Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (16 page)

So Girja would return to Bandipora every month, from Jammu, to collect her salary. By April, the situation had turned explosive. Her cousin, with whom she was staying in Bandipora’s Tikr village, asked her to collect her salary and leave immediately. ‘Don’t return this time,’ he advised her. But she needed the money badly and returned in May again. By then, her cousin had migrated to Jammu, so Girja stayed with a Muslim family—the head of the house was a friend of Girja’s father. The morning after she arrived, she was picked up by four men. Her body was found days later by the roadside.

Years later, a senior commander of the terrorist outfit Hizbul Mujahideen shared Girja Tiku’s story with a Bandipora resident. The two had been discussing the early days of militancy in the Valley, and the conversation veered towards the Pandits, and then to the Tiku family. Girja, he said, had been abducted and immediately blindfolded. Four men had taken turns to rape her in a moving taxi. As they were conversing with each other, Girja recognized the voice of one of the men who went by the name Aziz.

‘
Aziza, chhetey chukha?
Aziz, are you here as well?’ she asked.

Aziz got worried. He knew that Girja had recognized him. So, in a final act of barbarism, they took her to a wood-processing unit and cut her alive on a mechanical saw.

This is what the seekers of freedom were doing to the religious minority.

In June, 1990, Ashwani Kumar, a chartered accountant, was shot at by militants and injured severely. His father went to the police station to request a vehicle to take his son to the hospital. ‘Wait for India’s helicopter,’ the station in-charge told him. When he was finally taken to the main hospital, the doctors refused to treat him. His family managed to somehow shift him to the Soura medical institute, but no doctor touched him there either. He died there.

Many such cases were reported where doctors refused treatment to injured Pandits targeted by militants.

Every time Ma heard such reports, she cried. Every evening, before dinner, she would sit next to Father as he listened to the news bulletin on Radio Kashmir. The news of the killings made her worry about her brother’s family, especially Ravi.

‘I don’t know what is wrong with them, why won’t they leave like everybody else,’ she often said.

At times, the name of our neighbourhood would be mentioned in the news—an encounter between militants and security forces, or a hand grenade attack, or the army’s blasting a building with dynamite to kill militants holed up inside. This made Mother’s heart sink and at times like these she would pray.

A few years prior to the exodus, Ravi had fallen off his motorcycle outside the Palladium cinema, and had sustained a deep gash on his knee. The wound was treated in the hospital and Ravi was soon discharged. However, after a few days, when Ravi tried to change the dressing, he could not. The blood had dried up and the bandage was stuck to the wound. Even if touched gently there, Ravi would writhe in pain. He would not let even Ram Joo, the compounder, touch the dressing. He finally came to our house and asked Ma to change it.

Mother took out a fresh roll of bandage, cotton, and antiseptic lotion. She looked Ravi in the eye as she held one corner of his dressing. ‘So, what is the maximum speed your motorcycle can reach?’ she asked. Ravi’s attention was diverted. He opened his mouth to answer Ma’s question, but instead let out a loud cry. With one tug, Ma had taken off the dressing. I never understood from where Ma got her courage at times like these.

And now, Ravi and his family were in Srinagar, and we were in Jammu. The concern for their safety robbed Ma of sleep—whatever little she could manage in that heat and amidst the worry of what the morning might bring.

Whenever he could, Ravi visited us in Jammu. On the days he was expected, Ma’s entire demeanour would change. She would sing to herself and repeatedly send me to the market to buy things Ravi liked.

‘Go and get Cinthol soap; he likes it.’

‘Can we ask Madan Lal to keep a few bottles of Thums Up in his fridge?’

‘Can you get a packet of Green Label tea? He only drinks that.’

When Ravi would finally appear at our doorstep, tears of joy would run down Ma’s cheeks and she would hold him in a tight embrace. Then, for several days, she would stuff him with food.

‘Don’t apply ghee on my roti,’ Ravi would insist.

But his pleas were lost on Ma. She never paid heed. When Ravi protested too much, she would say, ‘Two rounds of your college field and this will all disappear.’ Then she would turn silent, remembering where Ravi’s college was.

‘For God’s sake, why don’t you shift here? Everyone is here, everybody’s family is here,’ she would then say. Ravi would just laugh, hold her, and say, ‘Go and make dum aloo for me.’ Ravi had a strong faith in his friendships, thanks to which he didn’t feel the need to leave home. After he returned to Srinagar, Ma would go back to her routine of listening to the evening news on the radio.

One day, towards the end of August 1990, we had to vacate the hotel. Madan Lal had been dismissed from service on charges of embezzlement. After he left, the owners spoke about refurbishing the hotel. We knew we had no choice but to find shelter elsewhere.

Near Gumat Chowk there was a chemist’s shop from where Father would buy medicines. Over the months, he had come to know the chemist, and as the threat of another move loomed large, Father asked him if he knew of any suitable accommodation. The chemist said his sister lived in a colony near the canal. She was married to an army officer and they had a room to spare. It would cost us five hundred rupees.

That was less than what we were paying at the hotel, so father readily agreed, although we were unsure of what sort of landlords the house owners would turn out to be.

So, with a prayer on our lips, we packed our bags on the first day of September 1990, and shifted to Bhagwati Nagar. The colony was a small, built along a channel of the canal. At the cross section of one of the inner lanes stood a house and we were given a room in the front. Our room was bigger than the one we occupied in the hotel. Ma as usual set up her kitchen immediately in one corner. The chemist’s sister lived at the back of the house with her mother-in-law, and both of them were very kind. The old lady of the house even gave us some old durries to put underneath our mattresses. The officer was always away, on duty.

The room wasn’t a dark hole and it wasn’t damp, but space-wise, it was just one small room. One corner was taken up by the kitchen, and on a long, rickety wooden bench provided by the landlady, Mother set up utensils and other articles.

Every day, Ma got up at the crack of dawn, fearing that she might miss the water supply. It came every morning for precisely one hour, and sometimes less. At dawn, I would sometimes wake up to find Ma sitting with her back against the wall, waiting for the water supply to start. For her, there was nothing as important as making sure that we stored sufficient water every day.

It was in this room that we gradually picked up the pieces of our lives, and began to prepare ourselves for the long haul. It was here that a sense of permanency about our situation set in.

One afternoon when I returned from school, I saw that Father had bought a big desert cooler. A few months later, he managed to save some money and we bought a fridge. That year we were without a television, though. It was the following year that Father bought one, on instalments, similar to the BPL television set we’d had back home.

I left the room early in the morning for school. I hated the dull, monotonous, factory-like rhythm of our lives. Each morning everyone had to contribute to the water-collecting labour. We had to fetch bucket after bucket of water and also bathe, all within an hour. Also, we had to share the water supply with the owners and another tenant family. Sometimes, the water supply would play truant for days. So the men would go to a neighbouring vacant plot and bathe under an open tap there. I found this very embarrassing since passers-by on the street could see me. But it was better than not taking a bath at all. During such moments, I always remembered home. My parents often spoke about a village where they had been posted soon after their marriage, where one could just dig the earth with one’s hands to make water appear.

Around this time, all the refugees who had fled from Kashmir had been asked to register their names, and each family was provided with a ration card. It was like a document of citizenship, identifying one as a ‘migrant’ and enabling government employees to collect salaries, or a cash relief of five hundred rupees in the case of the non-salaried families. For families like ours it was a hard life, but we managed somehow. But for non-salaried families, sustenance was tough. It was just not possible to support a family on the meagre stipend of five hundred rupees doled out by the government, and the small monthly ration of rice and sugar.

Every ration card had to include a photograph of the male head of the family, along with his wife. So in some cases, husbands and wives made separate ration cards to ensure that more money came in. To do this, many got their pictures taken with migrant labourers from Bihar and elsewhere. It was shameful, but there was little else one could do in those treacherous times. In Kashmir, we learnt, they had made fun of this misery as well by creating yet another ditty:
Ram naam sat hai, Paanc’hh hath te batte hai
(Ram’s name is truth, it’s five hundred rupees and rice [for the Pandits]).

In Jammu, over the past few months, things had been taking an ugly turn. Initially, like us, the Jammuites thought our exodus was temporary. Though they benefitted economically because of us, they developed an antipathy towards us. For them, we were outsiders. Within months, invectives had been invented for us. The most popular among them was:

Haath mein Kangri munh mein chholey
Kahan se aayey Kashmiri loley

Kangri in hands, chickpeas in their mouth
From where did these Kashmiri flaccid penises come?

When Father heard this for the first time, he did not quite understand the insult. All he said was, ‘But we hardly eat chholey!’

This was mainstream India for us. Our own Hindu brothers and sisters who took out a procession every Basant Panchami to safeguard Hindu rights were turning into our oppressors as well.

The most tyrannical were the landlords. Barring a few thousand unfortunate people who lived in miserable conditions in the refugee camps, most of us were forced to rent rooms from the local residents. Many locals wanted the extra money they could earn by renting out rooms. So often, people built additional rooms quickly—hencoop like—to rent them out. But once a family started living there, the landlords tried to control every aspect of their lives—how much water they were allowed to use, how much television they could watch, how many guests could visit, what they could cook or not cook. In many houses, the owners would hover around the tenant family’s room and keep a tab on the number of shoes outside. Our language, our pronunciation became an object of ridicule. Just like it did in Kashmir during that crackdown in the early 2000s, when the poor Kashmiri faced ridicule on account of his limited Hindi.

There is one particular incident that I can never forget. One of our relatives had a young son, hardly twelve years old. While going for a school picnic, the boy felt like buying a packet of potato chips and a soft drink to supplement the food his mother had cooked for him. He had no money, so he borrowed twenty rupees from a ruffian on his street, promising to return the money along with an interest of ten rupees. But days later, he was unable to repay the money. Out of fear, he never shared his predicament with his family. The ruffian kept threatening him.

One day, the boy stepped out of his house to play with his friends when the ruffian caught hold of him. He was carrying a screwdriver with which he stabbed the boy in the abdomen. The boy tried to run away and even begged a shopkeeper for help. But nobody came forward to help him. He died on the steps of the shop he had bought the packet of chips and soft drink from.

His parents were shattered. His mother was inconsolable. When he had stepped out of his house for the last time, the boy had snatched a piece of cucumber his mother had been eating. That memory remained and was now cutting his mother’s heart like a thorn.