Our Moon has Blood Clots Read online

  Published by Random House India in 2013

  Copyright © Rahul Pandita 2013

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  EPUB ISBN 9788184003901

  Published in association with the New India Foundation

  For Ravi, my brother, my first hero

  … and an earlier time when the flowers were not stained with blood, the moon with blood clots!

  —Pablo Neruda, ‘Oh, My Lost City’

  The best in me are my memories. Many people will come to life in them, people who gave their blood while they lived, and who will now give their example.

  —Anton Donchev, Time of Parting

  Jammu, 1990

  They found the old man dead in his torn tent, with a pack of chilled milk pressed against his right cheek. It was our first June in exile, and the heat felt like a blow in the back of the head. His neighbour, who discovered his lifeless body in the refugee camp, recalled later that he had found his Stewart Warner radio on, playing an old Hindi film song:

  Aadmi musafir hai

  Aata hai, jaata hai

  Man is a traveller

  He comes, he goes

  The departed was known to our family. His son and my father were friends. He was born in the Kashmir Valley and had lived along the banks of the Jhelum River.

  Triloki Nath was cremated quickly next to the listless waters of the canal in Jammu. Someone remarked that back home the drain next to the old man’s house was bigger than the canal. The women of the family were not permitted to wail in his memory. The landlord of the one-room dwelling where Triloki Nath’s son lived had been clear: he did not want any mourning noises inside his premises. He said it would bring him bad luck.

  It was barely a room. Until a few months ago, it had been a cowshed. Now the floor had been cemented and its walls were painted with cheap blue distemper. The landlord had rented out the room on the condition that no more than four family members could stay there. More people would mean more water consumption. The old man was the fifth member of the family, and that was why he had been forced to live alone in the Muthi refugee camp, set up on the outskirts of Jammu City, on a piece of barren land infested with snakes and scorpions.

  Ours was a family of Kashmiri Pandits, and we had fled from Srinagar, in the Kashmir Valley, earlier that year. We had been forced to leave the land where our ancestors had lived for thousands of years. Most of us now sought refuge in the plains of Jammu, because of its proximity to home. I had just turned fourteen, and that June, I lived with my family in a small, damp room in a cheap hotel.

  We went to the refugee camp sometimes to meet a friend or a relative. When I went there for the first time, I remember being confronted with the turgid smell of despair emanating from the people who waited for their turns outside latrines, or taps. New families arrived constantly, and they waited at the periphery of the camp for tents to be allotted to them. I saw an old woman wearing her thick pheran in that intense heat, sitting on a bundle and crying. Her son sat nearby mumbling something to himself, a wet towel over his head.

  One afternoon I went to the camp to meet a friend. He hadn’t turned up at school that day, as his grandmother had fainted that morning from heat and exhaustion. They made her drink glucose water, and she was feeling better now. The two of us went to a corner and sat there on a parapet, talking about girls. We perspired a lot, but in that corner we had a little privacy. Nobody could see us there except a cow that grazed on a patch of comatose grass, and near my feet there was an anthill where ants laboured hard, filling their larder with grains and the wings of a butterfly.

  Suddenly there was a commotion, and my friend jumped down and said, ‘I think a relief van has come.’ While he ran, and I ran after him, he told me that vans came nearly every day, distributing essential items to the camp residents: kerosene oil, biscuits, milk powder, rice, vegetables.

  By the time we reached the entrance of the camp, a queue had already formed in front of a load carrier filled with tomatoes. I also stood at the end of it, behind my friend. Two men stood in front of the heap, and one of them gave away a few anaemic tomatoes to the people in the queue. He kept saying, ‘Dheere dheere. Slowly, slowly.’ Some people were returning with armfuls of tomatoes. My friend looked at a woman who held them to her breast and he winked at me. Meanwhile, some angry voices rose from the front. The tomatoes were running out, and many people were still waiting. They had begun to give only three tomatoes to each person. In a few minutes it was reduced to one tomato per person. A man in the queue objected to two people from the same family queuing up. ‘I have ten mouths to feed,’ said one. An old woman intervened. ‘Do we have to fight over a few tomatoes now?’ she asked. After that, there was silence.

  By the time our turn came, and it came in a matter of minutes, it was clear that not everyone would get tomatoes. One of the men distributing them procured a rusty knife. They began to cut the tomatoes into half and give them away. I thought I was hallucinating. Or maybe this was the effect of the hot loo wind that, the inhabitants of this city maintained, could do your head in. I remembered our kitchen garden back home in Srinagar, and all the tomatoes I had wasted, plucking them before they could ripen and hitting them for sixes with my willow bat. And now in my hands somebody had thrust half a tomato. Others in the queue accepted it as I had, and I saw them returning to their tents.

  I looked at my friend. There was nothing to say. We returned to our private spot and threw two half slices in front of the cow. We were fourteen. I often think of that moment. Maybe if we had been grown-ups and responsible for our families, we too would have returned silently with those half tomatoes. At fourteen we knew we were refugees, but we had no idea what family meant. And I don’t think we realized then that we would never have a home again.

  PART ONE

  I arrived in Delhi one nippy morning in October 1996 with a rucksack in which I had put two sets of clothes and several books including a well-thumbed copy of Irving Stone’s Lust for Life that I very nearly knew by heart. The bus that had brought me from Jammu stopped at the Red Fort and suddenly, I felt very vulnerable. I thought this city would suck me into its dark underbelly; it would swallow me whole.

  I was one of the thousands of migrants who landed each day at the doorstep of India’s capital from every crevice and corner of the country. Like most migrants, I had also come to Delhi in search of a better life, to regain some of what my family had lost during the exodus from the Kashmir Valley. But there was a difference between the other migrants and me. On festivals, and on family functions, or when they were dying, they knew they could go back to where they had come from. I couldn’t do that. I knew I was in permanent exile. I could own a house in this city, or any other part of the world, but not in the Kashmir Valley where my family came from.

  The sense of vulnerability soon left me as I made friends, and fell in love, and wrote forty-page letters to beloveds until the early hours of the morning, when electric-motor pumps would be switched on in the water
-deprived Punjabi colonies inhabited by those who had fled Pakistan after Partition. I ate my first pizza, drank my first whisky. A few years later when my parents joined me after leaving Jammu, I would come home drunk, sometimes way past midnight, and speak in English to my father who would open the door for me. He never spoke to me about it, but when he felt my accent was getting stranger, he would ask my mother to tell me to go easy on the ‘Coca-Cola’. That phase is over. I now insist on carrying my own key. But even now, when I come home, my father coughs from inside his room. He won’t sleep until I return, whatever the time.

  There are no more forty-page letters. All that remains of those days is a plastic bag containing bracelets, photographs with lipstick marks on their backs, and my old copy of Lust for Life. There is also an old issue of the Daily Excelsior newspaper that every Kashmiri Pandit subscribed to in Jammu because it informed them of who of the community had died in exile. I hardly ever open it. But, sometimes, when I’m angry at the TV shows where our murderers speak about our return, I do. On its front page is a picture of Ravi’s mutilated face. The blood from his nose—the result of a blow from the butt of a Kalashnikov—has dried up. His forehead still looks beautiful and clear, and so does his moustache that I had wanted to imitate when I was young.

  It is then that the voices come back to me. The loud clapping. The jeering. The chants reaching a crescendo. The hiss of the loudspeaker. The noise beats hard on my chest, like a drumbeat gone berserk. My head feels like an inferno, and a cold sweat traverses down my back.

  Hum kya chaaaahte—Azadiiiii!

  What do we want—Freeeedom!

  Once I was with a few non-Kashmiri friends, and one of them was enacting a scene he had witnessed in video footage shot early in 1990 in Kashmir: a mammoth crowd in Lal Chowk, shouting, ‘Indian dogs go back!’ and ‘Hum kya chahte—Azadi!’. It made all of them laugh. To me, it brought back memories of the kicks I had braved in school while I sang the National Anthem. But in gatherings like these, my friends shouted for Azadi just for fun. For them it was just a joke—the sight of a crowd clenching fists, demanding freedom in a funny accent. Before I had improved mine, my friends would make fun of me as well.

  ‘Look at our friend here, he doesn’t live in Bharat, he lives in Barat.’

  ‘Tonight, he will go to his gar, not ghar.’

  I would laugh with them, making fun, in turn, of some of them for their inability to use the nukta, the small dot that makes jahaaj what it is: jahaaz.

  But this word, Azadi, it frightens me. Images of those days return to haunt me. People out on the roads. People peering out of their windows. People on the rooftops of buses. In shikaras. And in mosques.

  ‘Hum kya chaaaahte—Azadiiiii!’

  I no longer sing the National Anthem. A few years ago, a child beggar at a traffic signal pinned the national flag onto my shirt. I threw it away in the waste bin of a café near my house.

  It was the day I realized I could no longer remember my mother’s voice.

  When she could still speak, Ma would go for walks in the neighbourhood park in Delhi, wearing her North Star sneakers. Father would watch her close the door quietly behind her and, after she was gone, he would call after her, knowing very well that she could no longer hear him.

  ‘For God’s sake, don’t repeat your home story in front of everyone!’

  The home story was a statement that Ma had got into the habit of telling anyone who would listen. It didn’t matter to her whether they cared or not. It had become a part of herself, entrenched like a precious stone in the mosaic of her identity.

  By the time her voice had failed her in 2004, I noticed that she had started repeating this statement much too often. But now, when I no longer remember her voice, I realize how much that statement meant to Ma. It was the only thing that reminded her of who she was, more than the occasional glances she would steal at the mirror when no one else was looking.

  ‘Our home in Kashmir had twenty-two rooms.’

  I remember the day when I realized I had no memory of her voice. That morning I had been reading the newspapers like I did everyday. I would read a report or two, and Ma would point out advertisements of houses for sale. There were many of them.

  ‘Book now, pay later.’

  ‘Wooden flooring.’

  ‘Uninterrupted power supply.’

  ‘Ten minutes drive from the airport.’

  The last one was my mother’s favourite. When she could still speak, she would pick up the papers while I was brushing my teeth or shaving, and she would show them to me and say, ‘See, this one is close to the airport.’

  Ma never got to fly in her life. But she thought proximity to the airport was important to her son.

  That morning I sat beside Ma’s bed with the papers perched on my lap. I looked at the advertisements for the apartments, then at Ma. Her eyes were open, though hazy with tears that would stream down their corners. Her gaze was fixed at the ceiling above her. The thought crossed my mind that she was counting something; perhaps she was calculating our days and years in exile.

  I don’t know what happened to me then, I just got up and ran out. I tried to remember how she would comment after sifting through the descriptions of her dream houses. I tried hard. I tried to remember what she would say after discovering flakes of tobacco in the pocket of my white shirt, which she insisted on washing with her own hands. I tried to repeat her voice in my head when she would wake up at midnight after I came home from work or after meeting friends, to serve me piping hot food, curious about how my day had gone. None of it came back to me. No matter how hard I tried, I drew a blank. The words were there, but the texture, tone and contours of her voice had gone missing. They were lost to me forever.

  I could not even remember what she sounded like when she chanted what had become her personal anthem for more than a decade: Our home in Kashmir had twenty-two rooms.

  I remember pressing my foot over a cockroach in desperation as it tried to crawl away.

  We don’t know for certain where my ancestors originally came from. But in all probability they travelled from the plains of Punjab to settle in the Kashmir Valley, in the lap of the Himalayas, roughly three thousand years ago. They took the same route to enter Kashmir as their future generations took many times to escape from there, mostly due to religious persecution.

  The land where they settled had been a lake. The valley had emerged out of this body of water due to a geological event, most probably an earthquake. My ancestors made it home gradually, building a legend around their settlement. They said that the vast lake that Kashmir had been before they settled there was inhabited by a demon called Jalodbhava. He had been granted immortality so long as he remained underwater. It was then that one of our gods drained the lake, sending Jalodbhava into hiding over a hill. Ultimately, our patron goddess assumed the form of a bird and dropped a pebble from her beak that, before landing, turned into a big rock, killing the demon instantly.

  The land was abundant with nature’s bounty, but geographically isolated. Perhaps under the spell of nature’s magnificence, my ancestors took to the pursuit of knowledge. It is thus that Kashmir became the primeval home of the Brahmins, or Brahmans—those who are conscious.

  We developed our own philosophy, our own way of life. We held that the world is real, as opposed to the other Hindu philosophy of the world being maya, an illusion. For us, everything in this world was a manifestation of this consciousness. We rejected the otherness of god. We evolved a way of life that was distinct from the bell-ringing, hymn-reciting popular religion. We believed that the world was essentially a creative expression of Shiva, or consciousness. Thus everyone could become Shiva, irrespective of caste or gender.

  Kashmir is so beautiful, my grandfather used to say, even the gods are jealous of it. Not only of its beauty, but also of its contribution to art and scholarship. Arthur Anthony MacDonnell, the great professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University, once remarked, ‘History is the one weak spot in
Indian literature. It is, in fact, non-existent.’ But the twelfth-century Kashmiri Pandit scholar, Kalhana, putting aside the Hindu question of existence being ‘dream and delusion’, penned the magnum opus, Rajatarangini (River of Kings), which is counted among the world’s most extraordinary historical works.

  In the tenth century, the great Kashmiri Pandit scholar Abhinavagupta wrote thirty-five works, including Tantraloka, a treatise on Kashmiri Shaivism, and Abhinavabharti, a splendid commentary on the Natyasastra, the seed of the Indian performing arts. The eleventh century Kashmiri Pandit poet Kshemendra wrote Brhatkathamanjari, a collection of stories representing the lost tradition of brhatkatha (big story). From the same text, another Pandit scholar, Somadeva, prepared the famous Kathasaritsagara (Oceans of the Streams of Stories).

  The eleventh century Pandit poet Bilhana had a secret affair with a king’s daughter. When it was discovered, he was thrown into prison and ordered to be executed by beheading. Even while facing the prospect of execution, he wrote poetry. It was in the darkness of prison that he wrote his Chaurapanchasika (The Collection of Fifty Verses by a Love Thief).

  Many centuries earlier, Kashmiri scholars made immense contributions to Buddhism, which came to Kashmir with the emperor Asoka who extended his rule over Kashmir around 250 BC. It was in Kashmir that Buddhist scriptures were written in Sanskrit for the first time. The revered monk Gunavarman, who belonged to a royal family of Kashmir from the fifth century AD, refused the throne when it was offered to him upon the king’s death as he had no interest in wordly matters, wishing only to spread the teachings of the Buddha. He travelled to Ceylon, Java and China as well, propagating Buddhism. It was Kumarajiva, a Buddhist monk, whose father was a Kashmiri Pandit, who translated the Buddhist Lotus Sutra into Chinese in 406 AD. Guru Padmasambhava, or Rinpoche, who is also referred to as the Second Buddha, spent time in Kashmir, drinking from its knowledge reservoir. A Pandit scholar, Ratnavaja, was assigned the task of rebuilding the circular terrace of the Bsam-yas monastery in central Tibet, which was burnt down in the later part of the tenth century. In the early eleventh century, a female Pandit scholar called Lakshmi travelled to Tibet and taught Anuttarayoga Tantra.