Our Moon has Blood Clots Page 11
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.
The Jammu of the early nineties was in the grip of criminal elements. Each area had its don, and some of them had links with arms and drug smugglers. Every day, the newspapers would report a stabbing or a shootout. Some unruly elements thought that since the Pandit community was in distress, their girls would be freely available for exploitation. Out of sheer desperation, and to escape the hell of their daily lives, a few girls made that compromise. They eloped with young men who promised them a better life. But in most cases, such offers to elope were resisted. After all, we had escaped from the Valley to protect our lives, and more than our lives, our dignity.
Since it was a relatively new colony, Bhagwati Nagar had limited transport facilities. A Matador minibus would come every half hour or so and it was much coveted. Since I would leave for school early in the morning, I would catch it daily, sitting on the ‘friend’ seat, next to the driver’s.
After a few weeks, I noticed that the driver had begun to behave very sweetly towards me, even letting me ride for free. I thought we had forged a kind of friendship and that was why he made this gesture. But soon, I would be proved wrong. One fine day it became clear what he had wanted all along. He had in fact set his eyes on a Kashmiri girl from our neighbourhood. Her family came from a village in Kashmir and they were trying to retain their dignity in a small rented room. The girl went to my school. The driver had decorated his minibus with stickers carrying mushy messages. On the back, he had put a sticker that had an image of an arrow piercing through a heart, underneath which was written: Love for sale, 100% discount.
The driver wanted to convey his love to the girl. He had bought a greeting card for the purpose. Now he wanted me to write a nice mushy message inside the card. Kavita-type, he said. Then he put his hand in his shirt pocket and fished out a red sketch pen. ‘Here, write with this,’ he said. He grinned and I could see his tobacco-stained teeth.
The bait that he would take no fare from me from then onwards proved too tempting. I took the sketch pen from him, and after thinking for a few seconds, I wrote:
Mountains can fly, rivers can dry,
You can forget me, but never can I
‘Ab iska matlab bhi samjha do, praava.’ Now tell me what this means, brother. I told him. His face broke into another grin. He took the card and kept it carefully in the glove box. Of course, when the conductor came, he waved him away.
In the evening, as I was walking back home, I saw that girl’s father approaching from the other end of our street. He walked slowly, a wet towel on his head. He looked at me and smiled. ‘Namaskar,’ I greeted him. ‘Orzu, durkoth.’ He wished me well-being and strong knees. ‘How is your father?’ he asked and without waiting for my reply, he continued, ‘You know, the landlord is troubling us too much. Every day he comes and takes oil from us, or sugar, or rice. This would never have been a problem in Shahar. But here, you know what hard times have befallen us.’
‘Anyway, I’m just worried about—,’ he mentioned his daughter. ‘Keep an eye on her, will you?’
The greeting card flashed in front of my eyes. And my writing in red sketch pen. And the mushy poem I had scrawled.
Mountains can fly, rivers can dry,
You can forget me, but never can I
I mumbled something and fled. I reached home, but the image of the girl’s father did not leave me. I tried hard to forget about him. I went to the rooftop to look at a girl in the neighbourhood. I tried watching TV. I tried reading A Tale of Two Cities. But the image of that man did not leave me. I dreamt of him that night.
The next morning, I woke up, got ready quickly, and picked up my school bag. I walked slowly towards the main road. I stood at one spot, waiting for the Matador to arrive. After a while, I saw the red-and-yellow board of the Matador. The driver stopped right in front of me. That was another privilege extended to me. I got in and sat on the friend seat. He shook hands with me, another privilege.
In the morning he always lit incense and played bhajans by Chanchal. There was also a fresh garland of marigold flowers in front of a deity’s picture. The Matador moved forward. I had made up my mind.
‘Praava, O card deeyiein’ I asked him in broken Dogri to hand over the card. His face lit up. He must have thought I had come up with another killer line.
I took the card and opened it up, as if expecting it to be blank inside. But there were the lines, in thick red. ‘Here, the pen.’ The driver held it in his hand.
And then I did it. While I was at it, and it took me two seconds perhaps, I kept looking at his face. At first he didn’t notice, his eyes were on the road. But the sound of the paper tearing made him look at it and he braked abruptly. He let out a barrage of expletives. He hit me hard on the back of my head. I hit him back, just like he had, on the back of his head. I was shaking with anger. I don’t know where I got the courage from, but I just got it. Afterwards, I don’t remember how many blows landed on my body. My spectacles fell off, but luckily they did not break. I was thrown out of the Matador.
While hitting me, the driver had scratched my face badly. And the back of my head was hurting. But I was smiling. In spite of the pain, I felt very light. There was a buoyancy in my step. Most importantly, the images of the girl’s father dissolved. His checkered towel disappeared. His eyes, a film of pain over them, were no longer visible to me. All I could hear was his voice echo in my head—Take care of her, will you?
Yes, I will keep an eye on her. Mountains can fly, rivers can dry, but she will always remain a dream for that illiterate driver. I walked fast. The barber had just opened his shop, and he was sweeping last night’s hair off the broken floor. I entered, picked up a comb nonchalantly, and ran it through my hair. Then I turned sideways and checked my profile. I looked at my cheap shoes. For months, I had hated them, wishing that their soles would come off so that I could ask Father to buy me another pair. But now, standing at the barber’s, I looked at them and at the cheap jeans I wore. They looked so appropriate, so rebellious.
I ran to the baker. He was just throwing his first cooked bread back in the oven as an offering. I bought myself a naan, and sat there at the baker’s counter, eating it slowly.
I went to school, but I had lost interest in my studies. I felt stifled at the sight of my classmates’ hopping from one class to another, discussing a theorem or some law of Physics. That whole season, I stuck to reading Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Srikanta. I sought solace from the story of his travel to Burma and imagined myself in a ship that had set sail for some distant land. I wanted to fall in love with older women, like Srikanta had.
Forging friendships with some rowdy boys who were at the bottom of the class, I would sit with them at one lonely end of the canal where nobody went and the water gushed out like white foam from a small outlet. Relatives of those who had died would perform religious rites for the deceased there. Often, the coconuts used in such rites would float towards us and we would pick them up and eat them. Through those b
oys, I also got rare access to the first floor of Raja tea stall, next to my school. It was reserved for the boys who were only into beating up other boys from rival gangs. We would sit there, drinking tea, and taking puffs from a lone Gold Flake cigarette, listening to Kishore Kumar songs.
I had become a rebel. And I was aware of this change in me. In my neighbourhood, I had made some friends. There were the three Suri brothers, who were very kind. I visited their family and without any bitterness, I joked about their ‘Dogra’ traits, while they made fun of my Kashmiri ways.
One evening, I went to their house. The eldest Suri son had just returned from the old city. ‘Don’t venture out,’ he warned me. He said there was a lot of anger on the streets and Dogra mobs were beating up Pandits in several places. That morning, two Pandit boys had entered the premises of the Ranbir Singh boys high school in the old city. They were carrying a crude bomb that exploded in the hands of one of them. He died instantly, while his accomplice’s hand was severed. The accomplice was arrested by the police. The news had spread like wildfire and the locals thought the bomb was meant to kill the schoolboys. So, as the word spread, Pandits were beaten up across the city. The eldest Suri son said he had seen placards hanging around the necks of dogs that read, ‘I am a Kashmiri Pandit’.
It came to be known later that the two boys had intended to target a group of jailed Kashmiri terrorists who had been brought from the prison to write a board exam.
Not everyone had their fathers to guide them if they strayed, as, luckily, I had. There was a lot of anger among the residents of the refugee camps. Most of them were non-salaried families, especially from the villages. Back home, they had owned big houses, and apple and walnut and almond orchards. But now that was all gone. They were solely dependent on government dole.
It was a pathetic existence. Many fell ill with diseases that were hitherto unknown to the community. In the first year alone, many elderly people died of sunstroke, and snake and scorpion bites. Children became infected with fungal diseases, and scabies became rampant in the unhygienic camps. Doctors reported hundreds of cases of stress-induced diabetes. Heart disease and hypertension made their way in our lives. Many fell into depression. There were severe privacy issues as well. Young couples were forced to live in small enclosures with their parents. This first led to an erosion in sexual abilities and then to a reduced birthrate. Medical surveys conducted around that time said that the Kashmiri Pandits in exile had aged by ten to fifteen years. Many in the camp spoke of revenge.