Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (20 page)

When we met at his residence, he told me, ‘I can expect a Kashmiri Pandit to be anything—cowardly, sly, or arrogant. But he cannot be mediocre. It is just not in his genes. So rise up to your genes at least.’

I worked with him for six months, by which time
Kashmir File
had come to an end. Though I was still being paid a salary, there was hardly any work. And I still wanted to learn and so I quit my job.

In June 1997, I was still struggling to find another job and I was penniless. On June 13, a fire broke out in Delhi’s Uphaar cinema and fifty-nine people lost their lives. The next day, Ravi called me. ‘I just got a little worried; I called to check if you were all right,’ he said. I said that I was.

Even in that penury, I really thought I was all right.
Struggle
. The word seemed so romantic. I had something of a support system in the city, though—a girl older than me and in love with me. She lived in a working women’s hostel. I also had a friend who wrote software programs for a living and read Bertrand Russell at night.

At 4 a.m. on June 16, the phone rings. I wake up, startled. I answer it. And
…

I have no recollection of what happened during the next three hours. At 7 a.m., though, I remember rushing to the women’s hostel to meet the girl. The guard knows me. He smiles. ‘So early today?’ he asks. She comes out; she is annoyed—I woke her up so early. I tell her what has happened. I think, she will say something now.
Now, now she will hold my hand. Now, now I will cry
. But she says nothing. She does nothing. She nods sympathetically and suppresses a yawn. ‘I’ll leave,’ I say. I run to my friend’s house. I knock. He opens the door. There is a razor in his hand, he is shaving. I tell him.
Now, now: one embrace. Now, now he’ll make me sit down. Now, now he’ll ask what I am going to do
. But nothing. He keeps shaving his chin. ‘It’s God’s will,’ he says. I run away.

I remember an incident Ma had narrated to me. My parents had recently married, and along with my uncle’s family, they had gone to the Exhibition Grounds in Srinagar to watch a circus show. There was an artist who had climbed up on to a high platform where he was going to set himself afire and then jump into a pool of water below. But at the last moment he developed cold feet. He lit matchstick after matchstick, but he could not get himself to perform the act.

I became like that circus artist. I would make friends; we would eat, drink, joke. But I could never get myself to take that final plunge. I isolated a portion of my heart. I kept in it things I would share with no one. Like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s lines in
Bandit Queen: Khud se kahi jo kahi, kahi kisi se bhi nahi
(What I said to myself, I told no one).

That night I am alone on the bus to Jammu, in the last seat. They are showing
Khalnayak
on the bus. I am numb with pain. At dawn, we cross the border of Jammu and Kashmir. At the Lakhanpur gate, I buy the
Daily Excelsior
. No, no, no, no. This is not Ravi. Why is there blood on his face? Why is his photo on the front page? So it is Ravi.

The previous day, Ravi left Jammu with two other Pandit colleagues for Gool. The summer vacations were over and I’d met him a fortnight ago. ‘I am trying to be transferred to Jammu. Shubham is growing—he needs me,’ he had told me. Just before Gool, the bus comes to a halt and armed men enter. They have specific information about three Pandits on board the bus. Ravi knows what this means. He hugs the other two men. They are asked to step out of the bus, which leaves without them. Ravi tries to fight the men. He is hit in the face. All three of them are shot. That midnight, the police come knocking at the door of Ravi’s house in Jammu. His father opens the door. They tell him. The police want no trouble. The family is asked to cremate the bodies as quickly as possible.

I reach Jammu. Ravi is dead. My brother is dead, my hero is dead. Strangely, the only memory that comes back to me is of the time we went to Shalimar Garden and saw that green-haired foreigner.

Ravi is dead. Life is empty. Family is meaningless. Ma never recovers. I think it is from that moment onwards that she began to slip away. Ravi’s father never recovered. He kept saying: ‘
Ye gav mein kabail raid’e
—this is my personal tribal raid.’

The tribal raid. When invaders from Pakistan came and destroyed what my maternal grandfather had built. That is my maternal uncle’s story—of his losses when he was just ten. That story is very much a part of our exile. I will let Ravi’s father tell you that story. In his own voice.

PART FOUR

A
fter Ravi’s death, things fell apart. The family began to disintegrate. In a few months, Asha shifted elsewhere with Shubham. Ravi’s mother spent the hours endlessly watching television. She refused to take medicines for her diabetes and high blood pressure. A crazy restlessness crept into Ravi’s father. He would visit us sometimes in Delhi, making an overnight journey, and after an hour or two had passed, he would get up and say he wanted to go back. It would take us hours to convince him to stay for at least one day
.

In the summer of 2001, he came to Delhi. We had recently shifted house. He had a vague idea of where we lived. Without informing us, he landed on our doorstep one morning. He had made an overnight journey from Jammu. We were quite surprised at how he was able to locate the house. ‘I just saw a towel hung over the clothes line in the balcony; I reckoned it must be yours,’ he said. By the evening, of course, he was making noises about returning to Jammu the next day
.

I remember the exact moment when Ravi’s father began to tell me the story of the tribal raid of 1947. To prevent him from leaving the next day, I hid his bag in my room. He came looking for it, and ran his eyes over my bookshelf. I remembered a story I had heard from my mother—how he had a huge collection of books and how some of them were stolen by a cousin who sold them off to buy cigarettes. I mentioned this to him. ‘Who told you this?’ he asked, and his eyes shone and he slipped into a reverie. I was silent, avoiding looking at him so as not to make him conscious. ‘You know, I came to Delhi for the first time in the 70s; I think it was 1976
…’

When I came to Delhi for the first time, I felt so lost. It was a January afternoon, I think in 1976, when the bus came to a halt somewhere in the middle of a vegetable market, and the conductor of the bus shouted that we had arrived in Dilli. I was the last man to get off the bus. As I climbed down the steps near the exit of the bus, the conductor smiled at me, and I thought that he had noticed my trembling legs. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said to me with a grin, ‘this is your own city; a man from your land ruled here till a few years ago, and now his daughter is its empress.’ I was so taken aback by the crowds that I forgot what Jawaharlal Nehru, the man the bus conductor was referring to, looked like. I forgot his long aristocratic nose, the trademark of a Kashmiri. I forgot how he had appeared to me, almost thirty years ago when he climbed onto a wooden platform erected specially for him, in Lal Chowk, and addressed his own people—the people of Kashmir. I was then a young boy of ten, and I was a refugee.

And now, Nehru was dead. Hundreds of miles away from the familiar spaces of Lal Chowk, I was jostling for a foothold amidst a sea of people, and it seemed to me that they were coming at me from all sides. I somehow managed to get away and sat on the pavement, keeping my bag beside me. I kept holding it, as I had been advised by a friend’s father who had visited Delhi a few years ago and had his baggage stolen while he stopped to buy himself a bun. I was also hungry and thirsty but I did not move. I then remembered the lunch my wife, Mohini, had packed for me as I left home. I would have probably taken a bus back to Jammu first and then another to Kashmir, had Ahdoo not arrived then and taken me to his home.

Ahdoo was a friend who dealt in carpets, who had, five years ago, extended his business to Delhi. Since then, he had invited me numerous times to visit him, and it was when he became a father that I finally accepted his offer and travelled beyond Kashmir for the first time in my life. In three days, I was back home, eating the turnips cooked by my wife.

It has been almost thirty years since that trip, but I still hold my bag when I visit Delhi. Though it does not matter where I live now. Delhi or the Deccan, it is all the same to me. No land is my land now.

When I saw Nehru for the first time in Lal Chowk, I was a refugee in my own state. Sixty years later, I am a refugee in my own country.

Sometimes, when I am alone, I almost hear Arnimal sing her lines to me:
Lass’e kami’e hawasay, maazas gaum basbasay
. There is no reason for me to live, I am just withering away.

Mohini, my wife, lives with me in a refugee settlement. She deserves a medal for living. One of her kidneys is damaged. She is diabetic. She has lost vision in her right eye.

After Ravi’s death, I cannot stay in one place for long. I go and visit my daughter in Chandigarh. No sooner have I removed my shoes than I have this urge to run away. I go to my sister’s house in Delhi. But from there as well, I feel like running away. It is only here, in the one-room dwelling of this refugee settlement, that I accept my destiny.

Every morning, I get up and read the newspaper. I always skip the first page. It carries the same news items, day after day. Like soggy peanuts, they are fried and made crisp and then served with catchy headlines for extra flavour. The second page carries a few pictures, and a few lines underneath each picture. The obituaries.

Prabhavati Kaul—originally from Habba Kadal, Srinagar—passes away in Janipura, Jammu.

Mohan Lal Dhar of Baramulla died on Monday in Talab Tillo, Jammu. Tenth-day rites at the Rajinder Park, Canal Road.

His ears still reverberating with the sound of the roaring waters of the Jhelum, Mohan Lal’s tenth-day kriya will be performed in the dirty and characterless waters of the canal.

A priest has been called for conducting Mohan Lal Dhar’s kriya ceremony. He is in a hurry, and he makes this clear, before even beginning to recite shlokas in his adenoidal voice. Rice has been cooked on a kerosene stove, and small mounds are made. Immersed in water up to his knees, the son breaks the creation of a potter over his shoulder. Then he takes a quick dip in the shallow water.

Every day, after going through the second page, I decide not to read the newspapers anymore. It makes me feel like Chitragupt—the clerk in the office of the lord of death, Yama—who maintains the records of life and death. I feel guilty, as if my reading the newspaper causes these deaths. But so far I have not stopped reading them. It is because of a sense of duty—of attending the death ceremonies and kriyas of people known to me.

On the banks of the canal, people with probably the same sense of duty have gathered to register their presence. Soon they form small groups and break into various discussions. The Kashmir situation, to begin with.

‘Vajpayee’s government has done nothing for us. Its Kashmir policy has been the worst so far.’

‘Arre Dhar sahab, have you heard this—Chaman Lal Bhat’s daughter has married a Bengali boy.’

‘
Mahra
, it is a common trend now. Bengalis, Punjabis, Madrasis, Marathis—our children are marrying across India.’

‘Forget it, friend. Tell me, what is your son upto, these days?’

‘He has just completed his B.Tech, and is now pursuing an MBA from Pune.’

‘Your sister’s son—I heard he is a manager in a software company in Delhi. My sister-in-law’s daughter, she has a BE in electronics—drawing a five-figure salary in a multinational firm. The family has their own house in Noida. Maybe both of them can click.’

The priest is looking at his watch at regular intervals. After he finishes this task, there is another in the offing—a Yagnopavit ceremony. Hymns are being fired like salvos. Even if the priest forgets to recite a couple of them, it would not matter. If the soul is pure, it will go to heaven. And if it is not, how can a shloka or two salvage the soul? The entire
Dharmashastras
would be of little help in that case.

Anyway, the ceremony is over, and so is a chapter called Mohan Lal Dhar.

When a person dies, the ghost of the deceased hovers around his mortal remains, and mourns for those he has left behind. To rouse dispassion in the ghost, the son to whom he is greatly attached performs the
Kapal-Kriya
—the breaking of his skull.

Who will rouse that dispassion in me?

It is said that the heaviest load in this universe is that of a father carrying his son’s body. Ask me, I have carried it myself and my shoulders are still bent. It was I who took a dip in the same canal water on my son Ravi’s tenth-day kriya, and then on the eleventh day, through the efficacy of mantras sent his soul to the abode of my ancestors.

My condition is much like that of the king of Nagrama—now Nagam Tehsil, where I served as a teacher, many years ago. Damudhar, as he was called, built his kingdom, Satrasteng, on a plateau and also had a dam constructed for water. One day, as he prepared to leave for a bath, he was stopped by Brahmins, who asked for food. But the king refused, saying he would have his bath first and then feed them. Angered by the king’s refusal, the Brahmins cursed him, turning him into a snake. The legend says that the snake can still be seen in search of water. He is not to be freed from the curse until he hears the whole
Ramayana
recited to him in a single day.