Junaid Ahmed Shah was an Area Commander of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen who had been captured a few months ago when he made that most common, but fatal, mistake of paying a midnight visit to his wife and infant son at their home in Sopore where soldiers lay in wait for him. He was a tall, lithe man, well known, much loved for his good looks and for his real, as well as apocryphal, acts of bravery. He had once had shoulder-length hair and a thick black beard. He was clean-shaven now, his hair close-cropped, Indian Army–style. His dull, sunken eyes looked out from deep, gray hollows. He was wearing worn tracksuit bottoms that ended halfway down his shins, woolen socks, army-issue canvas Keds and a scarlet, moth-eaten waiter’s jacket with brass buttons that was too small for him and made him look comical. The tremor in his hands caused the crockery to dance on the tray.
“All right, get lost now. What are you hanging around for?” Amrik Singh said to Junaid.
“Ji Jenaab! Jai Hind!”
Yes sir! Victory to India!
Junaid saluted and left the room. Amrik Singh turned to Musa, the picture of commiseration.
“What happened to you is something that ought not to happen to any human being. You must be in shock. Here, have a Krackjack. It’s very good for you. Fifty-fifty. Fifty percent sugar, fifty percent salt.”
Musa did not reply.
Amrik Singh finished his tea. Musa left his untouched.
“You have an engineering degree, is that not so?”
“No. Architecture.”
“I want to help you. You know the army is always looking for engineers. There is a lot of work. Very well paid. Border fencing, orphanage building, they are planning some recreation centers, gyms for young people, even this place needs doing up…I can get you some good contracts. We owe you that much at least.”
Musa, not looking up, tested the spike of a seashell with the tip of his index finger.
“Am I under arrest, or do I have your permission to leave?”
Since he wasn’t looking up, he did not see the translucent film of anger that dropped across Amrik Singh’s eyes, as quietly and quickly as a cat jumping off a low wall.
“You can go.”
Amrik Singh remained seated as Musa stood up and left the room. He rang a bell and told the man who answered it to escort Musa out.
—
Downstairs in the cinema lobby there was a torture-break. Tea was being served to the soldiers, poured out from big steaming kettles. There were cold samosas in iron buckets, two per head. Musa crossed the lobby, this time holding the gaze of one of the bound, beaten, bleeding boys whom he knew well. He knew the boy’s mother had been going from camp to camp, police station to police station, desperately looking for her son. That could have lasted a whole lifetime. At least some horrible good has come of this night, Musa thought.
He had almost walked out of the door when Amrik Singh appeared at the head of the stairs, beaming, exuding bonhomie, an entirely different person from the one Musa had left in the projection room. His voice boomed across the lobby.
“Arre huzoor! Ek cheez main bilkul bhool gaya tha!”
There’s something I completely forgot!
Everybody—torturers and torturees alike—turned their gaze on him. Wholly aware that he had the attention of his audience, Amrik Singh trotted athletically down the steps, like a joyful host saying goodbye to a guest whose visit he has greatly enjoyed. He hugged Musa affectionately and pressed on him a package he was carrying.
“This is for your father. Tell him I ordered it especially for him.”
It was a bottle of Red Stag whiskey.
The lobby fell silent. Everybody, the audience as well as the protagonists of the play that was unfolding, understood the script. If Musa spurned the gift, it would be a public declaration of war with Amrik Singh—which made him, Musa, as good as dead. If he accepted it, Amrik Singh would have outsourced the death sentence to the militants. Because he knew that the news would get out, and that every militant group, whatever else they disagreed about, agreed that death was the punishment for collaborators and friends of the Occupation. And whiskey-drinking—even by non-collaborators—was a declared un-Islamic activity.
Musa walked over to the snack bar and put the bottle of whiskey down on it.
“My father does not drink.”
“Arre, what is there to hide? There’s no shame in it. Of course your father drinks! You know that very well. I bought this bottle especially for him. Never mind, I’ll give it to him myself.”
Amrik Singh, still smiling, ordered his men to follow Musa and see that he got home safe. He was pleased with the way things had turned out.
DAWN WAS BREAKING. A hint of rose in a pigeon-gray sky. Musa walked home through the dead streets. The Gypsy followed him at a safe distance, the driver instructing checkpost after checkpost on his walkie-talkie to let Musa through.
He entered his home with snow on his shoulders. The cold of that was nothing compared to the cold that was gathering inside him. When they saw his face his parents and sisters knew better than to approach him or ask what had happened. He went straight back to his desk and resumed the letter he had been writing before the soldiers came for him. He wrote in Urdu. He wrote quickly, as though it was his last task, as though he was racing against the cold and had to finish it before the warmth seeped out of his body, perhaps forever.
It was a letter to Miss Jebeen.
Babajaana
Do you think I’m going to miss you? You are wrong. I will never miss you, because you will always be with me.
You wanted me to tell you real stories, but I don’t know what is real any more. What used to be real sounds like a silly fairy story now—the kind I used to tell you, the kind you wouldn’t tolerate. What I know for sure is only this: in our Kashmir the dead will live forever; and the living are only dead people, pretending.
Next week we were going to try and make you your own ID card. As you know, jaana, our cards are more important than we ourselves are now. That card is the most valuable thing anyone can have. It is more valuable than the most beautifully woven carpet, or the softest, warmest shawl, or the biggest garden, or all the cherries and all the walnuts from all the orchards in our Valley. Can you imagine that? My ID card number is M 108672J. You told me it was a lucky number because it has an M for Miss and a J for Jebeen. If it is, then it will bring me to you and your Ammijaan quickly. So get ready to do your homework in heaven. What sense would it make to you if I told you that there were a hundred thousand people at your funeral? You who could only count to fifty-nine? Count did I say? I meant shout—you who could only shout to fifty-nine. I hope that wherever you are you are not shouting. You must learn to talk softly, like a lady, at least sometimes. How shall I explain one hundred thousand to you? Such a huge number. Shall we try and think about it seasonally? In spring think of how many leaves there are on the trees, and how many pebbles you can see in the streams once the ice has melted. Think of how many red poppies blossom in the meadows. That should give you a rough idea of what a hundred thousand means in spring. In autumn it is as many Chinar leaves as crackled under our feet in the university campus the day I took you for a walk (and you were angry with the cat who wouldn’t trust you and refused the piece of bread you offered him. We’re all becoming a bit like that cat, jaana. We can’t trust anyone. The bread they offer us is dangerous because it turns us into slaves and fawning servants. You’d probably be angry with us all). Anyway. We were talking about a number. One hundred thousand. In winter we’ll have to think of the snowflakes falling from the sky. Remember how we used to count them? How you used to try and catch them? That many people is a hundred thousand. At your funeral the crowd covered the ground like snow. Can you picture it now? Good. And that’s only the people. I’m not going to tell you about the sloth bear that came down the mountain, the hangul that watched from the woods, the snow leopard that left its tracks in the snow and the kites that circled in the sky, supervising everything. On the whole, it was quite a spectacl
e. You’d have been happy, you love crowds, I know. You were always going to be a city girl. That much was clear from the beginning. Now it’s your turn. Tell me about—
Mid-sentence he lost the race against the cold. He stopped writing, folded the letter and put it in his pocket. He never completed it, but he always carried it with him.
He knew he didn’t have much time. He would have to pre-empt Amrik Singh’s next move, and quickly. Life as he once knew it was over. He knew that Kashmir had swallowed him and he was now part of its entrails.
He spent the day settling what affairs he could—paying the cigarette bills he had accumulated, destroying papers, taking the few things he loved or needed. The next morning when the Yeswi household woke up to its grief, Musa was gone. He had left a note for one of his sisters about the beaten boy he had seen in the Shiraz with his mother’s name and address.
Thus began his life underground. A life that lasted precisely nine months—like a pregnancy. Except that in a manner of speaking at least, its consequence was the opposite of a pregnancy. It ended in a kind of death, instead of a kind of life.
—
During his days as a fugitive, Musa moved from place to place, never the same place on consecutive nights. There were always people around him—in forest hideouts, in businessmen’s plush homes, in shops, in dungeons, in storerooms—wherever the tehreek was welcomed with love and solidarity. He learned everything about weapons, where to buy them, how to move them, where to hide them, how to use them. He developed real calluses in the places where his father had imagined phantom ones—on his knees and elbows, on his trigger finger. He carried a gun, but never used it. With his fellow travelers, who were all much younger than him, he shared the love that hot-blooded men who would gladly give their lives for each other share. Their lives were short. Many of them were killed, jailed or tortured until they lost their minds. Others took their place. Musa survived purge after purge. His ties to his old life were gradually (and deliberately) erased. Nobody knew who he really was. Nobody asked. His family did not know that. He did not belong to any one particular organization. In the heart of a filthy war, up against a bestiality that is hard to imagine, he did what he could to persuade his comrades to hold on to a semblance of humanity, to not turn into the very thing they abhorred and fought against. He did not always succeed. Nor did he always fail. He refined the art of merging into the background, of disappearing in a crowd, of mumbling and dissembling, of burying the secrets he knew so deep that he forgot he knew them. He learned the art of ennui, of enduring as well as inflicting boredom. He hardly ever spoke. At night, fed up with the regime of silence, his organs murmured to each other in the language of night crickets. His spleen contacted his kidney. His pancreas whispered across the silent void to his lungs:
Hello
Can you hear me?
Are you still there?
—
He grew colder, and quieter. The price on his head went up very quickly—from one lakh to three lakhs. When nine months had gone by, Tilo came to Kashmir.
TILO WAS WHERE SHE WAS most evenings, at a tea stall in one of the narrow lanes around the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, on her way back home from work, when a young man approached her, confirmed that her name was S. Tilottama, and handed her a note. It said: Ghat Number 33, HB Shaheen, Dal Lake. Please come 20th. There was no signature, only a tiny pencil sketch of a horse’s head in one corner. When she looked up, the messenger had vanished.
She took two weeks off from her job in an architecture firm in Nehru Place, caught a train to Jammu, and an early-morning bus from Jammu to Srinagar. Musa and she had not been in touch for a while. She went, because that was how it was between them.
She had never been to Kashmir.
It was late afternoon when the bus emerged from the long tunnel that bored through the mountains, the only link between India and Kashmir.
Autumn in the Valley was the season of immodest abundance. The sun slanted down on the lavender haze of zaffran crocuses in bloom. Orchards were heavy with fruit, the Chinar trees were on fire. Tilo’s co-passengers, most of them Kashmiri, could disaggregate the breeze and tell not merely the scent of apples from the scent of pears and ripe paddy that wafted through the bus windows, but whose apples, whose pears and whose ripe paddy they were driving past. There was another scent they all knew well. The smell of dread. It soured the air and turned their bodies to stone.
As the noisy, rattling bus with its still, silent passengers drove deeper into the Valley the tension grew more tangible. Every fifty meters, on either side of the road, there was a heavily armed soldier, alert and dangerously tense. There were soldiers in the fields, deep inside orchards, on bridges and culverts, in shops and marketplaces, on rooftops, each covering the other, in a grid that stretched all the way up into the mountains. In every part of the legendary Valley of Kashmir, whatever people might be doing—walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home—they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier. And because they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier, whatever they might be doing—walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home—they were a legitimate target.
At every checkpoint the road was blocked with movable horizontal barriers mounted with iron spikes that could shred a tire to ribbons. At each checkpost the bus had to stop, all the passengers had to disembark and line up with their bags to be searched. Soldiers riffled through the luggage on the bus roof. The passengers kept their eyes lowered. At the sixth or perhaps the seventh checkpost, an armored Gypsy with slits for windows was parked on the side of the road. After conferring with a hidden person in the Gypsy, a gleaming, strutting young officer pulled three young men out of the passenger line-up—You, You and You. They were pushed into an army truck. They went without demur. The passengers kept their eyes lowered.
By the time the bus arrived in Srinagar, the light was dying.
In those days the little city of Srinagar died with the light. The shops closed, the streets emptied.
At the bus stop a man sidled up to Tilo and asked her her name. From then on, she was passed from hand to hand. An autorickshaw took her from the bus stand to the Boulevard. She crossed the lake in a shikara on which there was no sitting option, only a lounging one. So she lounged on the bright, floral cushions, a honeymooner without a husband. It was to make up for that, she thought, that the bright flanges of the boatman’s oars which pushed through the weeds were heart-shaped. The lake was deadly quiet. The rhythmic sound of oars in the water might well have been the uneasy heartbeat of the Valley.
Plif
Plif
Plif
—
The houseboats anchored next to each other cheek by jowl on the opposite shore—HB Shaheen, HB Jannat, HB Queen Victoria, HB Derbyshire, HB Snow View, HB Desert Breeze, HB Zam-Zam, HB Gulshan, HB New Gulshan, HB Gulshan Palace, HB Mandalay, HB Clifton, HB New Clifton—were dark and empty.
HB, the boatman told Tilo when she asked, stood for House Boat.
HB Shaheen was the smallest and shabbiest of them all. As the shikara drew up, a little man, lost inside his worn brown pheran that almost touched his ankles, came out to greet Tilo. Later she learned his name was Gulrez. He greeted her as though he knew her well, as though she had lived there all her life and had just returned from buying provisions in the market. His large head and oddly thin neck rested on broad, sturdy shoulders. As he led Tilo through the small dining room and down a narrow carpeted corridor to the bedroom, she heard kittens mewling. He threw a sparkling smile over his shoulder, like a proud father, his emerald, wizard eyes shining.
The cramped room was only slightly larger than the double bed covered with an embroidered counterpane. On the bedside table there was a flowered plastic tray with a filigreed bell-metal water jug, two colored glasses and a small CD player. The threadbare carpet on the floor was patterned, the cupboard doors were crudely carved, the wooden cei
ling was honeycombed, the waste-paper bin was intricately patterned papier mâché. Tilo looked for a space that was not patterned, embroidered, carved or filigreed, to rest her eyes on. When she didn’t find one, a tide of anxiety welled up in her. She opened the wooden windows but they looked directly on to the closed wooden windows of the next houseboat a few feet away. Empty cigarette packets and cigarette stubs floated in the few feet of water that separated them. She put her bag down and went out to the porch, lit a cigarette and watched the glassy surface of the lake turn silver as the first stars appeared in the sky. The snow on the mountains glowed for a while, like phosphorus, even after darkness had fallen.
She waited on the boat the whole of the next day, watching Gulrez dust the undusty furniture and talk to purple brinjals and big-leaved haakh in his vegetable garden on the bank just behind the boat. After clearing away a simple lunch, he showed her his collection of things that he kept in a big yellow airport duty-free shopping bag that said See! Buy! Fly! He laid them out on the dining table one by one. It was his version of a Visitors’ Book: an empty bottle of Polo aftershave lotion, a range of old airline boarding passes, a pair of small binoculars, a pair of sunglasses from which one lens had fallen out, a well-thumbed Lonely Planet guidebook, a Qantas toilet bag, a small torch, a bottle of herbal mosquito repellent, a bottle of suntan lotion, a silver-foil card of expired diarrhea pills, and a pair of blue Marks & Spencer ladies’ knickers stuffed into an old cigarette tin. He giggled and made his eyes sly as he rolled the knickers into a soft cigar and put them back in the tin. Tilo searched her sling bag and added a small strawberry-shaped eraser and a vial that used to contain clutch-pencil leads to the collection. Gulrez unscrewed the little cap of the vial and screwed it back on, thrilled. After contemplating the matter for a while, he put the eraser in the plastic bag and pocketed the vial. He went out of the room and came back with a postcard-sized print of a photograph of himself holding the kittens in the palms of his hands that the last visitor on the boat had given him. He gave it to Tilo formally, holding it out with both hands as though it were a certificate of merit being awarded to her. Tilo accepted it with a bow. Their barter was complete.