Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (12 page)

The news affected my father badly. He had known the Qazi family well. In fact, one of Ashok’s brothers lived near our house. Two days later, Father went quietly to the Doodh Ganga river behind our house and bid farewell to the gods. It was like Shiva had eloped with his bride. There was no joy, no festivity.

On the evening of February 27, Naveen Sapru left his office as usual. The thirty-seven-year-old telecom department employee boarded a minibus for Habba Kadal, as he wanted to collect his coat from a tailor first. In Habba Kadal, at a mosque, a few men had gathered hours before, making plans to eliminate him. They had been tracking his movements for days. As he reached the Habba Kadal bridge, they caught hold of Sapru. They shot him. His attackers surrounded him and, joined by many others, they danced around him. An old Pandit woman who happened to pass by begged his assailants to spare him. But they abused her and one of them pushed her away. As he lay there, his life ebbing out of him, a few from the crowd threw
shireen
at him as is done over a corpse. Minutes later, Navin Sapru bled to death.

When a police truck arrived and took his body to the cremation ground, the crowd followed it cheering from behind and shouting slogans.

Navin Sapru’s friend, the poet and writer Maharaj Krishan Santoshi, wrote a poem on his death. In ‘Naveen my friend’, Santoshi writes:

Naveen was my friend
Killed he was, in Habba Kadal
while on the tailor’s hanger remained hung
his warm coat.
Passing as it did through scissors and thread–needle
in the tailor’s hand, till the previous day
it was merely a person’s coat
that suddenly was turned into a Hindu’s coat

In the last stanza the poet writes:

I used to ask him every time
why doesn’t he possess the cunningness of Srinagar
I still await his response
My friend! Yes, I changed my address
since after your murder
it ceased to exist
the bridge of friendship, this Habba Kadal

The assault from the mosques continued all this while. We spent most of our time locked inside, venturing out only to buy vegetables and other daily necessities. By this time, curfew had become the norm due to the deteriorating law and order situation. Whenever curfew was lifted, Father and Ma would have to go to work.

On the morning of March 7, I was playing in the compound of our house. It must have been around 10 a.m., and Father and Ma had left for office. Suddenly, I heard the distinctive sound of gunfire. It rent the air and the pigeons in our attic took flight in alarm. I froze. The sound had been quite loud. Something had happened nearby. In a few minutes, a minibus owned by one of our Muslim neighbours raced up the street. That meant something had gone terribly wrong. A little later Father returned as well. He was fumbling for words.

‘Has your mother returned?’ he asked. I replied in the negative.

‘There has been heavy firing,’ he said.

After Father had left with Ma, she had taken a bus upon spotting a colleague in it. Father was worried since the firing had taken place near her destination.

We waited for a while. But Ma did not return. One of our neighbours said that two soldiers had died in the firing and many were injured. There had been a heavy exchange of fire.

This worried Father even more. He rushed to our neighbour Nehvi Uncle’s house. Though he did not share his fears with me, I knew exactly what was going through father’s mind. He feared that Ma was one of the victims of the firing. Along with Nehvi Uncle, father rushed to the bone-and-joint hospital in Barzulla where the injured had been admitted for treatment. They looked everywhere, but Ma was not there. They returned home.

An hour or so later, Ma returned. A cry of relief escaped father’s lips when he saw her. She was walking slowly and her lips were trembling. She sat on the veranda and asked for some water. We were overjoyed that she was unharmed. After she had caught her breath, Ma told us what had happened. Just as she had got off the bus, bullets started to fly. She saw a man get hit in his abdomen, and blood oozing out of it. Everyone ran helter-skelter. She ran and hid behind a shop. Afterwards, she began to walk through the fields towards our home. But she lost her way. And then she saw Latif. He saw her as well, and without exchanging a word, he held her arm and guided her through the fields. After some time they came to the main road where a group of soldiers was patrolling. Upon spotting them, Latif slipped away. But Ma was safe. From there on she knew the way home.

‘But I don’t understand why Latif ran away,’ she said after a while.

We were silent. Father probably knew. And in my heart I knew as well. But I did not think too much about it. I was just happy that my mother was safe.

A day later, a multi-party political delegation led by the former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi arrived in Kashmir to take stock of the situation. But the former prime minister had arrived with the sole purpose of creating an unnecessary fuss. Upon landing in Srinagar airport, Rajiv Gandhi immediately expressed displeasure over Governor Jagmohan’s not coming to the airport to receive the deputy prime minister, Devi Lal. Jagmohan said he had not been told about Devi Lal’s arrival. Later Gandhi complained that Devi Lal was made to sit on the left side of the governor, which was apparently against protocol. The delegation, which included stalwarts like George Fernandes and Harkishan Singh Surjeet, skipped Jammu altogether to escape the wrath of the Pandits who had already fled their homes and were now refugees in their own country.

A veteran communist leader, Reshi Dev, who was a Kashmiri Pandit, apprised Surjeet of the situation and asked him to raise his voice against the brutality that had been unleashed against the Pandit community. ‘
Aisee baatein chalti rehti hein
—such things keep on happening,’ he shot back.

We were already becoming nobody’s people.

Shortly afterwards, we slipped away from home one morning and took refuge in my mother’s sister’s house. Her family lived near the army cantonment, and it was safe there. Father spent the day listening to news bulletins. But the state radio and television carried no news reports. It was only BBC Radio that gave the correct picture. From the news reports, it was clear that the situation in the Valley had spiralled beyond control.

After a week or so, Father grew restless and wanted to return home. So we left my sister behind, and the three of us returned late one afternoon.

The whole neighbourhood had moved out. The entire locality was deserted. The Razdans had left, so had the Bhans, and the Mattoos. It looked like a ghost street. Not a soul was to be seen anywhere. We slipped inside our house like robbers. We walked past the kitchen garden, frost-ridden and barren, and entered the house through a side door. Then Father made sure the main door was locked so if somebody were to check, he would think the house was vacant, like every other house in the locality. Father instructed us not to switch on any lights and to keep the curtains drawn across the windows. He also urged us to speak in hushed tones. To feel a little more secure, Father had asked one of his staff members, Satish, to come and stay with us. Satish had married recently, and Father and I had attended his wedding in Budgam. Satish had made his family move to Jammu. His government job had been hard to come by and he was not sure if he would be able to keep it were he to move to Jammu, so he stayed behind.

We just sat there in a room upstairs and talked about the situation. Satish spoke about how Pandits were being killed all across the Valley.

Suddenly, we hear laughter outside. Then someone passes a remark and there is the sound of laughter again. Father goes to the window and after taking a deep breath lifts the corner of the curtain to look outside. I kneel on the ground near him and peep outside as well. Near the main gate below, there is a gang of boys. Some of them are smoking. I know most of them. They are boys from our neighbourhood—near and far—and I have played cricket with some of them. Their ringleader is a boy who lives nearby. ‘He is even trained in rocket launchers,’ one of them says loudly, boasting about his cousin who is with a militant group now
.

‘
Let’s distribute these houses,’ one of them shouts. ‘Akram, which one do you want?’ he asks
.

‘
I would settle for this house any day,’ he points to a house
.

‘
Bastard,’ shoots back another, ‘how you wish you could occupy this house with their daughter!
’

There is a peal of laughter. They make obscene gestures with their fists and Akram pretends as if he is raping the girl and is now close to an orgasm. Since I am kneeling next to Father, from the corner of my left eye, I can see that his legs have begun to shake
.

In the next few minutes, all of them have one house each. In between they discuss other girls. And then Akram asks the ringleader
, ‘Hey Khoja,
you haven’t specified your choice!
’

The ringleader is wearing a pheran and there is a cricket bat in his hands. He is smoking. He savours the question for a moment. Everybody is looking at him now. The ringleader then turns and now he is facing our gate. He lifts his arm, and points his finger towards it. He lets it stay afloat in the air for a moment and then he says it
.

‘
I will take this!
’

The corner of the curtain drops from Father’s grip. He crumbles to the floor right there. He closes his eyes and is shaking. I think I hear someone from the gang shouting: ‘Good choice
, baaya,
good choice
.’

Then it all blanks out. I can hear nothing more. There is a buzzing sound in my ear, as if my cochlea has burst. One of them must have then picked up a stone and thrown it at Razdan’s house. The sound of glass breaking tears through the freezing air. Pigeons take flight. A pack of dogs begins to bark
.

‘Haya kyoho goy,’
says one of them, ‘you have incurred losses upon Akram. Now he will have to replace this windowpane
.’

‘
At least go inside and piss; like a dog you need to mark your territory
.’

And then they leave. Their voices grow distant till they completely fade away. Silence prevails again except for the staccato barking of mongrels and the cooing of pigeons that are returning to the attic
.

‘It’s over,’ Father said. ‘We cannot live here anymore.’

Ma went to the storeroom and fetched a few candles that she always kept handy. In candlelight, she made turmeric rice. There was neither will nor appetite for an elaborate dinner. We ate silently, and quite early. I was so stressed that my stomach was in knots. Satish was feeling cold and Father told him to take one of his sweaters from our huge wooden wardrobe. I went with him. While he looked for the sweater, he nervously took a crumpled cigarette from his trouser pocket, lit it, and pulled so deep that the cigarette finished in three or four drags. After he left the room, I picked up the cigarette butt and lit it again till the filter burnt. I was nervous and thought a few puffs would calm me down.

Father told us we would have to leave early the next morning. That night we couldn’t sleep. We just lay beneath our quilts and Ma kept her torch beside her as usual. Father spoke to Satish in hushed tones. In the middle of the night we heard a thud as if someone had jumped from the boundary wall into our compound. It turned out to be a false alarm—a pigeon had pushed a loose brick from the attic on to the ground.

Early in the morning, it had begun to snow. There was snow already on the roads and some of it had turned into slush. Father said he would first venture out and see if it was safe for us to leave. I held his hand and both of us came out onto the street. Father closed the gate very softly behind us. Suddenly, a bearded man wearing a thick jacket appeared on the other side of the street. His pockets were bulging. His eyes fell on us and Father fumbled. His grip on my hand tightened and we turned back. Father pretended as if he had forgotten something inside the house. We hurried in, with Father locking every door behind him.

After a while, we came out again. At the main gate, painted blue, Father saw a piece of paper that had been stuck onto it. It was a hit list. Written in Urdu, with ‘JKLF’ across the top, it warned the Pandits to leave the Valley immediately. A list of about ten people followed—the list of people who the JKLF said would be killed.