilt and innocence lay in the realm of the occult.)
Ashfaq Mir was startlingly short, startlingly strong-looking and startlingly white even for a Kashmiri. His ears and nostrils were shell pink. He exuded an almost metallic radiance. He was smartly turned out, khaki trousers creased, brown boots polished, buckles gleaming, hair gelled and raked back off his smooth, shining forehead. He could have been Albanian, or a young army officer from the Balkans, but when he spoke, it was with the manner of an old-world houseboat owner, steeped in generations of legendary Kashmiri hospitality, greeting an old customer.
“Welcome, sir! Welcome! Welcome! I must tell you, I am your biggest fan, sir! We need people like you to keep people like me on the right track!” The smile that spread across his fresh, boyish face was a pennant. His amazed, baby-blue eyes lit up with what looked like real pleasure. He sandwiched Naga’s hand between both his hands and pumped it warmly for a good length of time before taking his place behind his desk and gesturing to Naga to sit down opposite him. “I’m sorry I am a little late. I was out all night. There’s trouble in the city—you must have heard—protests, firings, killings, funerals…Our usual Srinagar Special. I just got back. My CO Sir asked me to come and hand over Ma’am personally.”
Though he called her “Ma’am,” he behaved as though Tilo wasn’t there. (Which allowed Tilo to behave as though she wasn’t there either.) Even when he referred to her he didn’t look at her. Whether that was a gesture of respect, disrespect or just local tradition was not clear.
Not much about what happened in that room that day was clear. Ashfaq Mir’s performance could either have been carefully scripted, including the manner and timing of his entrance, or it could have been a kind of practiced improvisation. The only thing that was unambiguous was the undertone of bustling, smiling menace: “Ma’am” would be personally handed over, but Sir and Ma’am could leave only when Ashfaq Mir said they could. Yet he conducted himself as though he was a humble minion merely carrying out, in the most gracious way possible, a duty he had been assigned. He gave the impression that he had absolutely no idea what had happened, what Tilo was doing in the JIC or why she needed to be “handed over.”
It was obvious from, if nothing else, the quality of the air in the room (it trembled) that something heinous had happened. It wasn’t
clear what, or who the sinner was and who the sinned against.
Ashfaq Mir rang a bell and ordered tea and biscuits without asking his guests if they wanted any. While they waited for it to be served, he followed Naga’s gaze to a framed poster on the wall:
We follow our own rules
Ferocious we are
Lethal in any form
Tamer of tides
We play with storms
U guessed it right
We are
Men in Uniform
“Our in-house poetry…” Ashfaq Mir threw his head back and guffawed.
Either the tea—or the script—made him talkative. Oblivious to the disquiet (as well as the quiet) of his audience he chattered amiably about his college days, his politics, his job. He had been a student leader, he said, and like most young men of his generation, a hard-core Separatist. But having lived through the bloodshed of the early 1990s, having lost a cousin and five close friends, he had come to see the light. He now believed Kashmir’s struggle for Azadi had lost its way and that nothing could be achieved without the “Rule of Law.” And so he joined the Jammu and Kashmir Police and had been deputed to the SOG, the Special Operations Group. Holding a biscuit in the air, delicately between his thumb and forefinger, he recited a poem by Habib Jalib that he said had simply come to him—at the very moment of his change of heart:
Mohabbat goliyon se bo rahe ho
Watan ka chehra khoon se dho rahe ho
Gumaan tum ko ke rasta katt raha hai
Yaqeen mujhko ke manzil kho rahe ho
Bullets you sow instead of love
Our homeland you wash with blood
You imagine you’re showing the way
But I believe you’ve gone astray
Without waiting for a reaction he switched from his declamatory tone to a conspiratorial one:
“And after Azadi? Has anyone thought? What will majority do to the minority? Kashmiri Pandits have already gone. Only us Muslims remain. What will we do to each other? What will Salafis do to Barelvis? What will Sunnis do to Shias? They say they will go to Jannat more surely if they kill a Shia than if they kill a Hindu. What will be the fate of Ladakhi Buddhists? Jammu Hindus? J&K is not just Kashmir. It’s Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. Has any Separatist thought of this? The answer, I can tell you, is a big ‘No.’ ”
Naga agreed with what Ashfaq Mir said, and he knew how carefully this seed of self-doubt had been sown by an administration that had clawed its way back into control from the brink of utter chaos. Listening to Ashfaq Mir was like watching the season change and the crop mature. It gave Naga a momentary rush, a cultish sense of omniscience. But he didn’t want to do anything that would prolong the meeting. So he said nothing. He made a show of craning his neck to read the list of the “Most Wanted”—about twenty-five names—written with green Magic Marker on the whiteboard behind the desk. Next to more than half the names it said (killed) (killed) (killed).
“They are all Pakistanis and Afghanis,” Ashfaq Mir said, not turning around, keeping his gaze on Naga. “Their shelf-life is not more than six months. By the year-end they will all be eliminated. But we never kill Kashmiri boys. NEVER. Never unless they are hard-core.”
The barefaced lie hung in the air unchallenged. That was its purpose—to test the air.
Ashfaq Mir sipped his tea, continuing to stare at Naga with those amazed, unblinking eyes. Suddenly—or perhaps not so suddenly—an idea seemed to occur to him. “Would you like to see a milton? I have a wounded one with me here in custody. A Kashmiri. Shall I order for him?”
He rang the bell once again. Within seconds a man answered it and took the “order” as though it were an additional snack that was being ordered with the tea.
Ashfaq Mir grinned mischievously. “Don’t tell my boss, please. He will scold me. This type of thing is not allowed. But you—and Ma’am—will find it very interesting.”
While he waited for the new snack to be served he turned his attention to the papers on his desk, signing his name rapidly on several of them, with an air of cheerful triumph, the scratch of his pen on paper amplified by the silence. Tilo, who had been sitting on a chair at the back of the room, stood up and walked to the window that looked out on to a bleak parking lot full of military trucks. She didn’t want to be the audience for Ashfaq Mir’s show. It was an instinctive gesture of solidarity with a prisoner against a jailer—regardless of the reasons that had made the prisoner a prisoner and the jailer a jailer.
From being someone who had been trying to turn her presence in the room into an absence, her unpresent form now turned thermal, emitting a flux that both the men in the room were acutely aware of, although in very different ways.
In a few minutes a burly policeman entered, carrying a thin boy in his arms. One leg of the boy’s trousers was rolled up, exposing a matchstick-thin calf held together by a splint from ankle to knee. His arm was in a plaster cast and his neck was bandaged. Though his face was drawn with pain, he didn’t grimace when the soldier deposited him on the floor.
To refuse to show pain was a pact the boy had made with himself. It was a desolate act of defiance that he had conjured up in the teeth of absolute, abject defeat. And that made it majestic. Except that nobody noticed. He stayed very still, a broken bird, half sitting, half lying, propped up on one elbow, his breath shallow, his gaze directed inward, his expression giving nothing away. He showed no curiosity about his surroundings or the people in the room.
And Tilo, with her back to the room, in an equally desolate act of defiance, refused to show curiosity about him.
Ashfaq Mir broke up the tableau with the same declamatory tone in which he had recited his poem. What he said this time was a kind of recital too:
“The average age of a milton is between seventeen and twenty years. He is brainwashed, indoctrinated and given a gun. They are mostly poor, low-caste boys—yes, for your kind information even we Muslims happily practice caste. They don’t know what they want. They are simply being used by Pakistan to bleed India. It’s what we can call their ‘Prick and Bleed’ policy. This boy’s name is Aijaz. He was captured in an operation in an apple orchard near Pulwama. You can talk to him. Ask him any questions. He was with a new tanzeem that has recently started operations here. Lashkar-e-Taiba. His commander, Abu Hamza, was a Pakistani. He has been neutralized.”
The game became clear to Naga. He was being offered a deal in Kashmir’s special currency. An interview with a captured militant from a relatively new and—according to the intelligence reports he was privy to—deadly outfit, in exchange for peace over the night’s events—for whatever had happened with Tilo and whatever horror she might have witnessed.
Ashfaq Mir walked over to his quarry and spoke to him in Kashmiri, in a tone one might use for someone who was hard of hearing.
“Yi chui Nagaraj Hariharan Sahib. He is a famous journalist from India.” (Sedition was a contagion in Kashmir—sometimes it involuntarily slipped into the vocabulary of Loyalists too.) “He writes against us openly, but still we respect and admire him. This is the meaning of democracy. Some day you will understand what a beautiful thing it is.” He turned to address Naga, switching to English (which the boy understood, but could not speak). “After being with us and coming to know us well, this boy has seen the error of his ways. Now he thinks of us as his family. He has renounced his past and denounced his colleagues and those who forcibly indoctrinated him. He has himself requested us to keep him in custody for two years so that he can be safe from them. His parents are being allowed to visit him. In a few days he will be transferred to jail, to judicial custody. There are many boys like him who are with us here, ready to work with us. You can speak with him—ask him anything. It’s no problem. He will talk.”
Naga said nothing. Tilo remained at the window. It was cool outside, but the air rumbled and smelled of diesel. She watched soldiers escort a young woman with a baby in her arms through the maze of trucks and soldiers. The woman seemed reluctant to
go. She kept turning around to look back at something. The soldiers deposited her outside the tall metal gates of the Shiraz, beyond the coiled razor-wire fence that barricaded the torture center from the main road. The woman remained standing where she had been deposited. A small, desperate, frightened figure, a traffic island on the crossroads to nowhere.
For a moment the silence in the room grew awkward.
“Oh I see I understand…you would like to speak with him one on one? Shall I go out? It’s no problem. I can easily go out.” Ashfaq Mir rang a bell. “I’m going out,” he informed the puzzled orderly who answered the bell. “We are going out. We will sit in the outside room.”
Having ordered himself out of his own office, he left and shut the door. Tilo turned around briefly to watch him leave. Through the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor she could see his brown shoes blocking the light. Within a second he came back in with a man who carried a blue plastic chair. It was positioned facing the boy on the floor.
“Please have a seat, sir. He will talk. You need not worry. He will not harm you. I’m going now, OK? You can speak in private.”
He left, closing the door behind him. He returned almost immediately.
“I forgot to tell you that his name is Aijaz. Ask him anything.” He looked at Aijaz and his tone became slightly peremptory. “Answer whatever he asks you. Urdu is no problem. You can speak in Urdu.”
“Ji, sir,” the boy said, not looking up.
“He’s a Kashmiri, I’m a Kashmiri, we’re brothers—and just look at us! OK. I’ll go out.”
Ashfaq Mir left the room once again. And once again his shoes paced up and down just outside the door.
—
“Would you like to say anything?” Naga asked Aijaz, ignoring the chair and crouching on the floor in front of him. “You don’t have to. Only if you want to. On or off the record.”