Our Moon has Blood Clots Page 20

  ‘He is not well,’ the man says. That evening I call again. This time Vinod answers.

  ‘Yes, I was not well. You were writing a book, you said. But you see there is no point talking about what happened to me. I’m trying to forget it.’

  A part of me wants to give up. Then I remember the images I have seen of the dead the morning after, lined up on dry straw. Men, women, children. And the reports of their Muslim neighbours wailing over the bodies. So I chew on the inside of my cheek till it bleeds, gulp down a stiff drink and say, ‘Please Vinod ji, you’ll be doing me a great favour if you meet me.’

  There is a pause at the other end. And then, ‘I don’t know what will come of it,’ he says.

  ‘Consider it a favour to me,’ I say again.

  ‘Hmm …’ he sighs. ‘Ok, call me tomorrow morning at nine.’

  At nine the next morning, his phone is switched off.

  I am in a hotel. Its walls are damp and the bed sheets reek of lovemaking. I haven’t told any of my relatives that I am in Jammu. It would be difficult to work if I stayed with them; it would be impossible to step out without them fussing over breakfast and lunch, and dinner. Also, I know there will be questions about my own homelessness, about why over the past year I’ve been coming alone to attend family weddings. I have no answers for them. What I can tell them is something they wouldn’t understand.

  How can I share with them the strong imagery in my mind of a home, of how I failed to set it up in reality.

  Back in Delhi, in my bedroom, which used to be ‘our’ bedroom, there are still closets filled with her clothes, and shoes, her nail paint, her fragrances. She is no longer there.

  For my relatives, who worry about my meals and my other comforts, and who want to ask questions, exile is something that they think of while opening up an old family album, or while watching videos of their visit to Kshir Bhawani, shot on their newly acquired Sony Handycams. They are ‘settled’ in their mind otherwise. Their new houses are their homes. Jammu is their Shahar now. They celebrate birthdays, exam results, new house paint, a new car—everything.

  For me, though, exile is permanent. Homelessness is permanent. I am uprooted in my mind. There is nothing I can do about it. My idea of home is too perfect. My idea of love is too perfect. And home and love are too intertwined. I am like my grandfather, who never left his village his whole life. It was deeply embedded in his matrix, too perfect to be replicated elsewhere.

  Malcolm Lowry wrote, ‘I have no house, only a shadow.’

  I have no home, only images. And in those closets in my bedroom, I could only conjure up images of home. And now, that too is gone.

  I think Vinod Dhar will not meet me. I am saddened, but I understand. I have come to Jammu to record his story, but since he is playing truant, I have a lot of time. The four walls of the hotel depress me. I look out of the window. An old man is using a net to fish out leaves from the hotel swimming pool. In a banquet hall next to it, preparations are underway for the evening’s event. Waiters wearing uniforms soiled with curry stains carry crockery and cartons of alcohol.

  I step out. I decide to go to the old city, towards the Rajput Sabha where we had spent a few weeks more than two decades ago. I take an autorickshaw and get off at the Matador stand. I want to walk from here through the bustling bazaar. It is morning and many shops are yet to open. In many ways nothing has changed. Shop owners, who have just opened the shutters of their shops, burn camphor in small steel containers to ward off the evil eye. Two priests wearing their peculiar headgear ring small bells and utter some indecipherable hymn and float from shop to shop, seeking alms. The dye shops are open with workers immersing fabric in their boiling, coloured concoctions.

  Images from those few weeks we spent at Rajput Sabha come back to me. From the terrace of the Sabha, I would often stand and watch the world go by through the bazaar. To escape the monotony of our room, I used to spend hours on the roof. But today, I am the world. I look up, almost expecting to see a boy, fourteen years old, watching me, to escape his new life.

  I turn left and am now standing in front of the main entrance of the Rajput Sabha. But there are no stairs now. I look up. They are turning it into a shopping complex. There is cement and other construction material everywhere. Banners of cell phone companies offering deals have already come up. I stand there transfixed, and I remember a very hot afternoon. There were hardly any people on the street. When I think of that day, I always see it as a phantasmagoria of sorts. In it, I imagine a shopkeeper sitting on a cushion in front of his desk. He has fallen asleep and his mouth is open and a fly flits in and out of it.

  The grill door of the Sabha’s main entrance is locked as it always was from lunchtime onwards. And from inside, Vishal comes out and joins me at the entrance. He is wearing a crisp white shirt and trousers and shining moccasins. A sugarcane vendor passes by. He sells sugarcane pieces, kebab-like, chilled under a slab of ice. Vishal passes some money through the grill and buys some sugarcane. We sit on the stairs and chew on the pieces. Vishal was a friend of the Sabha’s caretaker. He often visited, along with some of his friends, and they just sat and gossiped and laughed over the cutouts of actresses the caretaker had pasted in his room. It was Vishal who cultivated in me a life-long passion for singing. Sitting on those marble stairs, he would break into a song from a film of the late eighties, Awaargi.

  Chamakte chand ko toota hua taara bana daala

  Meri aawargi ne mujhko aawara bana daala

  A shining moon turned into a fallen star

  My vagrancy turned me into a vagrant

  Somehow, that song stayed with me. It shaped me, moulded me into its meanings; it became my cast. In one stanza, the poet says—

  Mein is duniya ko aksar dekh kar hairaan hota hun

  Na mujh se ban saka chhota sa ghar, din raat rota hun

  I often marvel when I look at the world

  I could not even build a small house: day and night I cry

  This image is so clear in my mind, and so magnified, that I forget it happened two decades ago. I turn back. Behind me is a small temple and there are two benches in front of it, and a small see-saw for children. Sometimes, memory has a mind of its own. It takes off on autopilot, and flashes small incidents in front of you—incidents one has not remembered for years. Behind the temple is the shopkeeper’s house on the stairs of which I would stand and watch Mahabharat. I close my eyes and just sit there. An alcoholic is sleeping on the other bench.

  I take out my cell phone and I dial Vinod Dhar’s number again. The phone rings. On the second ring, the phone is answered.

  ‘Where are you?’ Vinod Dhar asks.

  I tell him.

  ‘Oh, you are five minutes away. Come to the coffee shop outside the Secretariat. I’ll see you there.’

  I pick up my bag and start running.

  The Secretariat is a depressing building from where the government functions. In Jammu and Kashmir though, there are two Secretariats. In the winters, the Secretariat operates from Jammu. In the summers, it is shifted to Srinagar. This is known as the Durbar Move. At this time the Secretariat is in Jammu and so is Vinod Dhar.

  I enter the coffee shop. It is a small place. Behind the counter, in an open space, there are three stone tables with stone benches on either side. Vinod is standing there. I recognize him from a picture I have seen of him in a news report. In it, he sits on a chair, outside his dwelling in the refugee camp, and looks away from the camera. And now, he is shaking hands with me. His hair is short and he hasn’t shaved for a few days. He wears a sky-blue shirt. He breaks into a boyish smile and leads me to one of the benches. He sits across the table from me. Then he takes a good look at me. ‘I had heard about how journalists can go after someone. Today, I have experienced it with you. I’ve never met anybody who is as persistent as you,’ he says.

  Vinod Dhar speaks nervously and he bites his nails as he speaks. And he speaks for the entire time he spends with me. As he speaks, spit accumulates a
t the corners of his lips.

  ‘You must be thinking I speak all the time,’ he says five minutes after we have sat down. ‘My psychiatrist says I have aged, but I stopped growing mentally on January 25, 1998.’ That is not entirely true though. Vinod is quite mature. He understands what he has gone through. Recognizing the fact that one particular incident in his life has left psychological scars is an act of maturity itself.

  Vinod Dhar was fourteen in 1998. His family and his uncles lived in Wandhama, a sleepy hamlet in Kashmir’s Gandarbal district. His family and three other Pandit families had thought of leaving like everyone else in 1990, but then decided against it. Their sustenance depended on agriculture, and the family elders were not sure how Jammu would turn out to be for them.

  ‘And then once everyone else left, it became too difficult to leave after that,’ says Vinod. In 1992, when they felt threatened, they decided to leave once again.

  ‘We tried selling our properties, but certain elements within the village prohibited others from buying them,’ says Vinod. He remembers how they had given up after that.

  ‘My father said Jammu was very costly and we wouldn’t be able to survive there,’ recalls Vinod.

  Shortly afterwards, an army camp was established near their village. It made them feel secure. Life moved on. They tilled their land, bought provisions from neighbouring shops and restricted their religious activities to a small temple near their house.

  In 1996, however, the army camp moved. And Vinod recalls how shortly afterwards, armed militants began to be seen in the village. The small group of Pandits always tried to steer clear of both the army and the militants.

  On the afternoon of January 25, 1998, Vinod Dhar ventured out after feasting on a lunch prepared by his mother. A meal of rice and turnip and lotus stem curry, he recalls. He went to a nearby field to play cricket with some friends. He returned after sunset. Inside, it was work as usual. His mother was preparing dinner and his father was enjoying a cup of tea. His brother was asleep upstairs. He had just entered when a group of armed men barged into their house. Even in the dim light, their rifles glistened. Vinod’s father addressed them. They made themselves comfortable and asked for tea. Vinod’s mother rushed to make tea.

  After drinking tea, the group went outside. Vinod remembers that one of them carried a wireless set and soon after they left, it began to crackle. After a few minutes, Vinod heard gunshots outside. He rushed to his mother and held her hand. Together, they tried climbing up to the first floor when his mother was shot from behind. His brother, who rushed down after hearing gunshots, was shot as well. Vinod reached upstairs and hid himself behind a heap of cow dung cakes, used as fuel. The group of terrorists shot dead twenty-three people that day. They were shot and then dragged into the main compound of Vinod’s house. After killing everyone, some of the terrorists came upstairs. Vinod held his breath. One of them poked his rifle through the dung cakes, narrowly missing Vinod’s face. And then they left. Their mission was accomplished. Vinod stayed where he was.

  It was the night of Shab-e-Qadr—‘Night of Destiny’—the night of Ramzan when the first verse of the Koran was revealed to the Prophet Mohammed by Jibreel.

  After midnight, Vinod slowly came down the stairs. He looked at the bodies that lay outside. It was freezing cold. He looked at them for a few minutes and then went back inside. One by one he dragged out heavy quilts from his house and put them over the bodies. Then he went back and hid behind the cow dung cakes.

  In the wee hours of the morning, an army patrol entered Vinod’s compound. But he did not venture out, because he had seen the terrorists wearing similar military fatigues. It was only when he saw a police party that he came out and met them.

  ‘My mind was absolutely numb,’ he recalls fourteen years later. ‘The realization that I had lost my entire family did not dawn upon me at all.’

  After the civil administration authorities arrived, the people from the village started pouring in. Vinod remembers the exact words he uttered to the officer in charge upon spotting his Muslim neighbours.

  ‘I told him: “In mein se koi haraami inhe haath nahi lagayega.” None of these bastards will touch the bodies.’

  We are still sitting in the coffee shop and it is now lunchtime. Many Muslim employees are there as well. There is no vacant spot available, so one of them sits next to me. He is eating a patty. As Vinod says this, he shuffles his feet uneasily. There is a pause. The Muslim walks away.

  I remember some of the reports I had read of the massacre. One report described how Muslim women were seen wailing over the dead bodies of Vinod’s family members and others.

  ‘I will tell you something,’ Vinod says, ‘when the gun shots were being fired, the people of the village increased the volume of the loudspeaker in the mosque to muffle the sound of the gunfire.’

  Nobody came out of their homes the whole night. They only came out later, after daylight had broken.

  ‘They wanted to shed magarmacch ke aansu—crocodile tears,’ says Vinod.

  All twenty-three pyres were lit by Vinod. Later in the day, the then prime minister, I.K. Gujral, arrived at Vinod’s village. Vinod was so young, recalls Sanjay Tickoo, a community leader who was there, that he wanted to take a ride in Gujral’s helicopter.

  Vinod was later shifted to a BSF camp in Jammu where he completed his schooling and later his graduation in commerce. After he lost his family, Vinod was harassed by his relatives who wanted a share of his ex gratia settlement. ‘They would beat me up for money,’ he recalls.

  Vinod now works as a clerk with the state government. ‘I wanted to study more, gain more knowledge. I am pursuing a Master’s in History, but I haven’t been able to clear it so far.’ As proof of his knowledge-seeking, Vinod throws a Bernard Shaw quote at me. ‘Where wealth accumulates, men decay.’

  Vinod lives in the Jagti refugee settlement for Kashmiri Pandits, outside Jammu city. When he is in Srinagar, does he ever feel like returning to his village? ‘I don’t go anywhere when I am in Srinagar. I don’t want to return to my village. But sometimes I go to the Kshir Bhawani temple and sit in front of the goddess. I used to go there with my mother,’ he says.

  Vinod is alone. ‘Why don’t you marry?’ I ask him. He is not looking at me, he is lost in thought. ‘You know that night, I sat hidden the whole night, I did not cry, I was like a stone.’ And then he looks at me; he has heard my question. ‘I cannot marry; I’m too insecure. What if she doesn’t like me tomorrow and decides to leave me? Then what will I do?’

  ‘I have never been to Delhi, or Bombay. I wonder how it would be to go to Europe. You live in Delhi? Life must be very fast there. How much do you earn? Do you get time to eat? If I come to Delhi, will you meet me?’

  ‘Suppose I go to a five-star hotel in Bombay to have tea. How much will it cost me?’

  I reply to his every question.

  Finally, we rise to leave. I take out my wallet to pay for coffee, but like an elderly uncle, he holds my hand. ‘No, you are my guest, I will pay. When I come to Delhi, then you pay,’ he says.

  We are at the entrance of the coffee shop. I ask him what he misses most. His eyes well up with tears. ‘I miss my parents. When you are young, you get to learn so much from them. I couldn’t do that,’ he says.

  We shake hands. As I turn away, two men wearing skullcaps and holding a large green cloth approach Vinod for alms. ‘What is this for?’ he asks.

  ‘Yateemon ke liye hein.’ This is for orphans.

  Vinod takes out a fifty-rupee note and drops it into the cloth. And then I can no longer see his face. He walks towards the Secretariat.

  A year and a half before the Wandhama massacre, seven Pandits were taken out of their homes and shot dead in Sangrampora. It was March 21, 1997. That night, Ashok Kumar Pandita slept early. In 1990, when the exodus happened, the Pandita family and a few others had decided to stay behind. The families depended on farming for their sustenance. During the day they tended to their fields. Often g
roups of militants would pass through their village. Ashok’s old father was a wise man. He had one piece of advice to give to his son—No matter what happens, don’t venture out of your house after sunset. That night, Ashok was woken up by a noise coming from downstairs. His aunt called out to him. But he remembered his father’s advice and didn’t venture out. She called out to him again. This time Ashok had to come out. The woman was worried about her son who had stepped out after hearing a noise. ‘Go and see where Pyare Lal has gone,’ she begged. Ashok came down and saw nine heavily armed men. They had brought with them four Pandit men from neighbouring houses. They had Pyare Lal as well. The men were carrying a list of names. ‘Bring Avtar Krishen,’ they demanded in chaste Kashmiri. Avtar Krishen was another cousin of Ashok’s. On his walkie-talkie, they heard the chief of the militant group say, ‘Major sahab, we are coming.’

  One of the Pandits, Sanjay, started to plead with the militants. ‘Please leave us; we have small children. What have we done?’ he begged. One of the militants hit him with his gun and shouted, ‘Don’t try to be clever. Just keep your mouth shut.’

  Then, led in a line by the militants, the men were made to walk a mile or so. At one spot, they were asked to remove their clothes. It had begun to drizzle. Ashok Pandita kept his watch. It had been gifted to him by his father. Then Avtar Krishen spoke up. ‘What is our fault? We have always stayed here; we did not leave for Jammu. Why are you doing this to us?’ he asked.

  The militant abused him. ‘Who asked you to live here, you infidels!’ The Pandits began to cry. The militants cocked their rifles and began shooting. Eight men fell. The blood from their bodies mingled with rainwater to turn into pink puddles. Before they disappeared, the militants kicked the bodies to check if anyone was still breathing. They missed Ashok Pandita. He had been shot in the leg and had held his breath as he lay with his relatives, now dead.

  In Habba Kadal, Sanjay Tickoo has lived with his family for the last two decades. Over the last few years, Tickoo and some of his friends who live in the Valley have been compiling a list of every Pandit who died in the nineties at the hands of militants. ‘But not only that, every Pandit who died due to sunstroke or a snakebite is also a casualty of war,’ he told me when I visited him at his house. Tickoo has also been instrumental in chronicling the damage to hundreds of temples and it is due to the efforts of his organization, the Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Samiti, that many temples have been renovated and attempts to sell temple land at various places have been thwarted.