Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (19 page)

We were still very unsure of going to Delhi. Ludhiana seemed a more plausible option. The doctor gave us a letter of recommendation for one of his senior colleagues at the Christian Medical College, Ludhiana, and five days later, Ma, accompanied by my father and uncle, took an overnight train to Ludhiana. ‘You are the man of the house till I return,’ Father said. ‘Take care of your sister.’

They returned two days later. Ma had grown thinner and her cheeks were sunken in and I suddenly realized that she had aged a great deal in the last few months. The specialist in Ludhiana had advised that she be administered a series of injections under anaesthesia. Each injection cost a few thousand rupees. Father had carried some cash in anticipation, and Ma had already been given one injection. They were to return for another in a month. The question was—where would the money for the next injection come from? My uncles offered money, but it was not a question of just one more injection. Over the next few months, many more injections would need to be administered.

It was then that Father thought of the middlemen from Kashmir who had begun to make the rounds of Pandit settlements in Jammu. Some of our erstwhile neighbours had realized that we were in an acute financial crisis and that this was the right time to buy our properties at a fraction of what they were really worth. The houses of Pandits who had lived in posh colonies were much in demand. Many in Kashmir wanted to shift their relatives, who stayed in villages or congested parts of the city, to better houses, to better lives. You would be sitting in your home when a man would suddenly arrive at your doorstep. ‘Asalam Walekum,’ he would greet you while removing his shoes at your doorstep. Once inside, he would embrace you tightly. He would not come empty-handed. He always carried symbols of our past lives with him—a bunch of lotus stems, or a carton of apples, or a packet of saffron. He sat cross-legged beside you, running his eyes over the room—over the kitchen created by making a boundary of bricks and empty canisters, over the calendar depicting your saints, over your clothes hanging from a peg on the wall, and over to your son, sweating profusely in one corner and studying from a Resnick and Halliday’s physics textbook. He would nod sympathetically, accepting a cup of kahwa, and begin his litany of woes. ‘You people are lucky,’ he would say. ‘You live in such poor conditions, but at least you can breathe freely. We have been destroyed by this Azadi brigade, by these imbeciles who Pakistan—may it burn in the worst fires of hell!—gave guns to. We cannot even say anything against them there, because if we do, we will be shot outside our homes. Or somebody will throw a hand grenade at us.’ He would then sigh and a silence would descend upon the room, broken only by his slurps.

‘Accha, tell me, how is Janki Nath? What is his son doing? Engineering! Oh, Allah bless him!’ He would patiently finish his kahwa while you sat wondering what had brought him to your doorstep. It was then that he came to the point.

‘Pandit ji,’ he would begin. ‘You must be wondering why I am here. I remember the good old days when we lived together. Whatever education we have, it is thanks to the scholarship of your community.
Tuhund’ie paezaar mal chhu
—it is nothing but the dirt of your slippers. Anyway …’ He would pause again.

‘I pray to Allah that before I close my eyes, I may see you back in Srinagar. But right now, it is so difficult. Tell me, what is your son doing? Oh, it’s his most crucial board exam this year! Pandit ji, do you have enough money to send him to study engineering, like Janki Nath’s son? I can see that you don’t have it. This is why I am here.’

And then he would ask the crucial question:
Tohi’e ma chhu kharchawun?
Do you wish to spend?

This was a well-thought-of euphemism he had invented to relieve you of the feeling of parting with your home. ‘Do you wish to spend?’ meant ‘Do you want to sell your home?’

‘You have had no source of income for months now,’ he would continue. ‘This is all I can offer you for your house. I know it is worth much more, but these are difficult times even for us.’

If you relented, he would pull out a wad of cash.

‘Here, take this advance. Oh no, what are you saying? Receipt? You should have hit me with your shoe instead. No receipt is required. I will come later to get the papers signed.’

He would also forcibly leave a hundred-rupee note in your son’s hands and leave. A few days later, a neighbour would come around and ask ‘Oh, Jan Mohammed was here as well?’

‘His son has become the divisional commander of Hizbul Mujahideen,’ the neighbour would inform you.

Most of us did not have a choice. By 1992, the locks of most Pandit houses had been broken. Many houses were burnt down. In Barbarshah in old Srinagar, they say, Nand Lal’s house smouldered for six weeks. It was made entirely of deodar wood. The owner of Dr Shivji’s X-ray clinic, Kashmir’s first, was told his house in Nawab Bazaar took fifteen days to burn down completely. At places where Pandit houses could not be burnt down due to their proximity to Muslim houses, a novel method was employed to damage the house. A few men would slip into a Pandit house and cut down the wooden beam supporting the tin roof. As a result, it would cave in during the next snowfall. Then the tin sheets would be sold and so would the costly wood. Within a few months, the house would be destroyed.

A few weeks after my parents’ trip to Ludhiana, my uncle came to our room, accompanied by a middleman. ‘He is offering to buy our house,’ Uncle said.

He put a number in front of us. ‘This is ridiculously low,’ Father said. ‘This is much less than what I have spent on it in the last few years alone.’

‘I know,’ the man said. ‘But you have no idea what has become of your house. After you left, miscreants ransacked it completely. They took away even your sanitary fittings and water ran through your house for months. A few walls have already collapsed. It is in a very poor state now.’

Nobody said a word. From her bed, Ma finally spoke.

‘How does it look from outside?’

‘The plaster has broken off completely, but your evergreens are growing well. They are touching your first-floor balcony now.’

And so, home is lost to us permanently. Ma is taken to Ludhiana and the injections are administered. It takes her months to recover.

Sometime ago, in September 2012, I meet an old Pandit scholar in Srinagar who never left Kashmir. He was abducted by militants three times but always returned unscathed. We are in his study where he sits surrounded by books. On the wall on the left are pictures of Swami Vivekananda, Swami Vididhar—a revered saint of Kashmir—and Albert Einstein. He tells me about an incident that occurred in 1995. He was cycling back home from a temple when he was stopped by a Muslim professor he knew. ‘What are you doing here? Go to Bae’bdaem, some very rare books stolen from Pandit houses have been put on sale there,’ he told him. The scholar cycled furiously to Bae’bdaem and found that in a shed, a boatman had put thousands of books and rare manuscripts on sale for twenty rupees per kilo. The shed swarmed with foreign scholars from Europe. The boatman spotted him. ‘You look like a Pandit, are you?’ he asked. ‘Then your rate is different; it is thirty rupees.’

The scholar placed a hundred-rupee note in the boatman’s hand. ‘I will give you a hundred rupees for each book and this is the advance,’ he told him. The scholar picked up whatever he could, including a fifteenth-century Sanskrit commentary on the verses of Lal Ded and Maheswarnanda’s
Maharathamanjari
.

But in exile, scholarship is lost. Young boys and girls work hard in the refugee camp schools and diligently prepare for their board exams while their parents make bank demand drafts to pay for engineering entrance exams. Everybody wants to go to a good college in Maharashtra, or Karnataka, and escape the wretchedness of exile. Everybody wants to earn money and rebuild their lives. But there is no learning now. No one among us would be nicknamed Sartre now.

I wanted to run away as well, but not to Maharashtra or Karnataka. I wanted to escape the drudgery of boring classroom lectures. The results for the higher secondary exams were declared and I had performed averagely as usual. I think Father was embarrassed by my results. I offered him no passage to a secure future. He was unsure about what I would do. But I think by that time I had some clue. I was determined to do something different; I was determined to defy. When I closed my eyes, I imagined a bright round mass of white light inside my chest.

I followed that light one day and arrived in Chandigarh. Though Father initially opposed it, I had decided to join a college there. That was how I escaped Jammu. In Chandigarh I felt no pressure to work hard at my studies. Instead, I forged friendships with people older than me. They were comrades who read Gorky and Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche and Camus, and Chekhov and Flaubert. With them, I also read Weston La Barre’s
The Ghost Dance
. I spent days at the State Library, reading writers they would talk of. At night, over egg paranthas and tea at Ranjan’s shack outside the General Hospital, they recited the poetry of Avtaar Singh Paash and Shiv Kumar Batalvi. I visited Talwindi Salem, where Paash had lived and where he was killed by Sikh extremists some years ago. In his house, I saw the table on which he had scribbled:
Know what how why
. That round mass of white light inside my chest turned brighter.

I was in college when I received a letter from my sister in Jammu. ‘Madan Lal Uncle has passed away,’ she informed me. He lived in a small room near ours. When I visited my parents during my college holidays, he would come over and shake hands with me. ‘You are a man now,’ he would say, while Ma went to the kitchen to prepare a cup of kahwa for him. Sometimes he would come by in the evening and slip a few roasted cashewnuts into my hand. In his last days, he had lost his mind, my sister wrote. He would go up to the terrace of his house and shout all night from there. Father and others took him to the hospital where he died a few days later. He died homeless, away from his land, away from the benevolent gaze of his forefathers.

The next letter I received from home carried good news. Ravi’s family had finally decided to shift to Jammu. Both Ravi and his sister had reached marriageable ages. Ravi was hoping that he would be transfered to Jammu since no Kashmiri Pandit family was willing to send their daughter to Srinagar.

At the Bagh-e-Bahu garden, Ravi finally met Asha—the girl who would be his bride. She was very talented, a gold-medalist, Ravi said, in Zoology. ‘Together,’ I quipped, ‘you two complete the life sciences.’

Soon after their engagement, without telling Ravi, I went to see Asha, who taught at my former school. I told her who I was and she took me to her lab, where, surrounded by animal specimens preserved in formaldehyde, she brought me a bunomelet and a soft drink. ‘Which one will you have?’ she asked. ‘Thums Up,’ I replied. She smiled. ‘Like him,’ she whispered. I was so happy, I had butterflies in my stomach. A few weeks later, Ravi received his transfer to Gool, a small town in the Udhampur division. Some areas around Gool were affected by militancy, but Gool itself was peaceful, Ravi told us.

In the autumn of 1993, Ravi and Asha were married. All the affairs of the marriage were handled by Ravi’s friend Irshad. He stayed until every ritual was solemnized; until every feast was partaken of. In between the festivities, the two friends would sit in a corner and exchange whispers and quiet laughter—of the heady days at Kashmir University. A girl’s name—Sushma—would come up often. Ravi had once been in love with her.

There are pictures of those days—of Ravi and Asha picnicking at the Bagh-e-Bahu; of them at Patnitop, a tourist resort. They came to visit me in Chandigarh and we watched a movie and then ate at Hot Millions restaurant. A year later, Shubham was born. I sent them a greeting card from Chandigarh and two weeks later, I boarded a night bus to Jammu to hold my nephew in my arms. Asha and I corresponded and some of these letters reflected what I had been reading in the last two years. ‘
Ye kus se gav Camus
—Who is this Camus?’ Ravi would enquire teasingly and I would hesitantly break into a long speech.

Those years passed like a Mobius strip.

I returned to Jammu after my final year exams. A few months later the results were declared and I had scored the same—average marks. But in my heart I carried the best education, of Paash’s immortal lines—

Sabse khatarnaaq hota hai/murda shaanti se bhar jaana
Na hona tadap ka/ sab kucch sehan kar jaana
Ghar se nikalna kaam par/ aur kaam se lautkar ghar aana
Sabse khatarnaaq hota hai/ humare sapnon ka mar jaana

It’s most dangerous/ to be filled with the silence of a corpse
To not feel anything/ to tolerate everything
To leave home for work/ and to return home from work
It’s most dangerous/ when our dreams die

I also held dear a quote from
Lust for Life
, that I had bought for ten rupees at a book stall outside Punjab University—‘
After all, the world is still great
.’

With this book and a letter from the maverick filmmaker Arun Kaul, who had, at the time, produced a few programmes for Doordarshan, including the brilliant
Kashmir File
, I had arrived in Delhi in 1996. I started working with a newspaper in Jammu, but the earlier hardships we had witnessed in Jammu had left me bitter. I did not want to live there. So, I wrote a letter to Arun Kaul, and three weeks later, he replied. ‘If you like my nose and I don’t dislike your face, we might get along,’ he said in his letter.