Our Moon has Blood Clots Read online

  ‘I pray to Allah that before I close my eyes, I may see you back in Srinagar. But right now, it is so difficult. Tell me, what is your son doing? Oh, it’s his most crucial board exam this year! Pandit ji, do you have enough money to send him to study engineering, like Janki Nath’s son? I can see that you don’t have it. This is why I am here.’

  And then he would ask the crucial question: Tohi’e ma chhu kharchawun? Do you wish to spend?

  This was a well-thought-of euphemism he had invented to relieve you of the feeling of parting with your home. ‘Do you wish to spend?’ meant ‘Do you want to sell your home?’

  ‘You have had no source of income for months now,’ he would continue. ‘This is all I can offer you for your house. I know it is worth much more, but these are difficult times even for us.’

  If you relented, he would pull out a wad of cash.

  ‘Here, take this advance. Oh no, what are you saying? Receipt? You should have hit me with your shoe instead. No receipt is required. I will come later to get the papers signed.’

  He would also forcibly leave a hundred-rupee note in your son’s hands and leave. A few days later, a neighbour would come around and ask ‘Oh, Jan Mohammed was here as well?’

  ‘His son has become the divisional commander of Hizbul Mujahideen,’ the neighbour would inform you.

  Most of us did not have a choice. By 1992, the locks of most Pandit houses had been broken. Many houses were burnt down. In Barbarshah in old Srinagar, they say, Nand Lal’s house smouldered for six weeks. It was made entirely of deodar wood. The owner of Dr Shivji’s X-ray clinic, Kashmir’s first, was told his house in Nawab Bazaar took fifteen days to burn down completely. At places where Pandit houses could not be burnt down due to their proximity to Muslim houses, a novel method was employed to damage the house. A few men would slip into a Pandit house and cut down the wooden beam supporting the tin roof. As a result, it would cave in during the next snowfall. Then the tin sheets would be sold and so would the costly wood. Within a few months, the house would be destroyed.

  A few weeks after my parents’ trip to Ludhiana, my uncle came to our room, accompanied by a middleman. ‘He is offering to buy our house,’ Uncle said.

  He put a number in front of us. ‘This is ridiculously low,’ Father said. ‘This is much less than what I have spent on it in the last few years alone.’

  ‘I know,’ the man said. ‘But you have no idea what has become of your house. After you left, miscreants ransacked it completely. They took away even your sanitary fittings and water ran through your house for months. A few walls have already collapsed. It is in a very poor state now.’

  Nobody said a word. From her bed, Ma finally spoke.

  ‘How does it look from outside?’

  ‘The plaster has broken off completely, but your evergreens are growing well. They are touching your first-floor balcony now.’

  And so, home is lost to us permanently. Ma is taken to Ludhiana and the injections are administered. It takes her months to recover.

  Sometime ago, in September 2012, I meet an old Pandit scholar in Srinagar who never left Kashmir. He was abducted by militants three times but always returned unscathed. We are in his study where he sits surrounded by books. On the wall on the left are pictures of Swami Vivekananda, Swami Vididhar—a revered saint of Kashmir—and Albert Einstein. He tells me about an incident that occurred in 1995. He was cycling back home from a temple when he was stopped by a Muslim professor he knew. ‘What are you doing here? Go to Bae’bdaem, some very rare books stolen from Pandit houses have been put on sale there,’ he told him. The scholar cycled furiously to Bae’bdaem and found that in a shed, a boatman had put thousands of books and rare manuscripts on sale for twenty rupees per kilo. The shed swarmed with foreign scholars from Europe. The boatman spotted him. ‘You look like a Pandit, are you?’ he asked. ‘Then your rate is different; it is thirty rupees.’

  The scholar placed a hundred-rupee note in the boatman’s hand. ‘I will give you a hundred rupees for each book and this is the advance,’ he told him. The scholar picked up whatever he could, including a fifteenth-century Sanskrit commentary on the verses of Lal Ded and Maheswarnanda’s Maharathamanjari.

  But in exile, scholarship is lost. Young boys and girls work hard in the refugee camp schools and diligently prepare for their board exams while their parents make bank demand drafts to pay for engineering entrance exams. Everybody wants to go to a good college in Maharashtra, or Karnataka, and escape the wretchedness of exile. Everybody wants to earn money and rebuild their lives. But there is no learning now. No one among us would be nicknamed Sartre now.

  I wanted to run away as well, but not to Maharashtra or Karnataka. I wanted to escape the drudgery of boring classroom lectures. The results for the higher secondary exams were declared and I had performed averagely as usual. I think Father was embarrassed by my results. I offered him no passage to a secure future. He was unsure about what I would do. But I think by that time I had some clue. I was determined to do something different; I was determined to defy. When I closed my eyes, I imagined a bright round mass of white light inside my chest.

  I followed that light one day and arrived in Chandigarh. Though Father initially opposed it, I had decided to join a college there. That was how I escaped Jammu. In Chandigarh I felt no pressure to work hard at my studies. Instead, I forged friendships with people older than me. They were comrades who read Gorky and Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche and Camus, and Chekhov and Flaubert. With them, I also read Weston La Barre’s The Ghost Dance. I spent days at the State Library, reading writers they would talk of. At night, over egg paranthas and tea at Ranjan’s shack outside the General Hospital, they recited the poetry of Avtaar Singh Paash and Shiv Kumar Batalvi. I visited Talwindi Salem, where Paash had lived and where he was killed by Sikh extremists some years ago. In his house, I saw the table on which he had scribbled: Know what how why. That round mass of white light inside my chest turned brighter.

  I was in college when I received a letter from my sister in Jammu. ‘Madan Lal Uncle has passed away,’ she informed me. He lived in a small room near ours. When I visited my parents during my college holidays, he would come over and shake hands with me. ‘You are a man now,’ he would say, while Ma went to the kitchen to prepare a cup of kahwa for him. Sometimes he would come by in the evening and slip a few roasted cashewnuts into my hand. In his last days, he had lost his mind, my sister wrote. He would go up to the terrace of his house and shout all night from there. Father and others took him to the hospital where he died a few days later. He died homeless, away from his land, away from the benevolent gaze of his forefathers.

  The next letter I received from home carried good news. Ravi’s family had finally decided to shift to Jammu. Both Ravi and his sister had reached marriageable ages. Ravi was hoping that he would be transfered to Jammu since no Kashmiri Pandit family was willing to send their daughter to Srinagar.

  At the Bagh-e-Bahu garden, Ravi finally met Asha—the girl who would be his bride. She was very talented, a gold-medalist, Ravi said, in Zoology. ‘Together,’ I quipped, ‘you two complete the life sciences.’

  Soon after their engagement, without telling Ravi, I went to see Asha, who taught at my former school. I told her who I was and she took me to her lab, where, surrounded by animal specimens preserved in formaldehyde, she brought me a bunomelet and a soft drink. ‘Which one will you have?’ she asked. ‘Thums Up,’ I replied. She smiled. ‘Like him,’ she whispered. I was so happy, I had butterflies in my stomach. A few weeks later, Ravi received his transfer to Gool, a small town in the Udhampur division. Some areas around Gool were affected by militancy, but Gool itself was peaceful, Ravi told us.

  In the autumn of 1993, Ravi and Asha were married. All the affairs of the marriage were handled by Ravi’s friend Irshad. He stayed until every ritual was solemnized; until every feast was partaken of. In between the festivities, the two friends would sit in a corner and exchange whispers and quiet laughter—
of the heady days at Kashmir University. A girl’s name—Sushma—would come up often. Ravi had once been in love with her.

  There are pictures of those days—of Ravi and Asha picnicking at the Bagh-e-Bahu; of them at Patnitop, a tourist resort. They came to visit me in Chandigarh and we watched a movie and then ate at Hot Millions restaurant. A year later, Shubham was born. I sent them a greeting card from Chandigarh and two weeks later, I boarded a night bus to Jammu to hold my nephew in my arms. Asha and I corresponded and some of these letters reflected what I had been reading in the last two years. ‘Ye kus se gav Camus—Who is this Camus?’ Ravi would enquire teasingly and I would hesitantly break into a long speech.

  Those years passed like a Mobius strip.

  I returned to Jammu after my final year exams. A few months later the results were declared and I had scored the same—average marks. But in my heart I carried the best education, of Paash’s immortal lines—

  Sabse khatarnaaq hota hai/murda shaanti se bhar jaana

  Na hona tadap ka/ sab kucch sehan kar jaana

  Ghar se nikalna kaam par/ aur kaam se lautkar ghar aana

  Sabse khatarnaaq hota hai/ humare sapnon ka mar jaana

  It’s most dangerous/ to be filled with the silence of a corpse

  To not feel anything/ to tolerate everything

  To leave home for work/ and to return home from work

  It’s most dangerous/ when our dreams die

  I also held dear a quote from Lust for Life, that I had bought for ten rupees at a book stall outside Punjab University—‘After all, the world is still great.’

  With this book and a letter from the maverick filmmaker Arun Kaul, who had, at the time, produced a few programmes for Doordarshan, including the brilliant Kashmir File, I had arrived in Delhi in 1996. I started working with a newspaper in Jammu, but the earlier hardships we had witnessed in Jammu had left me bitter. I did not want to live there. So, I wrote a letter to Arun Kaul, and three weeks later, he replied. ‘If you like my nose and I don’t dislike your face, we might get along,’ he said in his letter.

  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

  After 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 . . .’

  W
hen 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.