Our Moon has Blood Clots Read online

  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.’

  One day our stay at the Rajput Sabha came to an abrupt end. The caretaker had been making noises about the rules of the community centre—nobody was allowed to stay beyond a week or, at the most, a couple of weeks. And we had already been there for more than a month.

  Whenever he mentioned the rules, Ma would cook something nice and send it across to the caretaker. And now almost five weeks had gone by and the matter was no longer in his hands. The management had been monitoring our stay and one day the caretaker came and asked us to vacate the room within twenty-four hours.

  Packing our few belongings didn’t take much time at all. But where to go was a question that loomed like a dark grey cloud over our existence. Once again, father had to go looking for accommodation.

  Late that evening he came back and told us, ‘I couldn’t find anything. We’ll have to shift to another dharamshala.’ We packed our stuff into an autorickshaw. A week ago, my grandmother had also joined us. She had left Kashmir earlier along with my uncle’s family.

  The Vinayak Dharamshala’s entrance was old, almost hidden behind the façade of a vegetable shop. The first thing I remember of that green building is the smell of ammonia, coming from the filthy urinal located almost in the middle of the building’s compound. Our room had a small window that looked out on to a wall. There was a string cot and there were marks of vermilion all over. The blades of the fan were damaged and it was covered with the dust of years. It was very hot and depressing. Ma sat in one corner of the room, on a newspaper sheet. And she cried. Within an hour of us moving in, the electricity went off. Outside, drunk labourers began to shout expletives at each other, jostling for a space to sleep in the compound outside our room. There were too many mosquitoes. After a while, Grandmother was so tired she fell asleep. Even in her sleep, her hand moved as if she were fanning herself. Father brought some food from the Vaishno Dhaba outside, but we had lost our appetite.

  We left the room at the first light of dawn. We looked at each other; we resembled chickenpox patients. We went to my uncle’s place; he was staying in a one-room dwelling. Together, my father and uncle went out searching again. We applied lime juice on our mosquito bites. My aunt made us some breakfast, but we couldn’t stay there for long, as their landlord also frowned upon tenants receiving guests. So we just sat there praying that we would find a place to stay. Father and Uncle returned that afternoon, their faces flushed and their sweat-soaked shirts stuck to their backs. But I could see that Father was relieved. A man called Madan Lal was the reason for that relief.

  Years ago, we had arrived late one night in Jammu City. The dak bungalow had no rooms available, so we went from hotel to hotel in the hope of finding a suitable room. It was then that we met Madan Lal, the manager of the Tawi View Hotel, which lay hidden behind a row of car-repair shops. Madan Lal was a Pandit who had settled in Jammu years ago. As he knew my uncle, who bore a striking resemblence to my father, he recognized us. That rainy night he offered us a room and even organized some food and warm tea for us. He was a tough taskmaster and kept the entire hotel very clean.

  And now, years later, it was he who rescued us from the roughest storm of our lives. He was now the manager of Hotel Gulmour. It was by sheer chance that he had spotted my father and uncle. Later he would tell this story a hundred times—how he was about to leave the hotel to visit an ailing relative and had almost missed them.

  He rented us a room for one thousand rupees, later bringing it down to nine hundred. We shifted immediately. Our room was on the top floor and its windows overlooked a hillock, on which was built a colony. The first thing we saw there was a huge, bright white wall that almost blinded one in the afternoon summer sun. In the coming days, it became a sort of barometer to guage how hot it was on any particular day.

  And so began a new chapter in our life. It was the height of summer by then. At the crack of dawn, we had to fetch drinking water from a tap in the basement. So, every morning we spent an hour ferrying water up to our room. It was an arduous task, especially because it was only in the morning that the air cooled down a bit and one could get some sleep. But if one slept in, there would be no water. Nonetheless, ours was still better than the life of those who lived in the refugee camps or in one-room settlements like my uncle’s.

  The nights were dreadful. After midnight, all the heat absorbed by the city would burst forth, like a dragon from its labyrinth. We would wet Ma’s dupattas and drape them over ourselves. By the time we finally drifted off to sleep, it was time to get up again to fetch water. Right after that, it was time to leave for school.

  I would wear a red checked shirt and jeans and walk to the main road. When I returned, the sun would be at its zenith. Walking from the main road till the hotel made me dizzy. After every three or four days, I would walk all the way from the school to the hotel—saving the bus fare—and use the saved money to buy a bottle of Gold Spot. Drinking water made me nauseous. I longed for cold water. Sometimes we would get a slab of ice from an exiled family that had a fridge. Later, we made a novel arrangement for cold water. Every morning, I would trundle up to Raghunath Bazaar and buy a slab of ice for a rupee and hurry back with it. We would put it in a polythene bag and place the bag in a small water cooler. That way we managed to get cold water till lunchtime.

  That summer we ate very frugally. Most of the time our bellies were filled with water. On many nights I dreamt of our kitchen garden in Srinagar, and that I was having a bath underneath the tap there. ‘I wish I had a pipe near my mouth through which I could keep sipping cold water,’ my grandmother often said.

  We would get a copy of the Daily Excelsior every day at the hotel. After he had gone through it, Madan Lal would let me read it. I noticed that far too many obituaries of old people had begun to appear in the newspaper. The harsh summer and the agony of homelessness were taking a heavy toll.

  One morning in June 1990, I was sitting in the hotel’s reception when I froze at the sight of the front page of the newspaper. It read—‘Dreaded militant Latif Lone killed in an encounter’. I wanted to rush up to our room and tell my father about it. But I stayed put and read the whole
report. Latif had been shot dead in an encounter with security forces. The report said he had been the mastermind of many ambushes against security forces, including the one outside my house in which two BSF soldiers had been killed. It said that he had received training from the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.

  I went upstairs and told my parents. Ma began to cry. She kept saying: Latifa, jawan-e-rael; Latifa jawan-e-rael. Latif, he was in the prime of youth; Latif, he was in the prime of youth.

  That day, no food was cooked in our room. Ma did not eat even a morsel of food. We couldn’t believe that Latif was no more.

  We learnt the details of the episode later from Ravi. While every Pandit household in our locality had fled, two had decided to stay back. Ravi’s family was one of them. Ravi had recently got a lecturer’s job in a government college. He thought nobody would hurt his family. He trusted his friends and colleagues.

  On the day Latif was killed, the results of the Class 12 Board Examination had been declared, and he had stood outside Bombay Beauties, holding a Gazette in his hands. He wore a new pathani suit and, like always, his eyes were adorned with kohl. Suddenly, an army gypsy screeched to a halt in front of him, and Latif took to his heels. Behind Bombay Beauties was a barbed-wire fence beyond which were a few houses and open fields. As he was crossing the fence, Latif’s salwar got entangled in the wire. The soldiers caught up with him and fired. Latif’s aunt, who was standing nearby, tried to come in between, but she could not match the speed of the bullets. He died dangling between the wires. His body was taken away immediately.

  Ravi said that at least a hundred thousand people attended his funeral. A few weeks later, one of our erstwhile Muslim neighbours was found hanging from a tree, a few miles from his house. The man was a tailor who sometimes sold cinema tickets in black. He was also an opium addict. Latif’s organization had suspected him of passing on information about Latif to the army, so he was abducted, shot in the knees and hung by his neck.

  As I read and reread the news report on Latif’s death, I remembered one time when Latif had just climbed down after fitting the antenna on Ravi’s roof. At the base of the antenna, on a block of wood, I had seen a strange formation and it had fascinated me.

  When he came down, I had asked Latif, ‘Bhaijaan, what is this?’

  He had looked at it, run his hand through my hair as he always did and said, ‘Algae!’

  PART THREE

  From March 1990 onwards, the killings of Pandits in the Valley increased manifold. The news reports coming in from Kashmir were tragic. In the name of Azadi, the Pandits were hounded on the streets and killed brutally. Killings of the Hindu minority had turned into an orgy; a kind of bloodlust. By April, 1990, the mask was completely off. It was not only the armed terrorist who took pride in such killings—the common man on the streets participated in some of these heinous murders as well.

  In downtown Srinagar’s Chota Bazaar area, thirty-six-year-old telecommunications officer B.K. Ganju had been warned that his name was on a ‘hit list’ in a neighbourhood mosque. It was March 1990. Fearing for their lives, Ganju and his wife had decided to leave Srinagar the next morning. Early the next morning, their telephone began to ring incessantly. But they did not answer it.

  Soon afterwards, there was a loud knock at the door. Mrs Ganju asked who it was.

  ‘Where is Ganju? We have some urgent work with him,’ said the voice from outside.

  ‘He has already left for work,’ she told them. The calling out and knocking on the door persisted, but she wouldn’t open it.

  Suddenly, there was silence, and Mrs Ganju went to a first-floor window to look outside. There was nobody at the door. Then she heard noises from one of the rooms below. The strangers were now trying to break in through a window. She urged her husband to hide in the attic, in a drum partially filled with rice. By that time, the two men had entered the house. One of them was carrying a rifle and the other a pistol. Pushing Mrs Ganju aside, they searched all the rooms and, unable to find her husband, they left.

  In old Srinagar, houses are built quite close to each other. One of the Muslim women in Ganju’s neighbourhood had seen him hiding in the drum. As the men came out, she signalled to them, telling them what she had seen. The men returned and went directly to the attic and shot B.K. Ganju dead inside that drum.

  As they were coming down, Mrs Ganju asked them to kill her as well.

  ‘No, someone should be left to wail over his dead body,’ they replied.

  In Anantnag, in south Kashmir, the relatives of the renowned Kashmiri poet and scholar Sarvanand Kaul ‘Premi’ had been urging him to leave the Valley. But Premi had been confident that nobody would touch him. He had spent his whole life with his Muslim neighbours, he said. They will protect me, he told his relatives.

  When he was seventeen, Premi had participated in the Quit India movement against British rule. Later, he also played a pivotal role in the Quit Kashmir movement against the Dogra Maharaja of Kashmir, in 1946–47. A brilliant scholar, Premi had translated Tagore’s Gitanjali, and the Bhagwad Gita into Kashmiri. He was secular to the core—in his prayer room, he kept a rare manuscript of the Koran. After his retirement, he had taught for free for three months a year in two schools, one run by an Islamic and the other a Hindu educational society.

  On the night of April 29, 1990, three armed men barged into Premi’s house. They ordered the family to assemble in one room. ‘Bring all your valuables here,’ one of them told a family member. These were brought—jewellery, cash, heirloom pashmina shawls. Then the men ordered all the women to hand over whatever ornaments they were wearing. This was complied with as well. The valuables were packed into a big suitcase which Premi was ordered to carry.

  ‘Where are you taking him?’ the women begged of the three men.

  ‘Don’t worry, he will return soon,’ one of the men said.

  As Premi lifted the suitcase, his hand was trembling. After all, he was sixty-six years old. Unable to watch his father struggling, Virender, his twenty-seven-year-old son, insisted on accompanying him.

  In the darkness of night, father and son were led away by the armed men. Their family members waited for them all night. But the two did not return.

  The police found their bodies hanging from a tree a day later. The men had hammered nails between their eyebrows, where the tilak is applied. Their limbs were broken and their bodies ravaged with cigarette burns. They had been shot as well.

  In Bandipora, in north Kashmir, twenty-eight-year-old Girja Tiku worked as a laboratory assistant in a school. Her family had already migrated to Jammu. But, being poor, the family depended heavily on Girja’s salary.

  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 min
ority.

  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.