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She imagined the men: new immigrants to the city, stone-workers, come home to their pre-booked, pre-paid-for spot whose rent was calculated by calibrating the optimum density of exhaust fumes and dividing it by the acceptable density of mosquitoes. Precise algebra; not easily found in textbooks.
If they hadn’t died of truck, they would have died of: (a) Dengue fever (b) The heat (c) Beedi smoke or (d) Stone-dust Or maybe not. Maybe they would have risen to become: (a) Millionaires (b) Supermodels or (c) Bureau chiefs
She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know. How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated. Even after the rest of their bodies had turned to ash, two lung-shaped slabs of stone remained behind, unburned.
The description of the baby is as under: Name: UNKNOWN, Father’s Name: UNKNOWN, Address: UNKNOWN, Age: UNKNOWN, Wearing: NO CLOTHES.
In time she became the translator/transcriber as well as printer/publisher of his single-page broadsheet: My News & Views, which he revised and updated every month. They managed to sell as many as eight or nine copies of each edition. All in all it was a thriving media partnership—politically acute, uncompromising, and wholly in the red.
There was a ruined album of water-stained family photographs, most of them barely recognizable, of Musa’s daughter, Miss Jebeen the First, and her mother, Arifa. There was a stack of passports in a plastic Ziploc—seven altogether, two Indian and five other nationalities—Iyad Khareef (Musa the Lebanese pigeon), Hadi Hassan Mohseni (Musa the Iranian wise man and guide), Faris Ali Halabi (Musa the Syrian horseman), Mohammed Nabil al-Salem (Musa the Qatari nobleman), Ahmed Yasir al-Qassimi (Musa the rich man from Bahrain). Musa clean-shaven, Musa with a salt-and-pepper beard, Musa with long hair
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Tilo recognized the book and the writing in it as hers, but she read through its contents curiously, as though it had been written by someone else. These days her brain felt like a “recovery”—encased in mud. It wasn’t just her brain, she herself, all of her, felt like a recovery—an accumulation of muddy recoveries, randomly assembled.
I’m not yet cured of happiness. Anna Akhmatova
P tells me that recently, as part of “Operation Good Will,” the army took twenty-one children on a picnic in a navy boat. The boat overturned. All twenty-one children drowned. When the parents of the drowned children protested they were shot at. The luckier ones died.
I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature. Q 1: Why is it not sophisticated? Q 2: What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature?
(where Indira Gandhi was shot by her Sikh bodyguards).
“This is a collaborative venture between us and the Security Forces,” Musa whispered to her. “Sometimes, in these kinds of collaborations, the partners don’t know that they are partners. The army thinks it is teaching the children love for their Motherland. And we think we are teaching them to know their Enemy, so that when it is their generation’s turn to fight, they won’t end up behaving like Hassan Lone.”
On the soundtrack the laughter of women in the zenana. Bells on the ankles of dancing girls. The unmistakable, deep, coquettish giggle of a court eunuch.
SHE CALCULATED that it had been thirty years since all of them—Naga, Garson Hobart, Musa and she—had first met on the set of Norman, Is That You? And still they continued to circle around each other in these peculiar ways.
Afterwards on one occasion in March 1995 Major Amrik Singh and his friend Salim Gojri who was also like me a surrendered militant and frequent visitor to the camp picked up one person who was wearing a coat, white shirt and tie and gray pant.
She put on the light and looked up the word insouciant. The dictionary said: Cheerfully unconcerned or unworried about something. She kept dictionaries near her bed, piled up into a tower.
Even though I am personally and in principle completely against efficiency, I wonder whether conducting this sort of intervention (by which I mean excising the mothering instinct) on the Maaji—The Mothers of the Disappeared in Kashmir—would help.
P.P.S. I’m moving. I don’t know where I’m going. This fills me with hope.
Anjum spoke as though it was a world that Tilo was familiar with, a world that everybody ought to be familiar with; in fact, the only world worth being familiar with. For the first time in her life, Tilo felt that her body had enough room to accommodate all its organs.
A few kebabs and some biryani were kept aside for the municipal officers who would surely come by later in the day. “Those fellows are just like us Hijras,” Anjum said and laughed affectionately. “Somehow they smell a celebration and arrive to demand their share.”
Also, Miss Jebeen hadn’t notched up very many Todays to trade in for Tomorrows, but then the algebra of infinite justice was never so rude.
There were rumors and counter-rumors. There were rumors that might have been true, and truths that ought to have been just rumors.
In the matter of the Martyrs’ Graveyard, however, the question of whether the first grave contained a bag or a body turned out to be of no real consequence. The substantive truth was that a relatively new graveyard was filling up, with real bodies, at an alarming pace.
The mist swirled on, on an indiscriminate recruitment drive. It whispered into the ears of black marketeers, bigots, thugs and confidence-tricksters. They too listened intently before they reconfigured their plans. They ran their sly fingers over the cold-metal bumps on their quota of grenades that was being distributed so generously, like parcels of choice mutton at Eid. They grafted the language of God and Freedom, Allah and Azadi, on to their murders and new scams. They made off with money, property and women. Of course women. Women of course.
In the Mazar-e-Shohadda, Miss Jebeen and her mother were buried next to each other. On his wife’s tombstone, Musa Yeswi wrote: ARIFA YESWI 12 September 1968–22 December 1995 Wife of Musa Yeswi
Cold soldiers from a warm climate patrolling the icy highway that circled their neighborhood cocked their ears and uncocked the safety catches of their guns. Who’s there? What’s that sound? Stop or we’ll shoot! They came from far away and did not know the words in Kashmiri for Stop or Shoot or Who. They had guns, so they didn’t need to.
His body was delivered in a coffin to his family in his village in Thanjavur district, Tamil Nadu, along with a DVD of the documentary film Saga of Untold Valor directed by a Major Raju and produced by the Ministry of Defense. S. Murugesan wasn’t in the film, but his family thought he was because they never saw it. They didn’t have a DVD player.
Later it was established that the explosion had been caused by a car driving over an empty carton of Mango Frooti on the next street. Who was to blame? Who had left the packet of Mango Frooti (Fresh ’n’ Juicy) on the street? India or Kashmir? Or Pakistan? Who had driven over it? A tribunal was instituted to inquire into the causes of the massacre. The facts were never established. Nobody was blamed. This was Kashmir. It was Kashmir’s fault. Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.
On this occasion Miss Jebeen was by far the biggest draw. The cameras closed in on her, whirring and clicking like a worried bear. From that harvest of photographs, one emerged a local classic. For years it was reproduced in papers and magazines and on the covers of human rights reports that no one ever read, with captions like Blood in the Snow, Vale of Tears and Will the Sorrow Never End?
The corrosion in Kashmir ran so deep that Amrik Singh was genuinely unaware of the irony of picking up a man whose wife and child had just been shot and bringing him forcibly, under armed guard, to an interrogation center at four in the morning, only in order to offer his commiseration.
One of his legendary lines was: Dekho mian, mein Bharat Sarkar ka lund hoon, aur mera kaam hai chodna. Look, brother, I am the Government of India’s dick and it’s my job to fuck people.
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.
“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.”
She trekked through the meadow from where, a year ago, six tourists, American, British, German and Norwegian, had been kidnapped by Al-Faran, a newly formed militant outfit that not many people knew about. Five of the six were murdered, one escaped. The young Norwegian, a poet and dancer, had been beheaded, his body left in the Pahalgam meadow. Before he died, as his kidnappers moved him from place to place, he left a trail of poetry on scraps of paper that he secretly managed to give to people he encountered on the way.
In Kashmir, “interrogation” was not a real category. There was “questioning,” which meant a few slaps and kicks, and “interrogation,” which meant torture.
When she made it clear that she would not change her mind, they said they could not give her general anesthetic unless there was somebody with her to sign the consent form, preferably the father of the child. She told them to do it without anesthetic. She passed out with the pain and woke in the general ward.
Word spread quickly in the poorer quarters that a clever woman had moved into the graveyard. Parents in the neighborhood flocked to enroll their children in the classes Tilo held at Jannat Guest House.
The Sound and Light show at the Red Fort was taken into the workshop for revision. Soon the centuries of Muslim rule would be stripped of poetry, music and architecture and collapsed into the sound of the clash of swords and a bloodcurdling war cry that lasted only a little longer than the husky giggle that Ustad Kulsoom Bi had hung her hopes on. The remaining time would be taken up by the story of Hindu glory. As always, history would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.
The string, a new Chinese brand that had suddenly flooded the market, was made of tough, transparent plastic, coated with ground glass. Independence Day kite-warriors used it to “cut” each other’s strings, and bring each other’s kites down. It had already caused some tragic accidents in the city.
“Do you make all your life’s big decisions based on mobile phone videos?” “That’s how it is these days, yaar. The world is only videos now.
“One day Kashmir will make India self-destruct in the same way. You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You’re not destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying. Khuda Hafiz, Garson bhai.” With that he left. I never saw him again.
