you came upon this highway.
“How did he know?”
“Las Kone knows everything.”
“Did she wear her hair like mine?”
“She was a civilized person, Babajaana. Not a mout.”
Tilo kissed Musa, and while she held him to her and would not let him go she said, “Get away from me, you filthy mountain man.”
“Overwashed river woman.”
“How long since you bathed?”
“Nine months.”
“No, seriously.”
“A week maybe? I don’t know.”
“Filthy bastard.”
—
Musa’s shower lasted an inordinately long time. She could hear him humming along with Las Kone. He came out bare-bodied, with a towel around his hips, smelling of her soap and shampoo. It made her chortle.
“You’re smelling like a summer rose.”
“I’m feeling really guilty,” Musa said, smiling.
“Right. You really look it.”
“After weeks of generous hospitality to lices and leeches I’ve turned them out of the house.”
“Lices” made her love him a little more.
—
They had always fitted together like pieces of an unsolved (and perhaps unsolvable) puzzle—the smoke of her into the solidness of him, the solitariness of her into the gathering of him, the strangeness of her into the straightforwardness of him, the insouciance of her into the restraint of him. The quietness of her into the quietness of him.
And then of course there were the other parts—the ones that wouldn’t fit.
What happened that night on the HB Shaheen was less lovemaking than lament. Their wounds were too old and too new, too different, and perhaps too deep, for healing. But for a fleeting moment, they were able to pool them like accumulated gambling debts and share the pain equally, without naming the injuries or asking which was whose. For a fleeting moment they were able to repudiate the world they lived in and call forth another one, just as real. A world in which maet gave the orders and soldiers needed eardrops so they could hear them clearly and carry them out correctly.
Tilo knew there was a gun underneath the bed. She made no comment about it. Not even afterwards, when Musa’s calluses had been counted. And kissed. She lay stretched out on top of him, as though he were a mattress, her chin resting on her intertwined fingers, her distinctly un-Kashmiri bottom vulnerable to the Srinagar night. In a way Musa’s journey to where he was now did not entirely surprise her. She clearly remembered a day years ago, in 1984 (who could forget 1984), when the newspapers reported that a Kashmiri called Maqbool Butt, jailed for murder and treason, had been hanged in Tihar Jail in Delhi, his remains interred in the prison yard, for fear his grave would become a monument, a rallying point in Kashmir, where trouble had already begun to simmer. The news had not mattered to even one other person in their college, neither student nor professor. But that night Musa had said to her, quietly, matter-of-factly, “Some day you’ll understand why, for me, history began today.” Though she had not fully comprehended the import of his words at the time, the intensity with which they had been uttered had remained with her.
“How’s the Queen Mother in Kerala keeping?” Musa inquired into the bird’s nest that passed off as his lover’s hair.
“Don’t know. Haven’t visited.”
“You should.”
“I know.”
“She’s your mother. She’s you. You are her.”
“That’s only the Kashmiri view. It’s different in India.”
“Seriously. It’s not a joke. This is not a good thing on your part, Babajaana. You should go.”
“I know.”
Musa ran his fingers down the ridges of muscle on either side of her spine. What began as a caress turned into a physical examination. For a moment he became his suspicious father. He checked out her shoulders, her lean, muscled arms.
“Where’s all this from?”
“Practice.”
There was a second of silence. She decided against telling him about the men who stalked her, who knocked on her door at odd hours of the day and night, including Mr. S. P. P. Rajendran, a retired police officer who held an administrative post in the architectural firm she worked for. He had been hired more for his contacts in the government than for his skills as an administrator. He was openly lecherous towards her in the office, making lewd suggestions, often leaving gifts on her desk, which she ignored. But late at night, bolstered perhaps by alcohol, he would drive to Nizamuddin and hammer on her door, shouting to be let in. His brazenness came from knowing that if matters came to a head, in the public eye, as well as in a court of law, his word would prevail against hers. He had a record of exemplary public service, a medal for bravery, and she was a lone woman who was immodestly attired and smoked cigarettes, and there was nothing to suggest that she came from a “decent” family who would rise to her defense. Tilo was aware of this and had taken precautionary measures. If Mr. Rajendran pushed his luck she could have him pinned to the floor before he knew what had happened.
She said nothing of all this because it seemed sordid and trivial compared to what Musa was living through. She rolled off him.
“Tell me about Sultan…the bewakoof person that Gulrez was so upset with. Who’s he?”
Musa smiled.
“Sultan? Sultan wasn’t a person. And he wasn’t bewakoof. He was a very clever fellow. He was a rooster, an orphan rooster that Gul had raised since he was a little chick. Sultan was devoted to him, he would follow him around wherever he went, they would have long conversations with each other that no one else understood, they were a team…inseparable. Sultan was famous in the region. People from nearby villages would come to see him. He had beautiful plumage, purple, orange, red, he would strut around the place like a real sultan. I knew him well…we all knew him. He was so…lofty, he always acted as though you owed him something…you know? One day an army captain came to the village with some soldiers…Captain Jaanbaaz he called himself, I don’t know what his real name was…they always give themselves these filmy names these guys…they weren’t there for a cordon-and-search or anything…just to speak to the villagers, threaten them a little, mistreat them a bit…the usual stuff. The men of the village were all made to assemble in the chowk. The well-known firm of Gul-kak and Sultan were there too, Sultan listening attentively as though he were a human being, a village elder. The captain had a dog with him. A huge German shepherd, on a leash. After he finished delivering his threats and his lecture, he let the dog off the leash, saying, ‘Jimmy! Fetch!’ Jimmy pounced on Sultan, killed him, and the soldiers took him for their dinner. Gul-kak was devastated. He cried for days, like people cry for their relatives who have been killed. For him Sultan was a relative…nothing less. And he was upset with Sultan for letting him down, for not fighting back, or escaping—almost as though he was a militant who should have known these tactics. So Gul would curse Sultan and wail, ‘If you didn’t know how to live with the military, why did you come into this world?’ ”
“So why were you reminding him about it? That was mean…”
“Gul is my little brother, yaar. We wear each other’s clothes, we trust each other with our lives. I can do anything with him.”
“This is not a good thing on your part, Musakuttan. In India we don’t do these things…”
“We even share the same name…”
“Meaning?”
“That’s what I’m known as. Commander Gulrez. No one knows me as Musa Yeswi.”
“It’s all a fucking mindfuck.”
“Shhh…in Kashmir we don’t use such language.”
“In India we do.”
“We should sleep, Babajaana.”
“We should.”
“But before that we should get dressed.”
“Why?”
“Protocol. This is Kashmir.”
—
After that casual intervention, sleep was no longer a reali
stic option. Tilo, fully dressed, a little apprehensive about what the “protocol” implied, but fortified by love and sated by lovemaking, propped herself up on an elbow.
“Talk to me…”
“And what do we call what we’ve been doing all this time?”
“We call it ‘pre-talk.’ ”
She rubbed her cheek against his stubble and then lay back, her head on the pillow beside Musa’s.
“What shall I tell you?”
“Every single thing. No omissions.”
She lit two cigarettes.
“Tell me the other story…the one that’s horrible and beautiful…the love story. Tell me the real story.”
Tilo did not understand why what she said made Musa hold her tighter and turned his eyes bright with what might have been tears. She didn’t know what he meant when he murmured “Akh daleela wann…”
And then, holding her as though his life depended on it, Musa told her about Jebeen, about how she insisted on being called Miss Jebeen, about her specific requirements from bedtime stories and all her other naughtinesses. He told her about Arifa and how he first met her—in a stationery shop in Srinagar:
“I’d had a huge fight with Godzie that day. Over my new boots. They were lovely boots—Gul-kak wears them now. Anyway…I was going out to buy some stationery, and I was wearing them. Godzie told me to take them off and wear normal shoes, because young men wearing good boots were often arrested as militants—those days that was evidence enough. Anyway, I refused to listen to him, so finally he said, ‘Do what you want, but mark my words, those boots will bring trouble.’ He was right…they did bring trouble—big trouble, but not the kind he was expecting. The stationery shop I used to go to, JK Stationery, was in Lal Chowk, the center of the city. I was inside when a grenade exploded on the street just outside. A militant had thrown it at a soldier. My eardrums nearly burst. Everything inside the shop shattered, there was glass everywhere, chaos in the market, everyone screaming. The soldiers went crazy—obviously. They smashed up all the shops, came in and beat everyone in sight. I was on the floor. They kicked me, beat me with rifle butts. I remember just lying there, trying to protect my skull, watching my blood spreading on the floor. I was hurt, not too badly, but I was too scared to move. A dog was staring at me. He seemed quite sympathetic. When I got over the initial shock, I felt a weight on my feet. I remembered my new boots and wondered if they were OK. As soon as I thought it was safe I lifted my head slowly, as carefully as I could, to take a look. And I saw this beautiful face resting on them. It was like waking up in hell and finding an angel on my shoe. It was Arifa. She too was frozen, too scared to move. But she was absolutely calm. She didn’t smile, didn’t move her head. She just looked at me and said, ‘Asal boot’—‘Nice boots’—I couldn’t believe the coolness of that. No wailing, screaming, sobbing, crying—just absolutely cool. We both laughed. She had just done a degree in veterinary medicine. My mother was shocked when I said I wanted to get married. She thought I never would. She had given up on me.”
It was possible for Tilo and Musa to have this strange conversation about a third loved one, because they were concurrently sweethearts and ex-sweethearts, lovers and ex-lovers, siblings and ex-siblings, classmates and ex-classmates. Because they trusted each other so peculiarly that they knew, even if they were hurt by it, that whoever it was that the other person loved had to be worth loving. In matters of the heart, they had a virtual forest of safety nets.
Musa showed Tilo a photograph of Miss Jebeen and Arifa that he carried in his wallet. Arifa wore a pearl-gray pheran with silver embroidery and a white hijab. Miss Jebeen was holding her mother’s hand. She was dressed in a denim jumpsuit with an embroidered heart on its pinafore. A white hijab was pinned around her smiling, apple-cheeked face. Tilo looked at the photograph for a long time before she gave it back. She saw Musa suddenly look drawn and haggard. But he recovered his poise in a while. He told her about how Arifa and Miss Jebeen had died. About Amrik Singh and the murder of Jalib Qadri, and the string of murders that followed. About his ominous apology at the Shiraz.
“I’ll never take what happened to my family personally. But I’ll never not take it personally. Because that is important too.”
They talked into the night. Hours later, Tilo circled back to the photograph.
“Did she like wearing a headscarf?”
“Arifa?”
“No, your daughter.”
Musa shrugged. “It’s the custom. Our custom.”
“I didn’t know you were such a customs man. So if I had agreed to marry you, you’d have wanted me to wear one?”
“No, Babajaana. If you had agreed to marry me, I’d have ended up wearing a hijab and you would have been running around the underground with a gun.”
Tilo laughed out loud.
“And who would have been in my army?”
“I don’t know. No humans for sure.”
“A moth squadron and a mongoose brigade…”
Tilo told Musa about her boring job and her exciting life in her storeroom near the Nizamuddin dargah. About the rooster she had drawn on her wall—“So weird. Maybe Sultan visited me telepathically—is that a word?” (It was the pre-mobile-phone era, so she didn’t have a photograph to show him.) She described her neighbor, the fake sex-hakim with waxed mustaches who had endless queues of patients outside his door, and her friends, the tramps and mendicants she drank tea with on the street every morning, who all believed she worked for a drug lord.
“I laugh, but I don’t deny it. I leave it ambiguous.”
“Why’s that? That’s dangerous.”
“No. Opposite. It’s free security for me. They think I have gangster protection. No one bothers me. Let’s read a poem before we sleep.” It was an old habit, from their college days. One of them would open the book at a random page. The other would read the poem. It often turned out to have uncanny significance for them and the particular moment they were living through. Poetry roulette. She scrambled out of bed and returned with a slim, worn volume of Osip Mandelstam. Musa opened the book. Tilo read:
I was washing at night in the courtyard,
Harsh stars shone in the sky.
Starlight, like salt on an ax-head—
The rain-butt was brim-full and frozen.
“What’s a rain-butt? Don’t know…must check.”
The gates are locked,
And the earth in all conscience is bleak.
There’s scarcely anything more basic and pure
Than truth’s clean canvas.
A star melts, like salt, in the barrel
And the freezing water is blacker,
Death cleaner, misfortune saltier,
And the earth more truthful, more awful.
“Another Kashmiri poet.”
“Russian Kashmiri,” Tilo said. “He died in a prison camp, during Stalin’s Gulag. His ode to Stalin wasn’t considered sincere enough.”
She regretted reading the poem.
—
They slept fitfully. Before dawn, still half asleep, Tilo heard Musa splashing in the bathroom again, washing, brushing his teeth (with her toothbrush of course). He came out with his hair slicked down and put on his cap and pheran. She watched him say his prayers. She had never seen him do that before. She sat up in bed. It did not distract him. When he was done he came to her and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Does it worry you?”
“Should it?”
“It’s a big change…”
“Yes. No. Just makes me…think.”
“We can’t win this with just our bodies. We have to recruit our souls too.”
She lit two more cigarettes.
“You know what the hardest thing for us is? The hardest thing to fight? Pity. It’s so easy for us to pity ourselves…such terrible things have happened to our people…in every single household something terrible has happened…but self-pity is so…so debilitating. So humiliating. More than Azadi, now it’s a fight for d
ignity. And the only way we can hold on to our dignity is to fight back. Even if we lose. Even if we die. But for that we as a people—as an ordinary people—have to become a fighting force…an army. To do that we have to simplify ourselves, standardize ourselves, reduce ourselves…everyone has to think the same way, want the same thing…we have to do away with our complexities, our differences, our absurdities, our nuances…we have to make ourselves as single-minded…as monolithic…as stupid…as the army we face. But they’re professionals, and we are just people. This is the worst part of the Occupation…what it makes us do to ourselves. This reduction, this standardization, this stupidification…Is that a word?”
“It just became one.”
“This stupidification…this idiotification…if and when we achieve it…will be our salvation. It will make us impossible to defeat. First it will be our salvation and then…after we win…it will be our nemesis. First Azadi. Then annihilation. That’s the pattern.”
Tilo said nothing.
“Are you listening?”
“Of course.”
“I’m being so profound and you’re not saying anything.”
She looked up at him and pressed her thumb into the tiny inverted “v” between his chipped front teeth. He held her hand and kissed her silver ring.
“It makes me happy that you still wear it.”
“It’s stuck. I can’t take it off even if I want to.”
Musa smiled. They smoked in silence and when they were done she took the ashtray to the window, dropped the stubs into the water to join the other floating stubs and looked up at the sky before she returned to bed.
“That was a filthy thing I just did. Sorry.”
Musa kissed her forehead and stood up.
“You’re leaving?”
“Yes. A boat’s coming for me. With a cargo of spinach and melons and carrots and lotus stems. I’ll be a Haenz…selling my produce in the floating market. I’ll undercut the competition, bargain ruthlessly with housewives. And through the chaos I’ll make my exit.”
“When will I see you?”
“Someone will come for you—a woman called Khadija. Trust her. Go with her. You’ll be traveling. I want you to see everything, know everything. You’ll be safe.”