Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (14 page)

After spending three days in the hotel, Father began to look around for more suitable accommodation.

In the evenings, we would go to the Geeta Bhawan temple in the heart of old Jammu. It was there that the enormity of our tragedy, of our exile in our own country, struck us. The Bhawan had a large central courtyard. Portions of the building had been taken over by families who had nowhere else to go. Rags or saris or blankets or even bed sheets had been hung up to create small, private spaces.

We would all flock to the Bhawan to find out about the welfare of other families. Neighbours met neighbours, brothers met brothers, colleagues met colleagues, and in that courtyard they took stock of the catastrophe that had befallen them.

‘
Trath ha se peye
’ was the common refrain those days. Lightning had struck us. Some smoked cigarette after cigarette. Women walked to the storage tank to collect water. Everything looked like a nightmare, including the unreliable water supply. Old women wearing their traditional pherans in that heat cooled themselves with bamboo hand-fans.

It was at the Bhawan that the fate of others became evident to us—stories of what had happened in Anantnag, in Sopore, in Baramulla, in Budgam, in Kupwara. In Handwara, a massive crowd had spilled out on the streets on January 25 and the people carried axes and knives and iron rods. Some of them wore shrouds. The procession was in response to an announcement that had been made the night before: ‘We have achieved Azadi and tomorrow we will all come out and celebrate in the main market square.’ The crowd passed through Pandit localities. ‘Take out your Kalashnikovs, let’s finish them!’ shouted one. At Safa Kadal, the fleeing Pandit families were showered with coins and
shireen
to tell them they were already dead. The mob had shouted:
Ram naam sat hai, akh akis patte hai
(Ram’s name is truth, Pandits are leaving one after another). At Poershiyaar, an elderly Pandit saw a young man being brought to the steps leading to the Jhelum. He was being held by his hands and feet. His head was repeatedly banged on a stone step till blood flowed from his nose and mouth.

Those who escaped were on the streets now. We had lost everything—home, hearth, and all our worldly possessions, which had taken generations to build. Everyone mourned over the loss of this or that. An elderly woman known to my mother sat on the steps leading to a small temple, shedding silent tears. Her great-grandmother had passed on some pashmina and shahtoosh shawls to her. She had kept them safe for decades, mothballed for protection, to pass on to the next generation—divided equally between her daughter and her prospective daughter-in-law when the time came. And now they were all lost, left behind in the wilderness of Baramulla.

‘I wish I could call my neighbour and request her to keep them safe,’ she said.

‘Don’t be silly,’ her husband snapped. ‘Don’t you realize what your friend has done to us?’ He turned to my father and told him what had happened. They were planning to take their possessions with them to Jammu. The man had spoken to a transport company and they had promised to send a mini load-carrier. As they waited a few men arrived, banging at their door. Then they kicked the door in.

They entered menacingly as the old couple cowered in a corner. ‘Pandit, I believe you want to leave.
Balaay Dafaa!
Good riddance! Leave, but you cannot take anything with you.’ So the mini load-carrier was of no use. The family came to Jammu empty-handed, thankful that they had been allowed to leave unharmed. The old man said, ‘I’m sure the neighbours knew. By now they would have taken all your shawls.’

The woman looked crestfallen, and I think her husband immediately regretted what he had said to her with such certainity. Sometimes it is best to leave things ambiguous, suspended, so that some hope remains. I think it was on those steps that the woman lost her will to live.

A few months later, she died in a one-room dwelling.

It was at Geeta Bhawan that I had an experience that could have altered my life forever. One evening I saw some boys and a few elderly men gathering at a ground behind the Bhawan. They wore khaki knickers, and one of them erected a wooden pole in the middle of the ground with a saffron flag on it. Then they formed two rows and put their hands over their hearts and chanted some mantras. One of the men spotted me watching them and signalled me to come towards him.

‘Are you a Pandit
sharnaarthi?
’ he asked.

He made me sit next to him. Another boy joined us, sitting in front of us on his haunches, listening intently to the man.

‘You’ve been evicted out of your own homes by Muslims. You know that, right?’ he asked.

‘Yes, they evicted us,’ I replied.

‘What does it do to you?’ he asked.

I was not sure what he meant so I kept looking at him. The boy intervened. ‘What Guruji means to ask is whether you feel something inside about it. What do you feel?’

I tried to gauge how I felt about it. For a few seconds, so many images crossed my mind. Of those boys claiming our house. Of the fear on the dark night of January 19. Of the searing heat in my room. Suddenly I felt very hot under the collar.

‘I am very angry,’ I said.

He looked at me sternly. ‘How angry?’

‘Very angry.’

‘Say it loud. How angry?’

‘Very angryyyyyyyyy!’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now the question is: what do you want to do about it? Will you accept it silently like a
napunsak
or do you want to take some action?’ he asked.

Napunsak. Impotent. Suddenly I wanted to do something. Suddenly I wanted a gun in my hand and I wanted to kill. I wanted a bomb in my hand and I wanted to throw it in Lal Chowk at one of the processions.

‘We are from the RSS. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. We will give direction to your anger,’ he said. ‘Come, let’s go join the others,’ he continued, looking at the other men.

We went and stood in front of the saffron flag.

‘Put your hand on your chest,’ the man said.

I had seen them doing this earlier. So I did it exactly as they did. And he made me recite a mantra.

‘Come here every day,’ he said. ‘We meet here every day. We will teach you many things and make a man out of you. A man who is willing to fight for his rights, not only for himself but for his entire community. We are Hindus after all. Have you heard of Parshuram?’ he asked.

I had. I knew some of the verses of a poem about the warrior ascetic’s dialogue with Lord Ram’s younger brother Laxman. I recited some of them. He looked at me, not understanding what I had recited. He did not know those verses. I explained what I had recited.

‘Oh, of course, now I remember,’ he said, breaking into a smile.

‘Come tomorrow, I will see you here,’ he said.

They all shook hands with me.

I was so excited I ran all the way from the ground towards the main building of Geeta Bhawan to look for my father. It was very crowded so it took me some time to find him.

‘There you are,’ Father said the moment he spotted me.

‘
Kot osuk gaeb gomut?
’ he asked. Where had you disappeared? That was my father’s favourite phrase when he was mildly angry. I ignored it and began animatedly telling him about my encounter. I was so excited that I did not see his expression change.

‘I am going to see them tomorrow and every day now,’ I went on. ‘They will teach me how to fight the Muslims who made us flee from our home.’

‘Listen, you fool!’ My father tried suppressing his anger, but the tone of his voice hit me like a slap. ‘We are not here to fight but to make sure that you go to school and get your education. You don’t need to worry about anything else. Where we live, what we eat, where the money will come from—none of it is your concern. You just concentrate on your studies. And, yes, tomorrow we are admitting you into a school.

‘And don’t you dare meet those men ever again,’ he hissed.

Years later, I saw Father reading a report on the slain Ehsan Jafri, brutally done to death by a Hindu mob in Ahmedabad’s Gulbarg Society, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood. As I sat next to him, I read how Jafri had nurtured a nest of barn swallows in his room and to protect them, he would not even switch on the ceiling fan. That day I realized that Father had gifted me something invaluable. Something that enabled me to calmly face an uproariously drunk army general one night in a television news studio. We were there to debate human rights violations in Kashmir and I pointed out that there needs to be zero tolerance towards such crimes. ‘How can you say that?’ he barked. ‘It is they who have forced you out of your homes, turning you into refugees.’

I looked him in the eye and said: ‘General, I’ve lost my home, not my humanity.’

Father’s search for suitable accommodation continued. Many Pandit families had rented out rooms from the local people in Jammu. But even that was scary. We had heard many stories of exploitation and harassment by landlords.

After a few days of searching, father finally announced that he had found a place. It was a cheap dharamshala owned by the Rajput community in the middle of a bazaar in the old city. Known as the Rajput Sabha, it had a few rooms reserved for the community members who visited the city, mostly to pay obeisance at the Vaishno Devi shrine. It was also used as a community hall to solemnize marriages and other functions. It was surrounded by shops selling bridal wear. There was a famous sweet shop nearby, and a number of shops where girls arrived in hordes to have their dupattas dyed. The room itself was quite small, and from the ceiling hung a rickety fan, donated by someone in memory of his grandmother.

Unlike the hotel, there were no beds and mattresses here. Apart from a blanket and a bed sheet, we had nothing. For days we slept on newspaper sheets spread on the floor. On a small kerosene stove, Ma cooked and we ate hoping that the power wouldn’t go off, leaving us drenched in sweat. It was so hot we couldn’t sleep at night. After a week or so, Father bought a couple of cotton mattresses for us to sleep on. The water supply came only once every morning, for about an hour.

On Sundays, I would sneak out to watch the TV series
Mahabharat
while standing on the stairs of a local shopkeeper’s house. He would allow his workers to watch it from there, and I would stand quietly with them. At least there was power in Jammu. In Srinagar, they would deliberately cut off electricity at the telecast time of
Ramayan
, and then later
Mahabharat
.

There was another serial that would be telecast right afterwards. It was about a child prodigy called Lekhu who used science to make small changes in the lives of the people of his village. But after
Mahabharat
, all the workers would leave and the shopkeeper’s family would bolt the main door. I would then sit on a small bench outside a nearby temple and imagine what Lekhu would have made that day. Father had once told me how one could make a radio with a magnet and a copper wire. Sitting on that bench, I would rack my brains to figure out how I could build a television so I could watch Lekhu’s adventures.

It was here at the Rajput Sabha that a deadly psychological blow was inflicted upon Mother. One evening, the compound had been booked by a family for their daughter’s marriage. As darkness fell, it was filled with men, women, and children wearing shiny new clothes. The stereo played popular filmy numbers and many danced to the tunes. Late in the night, there was a knock at our door. Mother opened it and found a man standing there with a plate in his hands. ‘I was told that
sharnaarthis—
refugees—live here. So I came to offer food.’ Before Mother could react, the man put the plate in her hands and turned away. Mother lifted the newspaper sheet covering it. On the plate were rice, dal, and pumpkin curry. Mother stared at it for some time and then she began to weep inconsolably.

The next morning, I accompanied her to the market to buy milk. While standing in the queue, I watched as she initiated a conversation with a woman standing in front of her. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘our home in Kashmir had twenty-two rooms.’