I was ready for school after three-month long winter break. Though the winter break had ended, the chill of the notorious Kashmiri winter was still there. Roads were slippery and filled with dirty remnants of snow. The trees were still bare of leaves. The water in the pipelines that had frozen that night took all morning to melt and flowed through taps only by the noon when Totheh, my grandfather, performed ablutions for his zuhr prayers. He prayed passionately for the spring but was little hesitant in the winter because of the chilled water that was just as cold as its source, the Himalayan ice. As much as Totheh and others despised winter, I always thought that it was the best season in Kashmir. There were two specific reasons for that one, I could stay at home and play with the snow all day and second, I and Ammi would go to stay with Abbu at his place for a month.
But that day it was different. I was excited to go to school. This had not much to do with the school but with my new schoolbag. Usually it would have taken hours of coaxing by Ammi to get me pack my bag but that evening I was, unlike other time, cooperative and without any opposition I found myself neatly stacking my books into my schoolbag in the living room that abutted the kitchen, under the light of a kerosene lantern. “Long power-cuts are just another thing that the brutal winters come with”, Totheh said listlessly, while everyone else nodded in affirmation. While Totheh was complaining about the weather, I sat there stroking my new bag with admiration. Its outline seemed like a car and was of perfect blue shade. The front had glossy headlights and the rear end had a plastic wind-screen and a set of rexine wipers.
This particular schoolbag had then been on my wish-list for a couple of months and I had been pestering Ammi to get me one since I was going to join a new grade in school. Ammi, like she always did, passed on my wish to Abbu who lived miles away in Srinagar. In my mind’s eye, I can still recall that trip to the city centre Lalchowk when Abbu, flanked by Ammi and me, pushed our way through hordes of shoppers who, like us, were taking full advantage of the sunny February day. Just like us they were busy hoarding vegetables, pulses, rice for their kitchens and coal for their kangrih as the Jammu-Srinagar Highway had just opened after a long stint of bad weather and the Valley was reconnected with the Indian mainland. While we walked around the busy market, Abbu stopped by the colossal building with a glass façade. The hoarding over the swinging door read “Luxury Mart” in bold red letters. It was a high profile supermarket; most of the city’s affluent did their grocery shopping from here. You could see their armed security guards loitering outside while they ambled around the aisles that were lined with stacks of Brazilian coffee, dates from the UAE and chocolate from the US.
When I stepped into the building, I felt as if we had transcended into a different world. The aura was warm and a light fragrance of chocolate and coffee and freshly made sandwiches lingered in the air. There were separate sections for vegetables and meat. Pulses from various parts of the country were stored in huge jars. There was a row displaying varieties of rice from all over the country. There was a whole shelf exclusively meant for dog-food. And the store was armed with a troop of young men who wore green sweaters and matching their green caps. They had been trained to say “Yes Ma’am” and “OK Sir” in the most amiable tone with a plastic smile on their faces. While we were walking past the station that displayed the most appetizing cakes I had ever seen, Abbu could feel that my pace had turned slow and my head was transfixed in that direction. And I could feel that his grip of my hand had tightened. I immediately looked away. My naïve seven year old self had not realised that my father had sensed my desire even before it had been expressed. Abbu gently steered me towards the counter while Ammi protested. “Which one, Daniyal?” he asked, ignoring Ammi’s disapproval. I timidly pointed at the smallest cupcake I could see, glancing at Ammi through the corners of my eyes. I could see that her anger had melted into a smile. The young guy at the station warmed the cupcake and handed it to me on a paper plate with a plastic spoon, a stack of tissue paper and big affable “Thank you, Sir”. I returned his ‘thanks’ with a shy smile.
Finally we arrived at the aisle that was stacked with bags of all shapes and sizes. As soon as I spotted the one I had been looking for in a corner, I ran and grabbed it with both my hands, like it was the last one left in the world, dropping all the other bags from their resting place on the shelf like a rickety stack of dominoes. I could hear Abbu chuckle while Ammi’s face turned florid at the ruckus I had created. In the next few seconds we were surrounded by a group of green capped employees who charged to the scene like firefighters rush to a blazing building. And within minutes the mess was cleared up and each bag was reallocated to its fixed destination. We hurried towards the queue to pay our bill. Abbu had to pay seven hundred rupees for my bag and another eighty bucks for the cupcake. It was more than twice of what he would have paid had I picked a simpler schoolbag. But Abbu had always been my jinni, my wish-granter. Usually I would not throw tantrums or want things that I knew Abbu could not afford. I was conditioned to wish for simple things, a pack of cotton candy, an extra hour of sleep after fajr prayers, or a trip to the meadows.
But this bag was something Abbu had promised me if I would memorize his favourite chapter from the Quran, Surah Ar Rahman, ‘The Merciful’ and an Urdu couplet from his favourite poet, Faiz which, to Ammi’s surprise I did within two weeks of my winter vacation. The couplet, however, was more challenging. For, Abbu would not be satisfied with the memorization alone, he wanted to check if I had understood what Faiz meant when he said:
“Dil na umeed toh nai, na’kaam hi toh hai
Lambi hai gam ki sham, par sham hi toh hai”
‘My heart has not lost hope, it only didn’t succeed
This night of agony lengthens, but it is just a night’
That night while I was waiting with the rest of the family for the restoration of electricity and ruminating over Faiz’s couplet, a deafening bang shook me out of my reverie. Totheh sighed loudly. A gunfight had erupted in the neighbourhood. There was a staccato round of fire from the machine guns. “It must be around Bashir’s house”, said Totheh, judging from the proximity of the sounds. The night would indeed be long.
Totheh and my two uncles decided to climb up to the attic to assess the situation. I followed, ignoring Ammi’s scathing gaze. From the attic, I counted nine army trucks that had surrounded the house from where the rebels were firing. Totheh had been right, it was indeed Bashir’s house. The cold air was infused with smoke and the stench of gunpowder. Through the beams emanating from the enormous headlights of the military trucks, we could see the rubble that rose after every blast. Also, crouching near one of the vehicles was Bashir, the fifty year old owner of the house, who was a middle school teacher by the day and a profound poet by the night. His house, that was build just before five months, had stacks of books he had collected all his life and his own poetry that he had compiled in handwritten notes.
As the thread of twilight appeared in the sky, I woke up to the sound emanating from the microphones of the mosque. I did not realize when I had dozed off into a slumber. Totheh just finished his prayers while I began to prepare for mine. I was startled when Noor-ud-din, the caretaker of the mosque, cleared his throat and blew audibly over the loudspeaker of the mosque. In his jaded voice he asked all the men of the village to assemble in the mosque compound while the women and kids were asked to stay behind in their homes. I peeped from my vantage point in the attic, Bashir’s house was gone; it had been blown up by the army. I wondered how I had slept through the clamour. Probably, like most of the kids in Kashmir, I was used to the sound of bullets and grenades. Totheh and my uncles were joined by other men from the village as they marched towards the mosque in a single line. While the men were being questioned, the army men entered the houses and conducted ‘search operations’. Within twenty minutes, three soldiers barged into our house. Ammi put on her cloak and covered her face, my aunties followed her. It was an attempt to shield themselves from the harassment that the Kashmiri females would go through in every such situation. The soldiers moved from room to room, pried the cupboards open, walked over our carpets with their muddy shoes, searching hard for any evidence that could incriminate us or help them to hound the militants or just teach us a lesson. I sat in the drawing room with my aunts and Ammi, my fingers intertwined with hers. I could feel her palms getting sweaty. She tried hard to curl her trembling lips into a faint smile. The soldiers left and the house was filled with an ominous silence.
Totheh and my uncles returned after three hours, followed by Bashir, his wailing wife and his three sons. The eldest was trying to console his mother, the other two had maintained a stoic look. Bashir, on the other hand, looked empty as if the gravity of the tragedy had not sunk into him, yet. His hands and face were covered with black soot. Aziza, Bashir’s wife, had pulled her hair out of her headscarf. Two dark lines of smudged kohl ran under her eyes and stopped abruptly at her cheeks making her look like a distressed panda. Her voice had broken from wailing all night and she was lamenting, quasi-musically about the grief that had befallen them. Her husband had put all his earnings into the house and then everything was lost. “All we’re left with is these tatters that cover our bodies. Everything else has been razed to the ground”, she cried. Ammi held her in her arms, fixed her hair, wiped her face and then got her a glass of water. After Aziza calmed down, Bashir and his family stood up to leave but Totheh insisted them to stay for breakfast and they eventually agreed. After a few rounds of nun chai Bashir and his family left. They had to stay at Aziza’s brother’s place till their own house would be reconstructed. Totheh stood up and held his grimy hand in his hand and planted a kiss on Bashir’s forehead.
The night before, Bashir’s family had just finished dinner when there had been a knock on their door. Aziza had turned pale, it was a well-known fact that a knock at that hour almost certainly meant death in that part of the world. She accompanied Afzal, her eldest son, to the compound to receive the visitor, despite his protests. Before he opened the gate, Afzal had repeatedly asked the unusual guest to identify himself. His queries were responded by increasingly louder thumps on the metallic gate. In order not to raise the suspicion of the patrolling officers who were usually on their rounds, he opened the gate. There were two figures on the other side, draped under heavy blankets. The thick-soled duck-back shoes bespoke the identity of the unwelcome guests. Under the faint light of his kerosene lantern, he saw a familiar face of Manzoor, his neighbour-turned-militant. Manzoor, a robust but quiet boy, had worked as a bank clerk before he joined insurgency leaving his wife and son behind. That night he wanted shelter, so he had knocked at Bashir’s door. “I’m sorry for all the trouble” Manzoor said once he got inside. “I know the house is new. We’ll leave before dawn if things go well. God willing.”
Afzal knew what he meant when he said that. They could only pray that there would not be any tip off that night but they had not been lucky that night. And despite Aziza’s fervent prayers to all the Saints of Kashmir, the Army had laid siege around the house and started firing. The family members were asked to assemble in the courtyard. They did as they were told. Then a round of incessant firing followed, despite Aziza’s teary appeals. Manzoor and his companion had retaliated only an hour later when they realised that there was no escape. After three hours of unremitting fighting, the firing from the militants’ side had stopped. The army men had then lobbed a grenade at the house, in a process they called ‘sanitization’. The soldiers left behind the debris of Bashir’s house and the two dead bodies of Manzoor and his companion. After the usual proceedings of a search operation, the soldiers had left.
As usual, people from the village as well as from the surrounding villages flooded in at the site. Men and women, young and old carried out a massive funeral procession of their beloved heroes. Soon the celebrations would turn into mourning, and a new cycle of death-funeral-death would ensue in the City of Funerals. After that, as a norm, people would forget, or at least pretend to forget, till a new death awakened the souls that sedated their anguish each night with internalized reprisal and anxiety drugs.
People would sung lullabies to their babies in the names of their dead fathers. They would concoct stories about their missing brothers and sisters, and read them out to their nieces and nephews. And some of these kids would be raised only to get killed in the war that they never signed up for. One such kid was Izhan, the slain militant Manzoor’s son and my classmate and best friend.
Bashir had declared that he would refuse the ex gratia money that the government had offered him as compensation. He had made it clear that he would prefer to live in a shed instead even if it takes him years to rebuild it but wouldn’t accept any monetary or other assistance from the ‘killers’. “It takes courage to say something like that. And it takes a spine to do it, and I’m sure Bashir has it. Most of us in this village do. See, Manzoor, he made all of us proud. Not everyone runs away”, Totheh announced. I saw my mother shrink with shame, Totheh had referred to Abbu. As Totheh performed his ablutions to attend Manzoor’s funeral, I could see that the rift between him, my maternal grandfather, my de facto father, and Abbu, my biological father, had widened to a point that it had become unfathomable.
My parents’ marriage had been fixed years back when Abbu was around twelve and Ammi was eight. Their fathers had been friends but they were no less than brothers to each other. They shared everything from the sweet halweh on Eid to opinions about the crop as well as family matters. Like most of the people of his age, Abbu grew up supporting his father with his orchards and his ‘apple trade’. My Ammi, as a necessity for girls, learnt the art of cooking the best lamb curry. While Abbu planted rice saplings in the fields along with my maternal uncles, Ammi served them freshly brewed kahweh from Samavar.
In their initial acquaintances, Abbu would follow Ammi to school. He would walk several yards silently behind her and she would respond by giggling with her friends. And while all these tender exchanges happened, they were tied up in a nuptial knot before they could actually confess their love for each other. A year after their marriage, the Kashmir they lived in, the paradise that served as the background for several romantic Bollywood movies, had been transformed into a hell where violence, brutality, torture became a norm, where wedding processions were targeted in nocturnal combat and mothers threw auspicious mixture of home-grown almonds, sugar candies and rose petals over corteges of their sons who had been consumed by the war.
A sudden mass mobilization campaign began in Kashmir and in our village too in which men from all walks of life recruited themselves for the armed insurgency. Office goers, farmers, businessmen, shepherds, clerks, students, married men, single boys all were consumed by this passion to fight the system, the unseen Oppressor. In the process, they left behind their offices, farms, trade, livestock, schools and families along with thousands of widows, ‘half-widows’ and orphans. Soon the men started dying while fighting or while being in a wrong place at a wrong time. A significant number of people have died in the name of ‘collateral damage’. Thousands of them have disappeared into oblivion.
It was raining heavily the day Abbu left for ‘training’. Ammi told me that I was six months old. A Gujjar shepherd had helped them cross the treacherous mountain pass in the border village of Chowkibal to reach the other side of the LOC, the line of control/contention between India and Pakistan, that had been incised on the face of Kashmir. Totha and my paternal grandfather had accompanied him to the village square where he joined four other men and boarded a bus to Chowkibal posing as construction workers. From there, they had crossed the precarious mountain pass on foot. The shepherd who was responsible for the cross-over knew these nooks and crevices like the back of his hand.
Abbu had managed to cross over along with the rest. They were trained for about six months to use firearms, to unpin grenades and throw them at the opponent, to survive on the bare minimum of food water, air, companionship. They were trained to be shapeshifters, to merge in crowds where they didn’t belong and sometimes with trees and streams. They were trained to kill and most importantly to die. On their way back to Kashmir to implement their newly acquired skills, they were intercepted by an army patrol. There was a fierce exchange of fire between the two conflicting factions. Three of Abbu’s companions were killed in the cross-fire. Abbu sustained a gunshot wound in his leg. He was caught along with Salim, the fourth member of the rebel troupe. A bullet in the leg was much more dangerous than a bullet in the chest. For a guerrilla, getting caught alive was worse than dying in the battle field. Abbu and Salim were captured alive.
They were taken to Cargo. The term Cargo is synonymous with inconceivable torture in Kashmir. It is one of the Indian operated torture centres. Almost every family in Kashmir has an experience with one of the many torture centres in Kashmir, a hand-me-down experience, if not first hand. And my connection with Cargo was through Abbu. I would often insist on hearing stories of his stint in Cargo and Abbu never shied away from sharing his experiences of the three year long ordeal. I had seen all the scars on his body and I knew the story behind each one of them. On multiple occasions, I had run my fingers over a peanut sized brownish crater on his left leg. That’s where the bullet had entered his leg on that night when they were trying to cross the LOC. As a kid, the stark contrast between his right and left lower limbs had always startled me. His left leg was visibly thinner than his right one.
That was because the bullet that had pierced his leg had splintered the bone leaving him immobile for about a year with his leg in a cast and the following disuse had rendered the muscles withered. He had always used his atrophied muscles as an example to edify various virtues. “Daniyal, if you won’t study your brain will shrink like my leg” he would say. “Daniyal for your faith to grow you have to put it to practice, or else it will diminish like my leg”. And there was something about his demeanour that was compelling without being stern. There was something about the way his eyes moved behind his thick glasses that forced me into compliance without him saying a word. His glasses were as thick as the bottom of a glass bottle from which I sipped Cola in summers. They magnified his eyeballs and that made them look even gentler. The glasses were also a gift of Cargo.
During interrogation, his tormenters had asked him about the ‘commander of his tanzeem’ (the organization he had affiliated with), he was forcibly made to stare into enormous flashlights after which he was kept in stark darkness. As a result his eyes were seared on the inside. Because he couldn’t afford surgery, he had to do with the makeshift vision that his glasses provided. There were times when he knocked into objects, when he faltered around the room in dim light, when he asked me to thread his needles for him and when he didn’t look like the superhero figure that the other fathers of the locality were in the lives of their kids. But for me, he was just Abbu, my father, if not a hero. I stood at the doorway every time he was a little late from his prayers. During crackdowns, I would pray to God that Abbu had introduced me to, for his safety. And unlike Totheh and my other relatives, I firmly believed that he had not surrendered because he wasn’t strong. He had given up arms because he had come to believe that violence wasn’t the way out.
My Abbu worked in Srinagar, miles away from our home in Tral. He had learnt the art of sozin, the intricate embroidery on the gossamer shawls of Pashmina. He had an inborn artist in him. I would see him fidgeting with the innumerable shades of silken threads, as he held them against the beam of sunlight that fell into his kaarkhan, his workplace through the window. He squinted his eyes against each thread just to make sure he had picked the perfect shade. There were needle pricks on his pointy fingers, some even encroached over the dark callus that was on his trigger finger. His fragmentary personality had vividly contrasting pieces from the different lives he had lived, from the doting lover-boy to an insurgent to an infirm prisoner to a poetry enthusiast to an artist. He was an enigma to me but an outcast to everyone else. He was a surrendered militant, some thought he was a renegade and everyone including Totheh, my uncles, Bashir and his sons, Izhan and his slain father Manzoor, thought that he was a coward. His ostracism followed shortly after his surrender which made him leave his native village of Tral and work as an apprentice to a shawl-weaver. He was never seen in Tral again but his absence in their lives was a presence in mine. His refusal of the glory of death was the reason I had a father.
That day, thousands of people thronged the mosque compound to pay obeisance to their fallen heroes. Manzoor’s bullet ridden body had been garlanded and it was surrounded by people who just wanted a final glimpse of his face. There were women who were throwing auspicious mixtures of sugar candies and almonds over the crowd, lamenting for him in melody as if they were bidding farewell to a groom. Sitting next to him, I saw Izhan. People would come to him and kiss him on his forehead. When the mourners left for the burial site, Izhan raised his fist towards the spring sky and broke into the slogan of Azaadi, freedom that had been passed from one generation to the next for years in Kashmir. ‘Ham kya chahte?’ Azaaadi! What do we want? Freedom! The crowd replied. A part of me mourned for my friend, for the grief that had befallen his family, but there was a part of me that was jealous of him. That wanted to be him, to immerse in all the attention he was receiving. To shout slogans that would be reciprocated by thousands of people. This fantasy, however, was as short-lived as the glamour that surrounded the militants’ death.
A week later, the school resumed. While I strutted happily to the school with my brand new blue bag hanging on my shoulders, I saw Bashir frantically rummaging through the piles of garbage that was left of his house. He had grown visibly thin, his hands and face were covered with soot. He looked detached, unaware of what was going on around him. He would come to the remains of his house every morning right after sunrise and peeped through the debris to scavenge anything that remained of his previous life, his poetry most importantly. On his side, lying under a plastic sheet, were neatly arranged rows of charred pens, crumbling paper, a couple of burnt books and some sooty photographs he had managed to salvage. True to his word, he had refused a single penny of the compensation.
The classes continued all day, a mist of despair loomed large over the classroom. I sat next to an unoccupied desk. The usual occupier, Izhan, was now mourning for his deceased father along with the other family members.
On my way back, Bashir was still engrossed in the bits and scraps of his past. My overenthusiastic salaam did not reach the Island of Memories he was marooned in. His memory-scavenging would continue for years after the encounter, even after his sons had moved into some rented accommodation in Srinagar where they worked. One day he was found lying next to his valuable pile of garbage. He had passed away in his sleep.
Izhan continues to be my best friend till this day. We studied in the same school but when I moved to Delhi for my college he stayed back in the village to support his mother and grandmother. A year after I had started working as a researcher in Stanford, I offered him help to move to the States. Being a militant’s son, he was denied passport repeatedly. So he continued living in Tral, in the village where his mother lived, where his father had been killed and buried in the most prestigious graveyard. His tombstone being the most ornate, embellished with verses of Urdu poetry.
Every year in Ramadan whenever I visit to my village, we’d read Fatiha, the first chapter of the Quran over his father’s grave. In recent years we would make a trip to the decrepit corner of the daffodil lined cemetery. A single grave is without any ceremonious tombstone, even without an epitaph. It is Abbu’s grave. Five years ago, he died in his kaarkhan, the work station. It was a peaceful death. He died of old age.
The old embers of grudges had cooled down under the winds of time. Ammi requested her brothers to bury Abbu in the village graveyard. They agreed, and without much dissent Abbu found his resting place just a couple of metres away from Totheh. ‘Maybe they’ve finally made peace in the other life’, said Izhan one day, as we walked back from the cemetery after paying obeisance to our heroes.
