Our Moon has Blood Clots Page 12

  In one camp lived a woman whose young son was killed by his friends in Baramulla. They had taken him to a shop where a few of them caught hold of him while one of them downed the shutter on him. But he was physically very strong and put up a brave fight. He even managed to snatch their only Kalashnikov rifle. But he had no understanding of its functioning and could not unlock it. Meanwhile his assailants overpowered him and one of them fired at him. He was badly injured whereupon they pounced on him, gouged out his eyes and cut out his tongue.

  The boy’s mother refused to believe that her son was no more. So, every afternoon she would cook food for him and keep it on a parapet outside her tent. I saw her one day while she was cooking food for her dead son. She spoke to a neighbour while she lovingly placed the food on the parapet. ‘He won’t eat if the rice is not crispy,’ I heard her saying.

  In 1991, a family from Shopian came to live in the Muthi refugee camp. Pyare Lal Tickoo had been a cloth merchant associated with the local traders’ union. The Tickoos lived in Shopian’s Batpora locality, home to 112 Pandit families. After the nightmare of January 19, many Pandit families left their homes, fearing for their lives. By April, sixty families had left. By May, another thirty left. Only twelve families, including the Tickoos, decided to stay back.

  On June 16, Pyare Lal Tickoo’s son, Rajinder, left home for Shopian hospital where he had been training in the accounts department. On his way back home later that afternoon, Rajinder went to a friend’s shop near the town’s main bus stand. It was here that a group of militants who had been following him from the hospital shot at him. Rajinder was hit by four bullets and he died on the spot.

  Someone ran to his house and informed the senior Tickoo about his son’s death. The father ran to the bus stand and spotted his son lying alone in a pool of blood. There was a bullet near his corpse. Pyare Lal Tickoo picked it up. It read—Made in China. The body was taken to the hospital where a postmortem was conducted. Once it was over, Pyare Lal Tickoo carried his son’s body in his arms. In the refugee camp, he would recall later—

  ‘When I had my son’s body in my arms, I held it close to my heart. I was reminded of Raja Harishchandra’s predicament at losing his son.’

  There was no priest available for Rajinder’s last rites. They cremated him quickly. Nobody among their Muslim neighbours came to offer their condolences.

  All the remaining Pandit families of Batpora took refuge in Tickoo’s house that night. Late at night, the deputy commissioner of Shopian appeared at their doorstep asking them if they required any security.

  ‘Whatever had to happen has already happened. Now it is up to you to provide us with security or not,’ Pyare Lal told him. The officer left in a huff.

  No security was provided. Three days later, the Tickoos collected the ashes of their beloved son. Soon after that, all the Pandit families of Batpora left Kashmir for good.

  Before leaving, Pyare Lal had tried handing over their two cows to their neighbours. The cows gave five litres of milk in the morning and about seven litres in the evening. But nobody was willing to take them. So, finally, the Tickoo family let them loose. And they left to spend the rest of their lives in exile. A month after they left, all Pandit houses were ransacked by the locals and everything was looted. Then most of the houses were set afire. The remaining houses were destroyed in another fire in 1995. The cloth shop owned by Pyare Lal was looted as well. Later, it was taken over by the government for widening the road.

  The Tickoos owned a huge walnut and apple orchard. The walnut orchard produced about two and a half lakh rupees worth of walnuts per season. Many Muslim neighbours approached them later, throughout the nineties, advising them to sell their land. But the Tickoos refused every time.

  In 2003, without seeking their consent, the land owned by the Tickoos and other Pandit families was acquired by the state government to construct an Industrial Training Institute. In some cases, revenue records were tampered with by tehsil and revenue officials sympathetic to the majority community.

  In his petition to the state revenue department, Tickoo wrote—

  ‘During the past four years … the land owned by Pandits is being acquired ostensibly “for public purposes” under a deliberate plan to thwart their chances of return by “finishing [off] their immovable property.” In Ward no. 1 of Batpora, the residential land of Pandit families—Lahoris, Sathus, Kitchloos and Panditas, that together measures 35-40 kanals, was taken over for building [a] bus stand. Sadly, Government of India that depends on state authorities for feedback did not try to intervene.’

  By the mid 2000s, these episodes become common occurrences. Wherever there is a chance, there are attempts to usurp land or other property belonging to the Pandits. In the early eighties, a prominent Pandit lady, Tarawati, of the village Kolpur near the famous Mansbal Lake, acquired a tract of land for building a temple. A Shivling, vandalized by the tribal invaders in 1947, was established inside. Then in 1990, the Pandit exodus takes place and nobody is left to take care of the temple. In 2006, the Pandit community learns that a fire brigade station is coming up close to the temple and it might have encroached upon the temple land. The Pandits of that village, now living in exile, get together and collect funds to rebuild the temple. They then contact the revenue officials and are told that there is no mention of the presence of a temple in the revenue records.

  In September 2012, I meet R.K. Tickoo outside a newspaper office in Srinagar. He has been trying to contact journalists to highlight his plight. Two of his agricultural plots in Wadwan in Budgam district have been illegally occupied by his Muslim tenants. Even after the tehsildar declared it to be an illegal occupation, senior revenue officials are refusing to issue an order in his favour. ‘I have been on leave for fifteen days and have been endangering my life, visiting Budgam daily,’ he tells me. ‘I just need money to be able to send my son for engineering.’

  Nine days after Rajinder Tickoo’s murder, a group of people entered the house of Brij Lal Kaul in Shopian district’s Harman village. Kaul worked as a driver with the Rice Research Station on the Wanpoh–Kulgam road. He had sent his son and daughter to Jammu earlier for their safety. That night, the group caught hold of Kaul and his wife, Chhoti, and pulled them out of their home. They were tied behind a jeep and dragged for three kilometres. But there was still some life left in their mutilated bodies. So they were shot dead.

  Later, an acquaintance performed their last rites in the corridor of the house the Kauls had so lovingly built. They were cremated discreetly nearby.

  My father continually urged me to study. But it was very difficult. I wanted some private space, and that was impossible. I would sometimes hang a sheet between the television and the string cot to hide myself from the rest of the room. I liked to think that I was in a room of my own. I imagined myself in my first-floor room back home in Srinagar, in the room with the wooden bookshelf.

  In exile, salaries of those in government service were being paid. But the employees could not be accommodated in their respective departments in Jammu. So, like everyone else, Father and Ma would visit their office in Jammu once a month, collect their salaries, and return. It seemed like a nice arrangement. But after a few months, unemployment for my father’s generation meant that all of them would just sit and think about exile and the difficulties it posed. Some of the younger lot had found work elsewhere, but most people like my parents were at the stage where beginning to work in an entirely different set-up would have been a nightmare. Since they had so much time at their disposal, we would receive a steady stream of guests from early morning till late evening—my parents’ colleagues, former neighbours, new neighbours, friends, relatives. This made having a little privacy even more difficult.

  With whatever little money I could save, I had bought a few audio cassettes of the music of the popular films of those days. But there was no cassette player to play them on. Our Philips two-in-one had been left behind. Late in the night, while everyone slept, or tried to sl
eep, I would climb up to the rooftop and listen to songs over a small pocket transistor. I dreamt of saving enough money to buy a Walkman.

  Around this time, in 1991, a catastrophe struck our family again. Though we all helped, a large chunk of the housework was left to Ma. She ran the kitchen and tended to all the cleaning, among other chores. The lifting of countless heavy buckets of water had taken a toll on her back. One morning as she bent down to mop the floor, a cry escaped her lips and she fell down. She was in extreme pain and she was unable to get up.

  We took her to a doctor immediately; he explained that the alignment of some of her vertebrae had altered, putting pressure on her spinal cord. She was advised complete bed rest. With her completely grounded, the kitchen duty fell to my sister. Father and I pitched in as well, helping her as much as we could. She was in college after all and needed time to study.

  It took more than two months for Ma to recover enough to get out of bed. She could walk a little and do light household chores, but she had to wear an orthopedic belt around her waist almost all the time. The doctor also said that she could no longer sit or sleep on the floor. So we had to make a wooden bed for her. But now the problem was that in that small room there was no way we could set up a kitchen for her to stand and work in. We did not want to leave this accommodation, but we were left with no choice. It was a question of Ma’s health.

  So, we resumed the search once again. This time, Father sought a room with a separate kitchen. Though we knew that we would have to pay more rent, it was a small price to pay for Ma’s well-being.

  After a week or so, Father found a room with a small kitchen in a house very close by. The house owner was a government employee, and his wife stayed at home. They had four children. The youngest was a boy, so we understood why they had four children.

  The day we moved I was quite happy. At least there was a separate kitchen now. Also, along the room, there was a small space, a store of sorts, where I could create my own little space. There were other problems though. The bathroom of the house was without a door. It just had a thin curtain and each time one had to use it, one had to approach and ask—Koi hai? If there was someone inside, the person made his presence felt by shouting back haan or by coughing a little.

  But soon, our stay in that house turned into a nightmare. The owner and his wife were just the sort of landlords we had heard so much about. Every afternoon, the woman sent her children to our room. They would sit there, and even gradually started sleeping there. One day the owner told Father that he wanted my sister to teach his children. ‘Just an hour or so, to help with their homework etc.,’ he said casually. Father refused, saying his daughter was too busy for that. This did not go down well with them. Then one day, we objected to their children spending too much time in our room. From then on, it all went downhill. The owner started accusing us of spending too much time in the bathroom. ‘Every time you go, the water tank is emptied,’ he said. That was hardly true. We treated water as if it were a precious jewel.

  One of his rules was that no meat should be cooked by us. In exile anyway, we could not afford it. But, we found it tough to adhere to the rule during festivals like Shivratri. Nonetheless, we abided by it strictly. When he could find nothing else, the man accused us of cooking meat in our kitchen. When he left for office, his wife would take over. She spent the whole day on a cot they had placed right outside our room. She had taught her children to shout Kashmiri loley. Then they also began raising objections whenever guests stayed overnight, which happened only when Ravi or his parents came to visit us from Kashmir for a day or two.

  One day, Ravi’s father came to visit, and Ma was very happy. It was the first time her brother had come to visit us after Ma’s illness. But when he arrived, the landlady began to create an ugly scene outside our room, accusing us of taking undue advantage of their good nature. Ma tried to reason with her but the landlady went on and on. Uncle understood that it would not be wise for him to stay. So he spent the night at another relative’s home. That night, Ma cried. She could not believe that her brother had come to her house and could not stay overnight. What’s more, she was unable to even feed him all the food she had spent the day cooking so lovingly.

  Then one day they attempted a very dirty trick. One of the cable TV wires ran close to their roof. One of them spliced another wire to it and ran this wire down towards our room window. The cable TV operator, who was very ill-tempered, would pay sudden visits to rooftops to check if anyone had hooked onto his cable without paying. That day he arrived and went straight to the roof of the house. And there he discovered the wire, one end of which touched our window. He came down and thumped his fist on our door. He was shouting expletives. Father tried his best to tell him that we were not responsible for this, but he would not listen. At one point, his abuses became so unbearable that Father gave it back to him. He pushed Father roughly. Luckily, at that point, I returned with one of the Suri brothers and, together, we diffused the situation. But while leaving he threatened us with dire consequences. Father was both angry and aghast. ‘You are a dirty man,’ he told the owner when he came later. ‘We are in exile. I would not even wish such a thing on a demon like you,’ he said. The owner tried to shout him down but was left fumbling for a response. In his heart, he knew what he had done.

  A week after that ugly episode, we packed our bags again and shifted to yet another house. Seventeen years later, when we were shifting to a house of our own in a Delhi suburb, Father remembered that incident and how quickly we had gotten into the habit of packing our belongings and shifting. ‘I could have opened up a packer and mover company,’ he quipped. We all smiled. We also counted the number of times we had shifted house since the day we left home.

  It roughly came to be around twenty. It may have been even twenty-two times, the same as the number of rooms in our house that Ma talked continually about.

  The episode with the landlord affected Ma deeply and triggered another bout of back pain. The orthopaedician who examined her said her condition was beyond any treatment available in Jammu. ‘You will have to take her to Ludhiana, or Delhi,’ he said.

  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 th
e 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.