Our Moon has Blood Clots Read online

  On the morning of March 24, 2003, when Tickoo woke up, his wife told him that something had happened in Nadimarg village in south Kashmir. His wife’s parents lived in a nearby village and she feared for their safety. Tickoo left immediately for the village with one of his friends. The scene when they arrived was grisly. Twenty-four Pandits, including women and children, had been shot dead by militants, helped allegedly by a party of local policemen. The previous night, the Pandits had been made to sit on the floor in a courtyard and shot in their heads.

  I remembered speaking to one of the survivors, Mohan Bhat, many years ago in Jammu. He had lost his entire family to the massacre. He told me how the militants had shot a toddler who was crying.

  ‘I was numb when I saw those bodies,’ Tickoo told me. He composed himself, and asked his friend to hold a bowl of water. One by one, he lifted the shrouds from the faces of the dead, and as per Hindu rituals, put water in their mouths with a spoon. His friend, who was holding the bowl, ran away after Tickoo lifted the shroud off the third body. He couldn’t bear it any longer.

  Later, Tickoo asked a doctor to bandage the heads of the dead. And over that bandage he drew their features—eyes, nose, mouth, and ears—with vermilion paste. And then the bodies were consigned to the flames.

  It is the spring of 2012. Shivratri is two days away. Every year, my father visits INA market in Delhi to buy puja paraphernalia. This year I tell him that I will buy it myself. I carry with me an empty rucksack to fill things in. I buy everything on the list father has prepared, and take the metro to return home. No sooner have I entered the coach than I start feeling uneasy. My heartbeat goes berserk, and there is a strange tingling sensation in my arms. I feel a sudden rush of heat in my stomach and I am dizzy. I get off at the next station. I put my bag down and slowly sink to the stairs. Ten minutes later I feel better. What happened to me? I ask myself. Was it a heart attack? But how can it be? I am physically fit. On reporting assignments deep in the jungles of central India, I walk for hours without any complaint. I do intense cycling over the weekends. I pick up my bag, slowly climbing the stairs to the main road, and call a friend who is a doctor and whose clinic is not far from where I am. It shouldn’t take me more than twenty minutes to reach him.

  I get into an auto rickshaw. We have hardly covered a mile when an attack strikes me again. This time it is more severe. I think I am becoming disoriented. I can barely keep my eyes open. Am I collapsing? With great difficulty, I manage to tell the driver that there is not enough time to reach the clinic. I ask him to take me to the emergency room in Moolchand hospital, only a mile or so away. I also think I should inform someone. But who? I have many friends, but somehow I cannot think of anyone whom I can call. Something feels so tangled inside me. We are stuck in a traffic jam and I am collapsing. I remember the driver looking at me in his rear-view mirror, crossing over on to the wrong side of the road and driving me to the hospital. Just before I enter, I call up a friend whose office is nearby. Then I calmly keep my bag in one corner of the emergency room and lie down on an empty bed.

  Within minutes, all kinds of wires are strapped on to my chest. My finger is attached to a monitor, and someone inserts a needle in the back of my hand. I remember the back of my father’s hand where an Om is tattooed. Someone takes a blood sample. A nurse tries to put an oxygen mask that I refuse. An electrocardiogram is taken, and my blood pressure is checked. Everything is normal. ‘Probably an episode of hyperacidity,’ the doctor says.

  But I am shaken. I am not afraid of death. But I think of my father. What would he do if I were to die? The thought makes me shiver. I could die right now, I think, and nobody would be around to even hold my hand. I look over to my left; a man is puking blood. My friend still hasn’t turned up. I close my eyes. I picture grandfather reciting the Durgasaptashati. I recite it in my head. I begin to feel calm. Suddenly nothing matters. I am ready to face anything.

  After another electrocardiogram, the doctor says I can go home. ‘Has his admit card been made?’ she asks a nurse. ‘We are waiting for his attendant,’ she replies. I get up.

  ‘It’s ok, I will get it made,’ I say. I pick up my bag. The collard greens will be ruined if they are not refrigerated soon. I walk to the reception, get myself admitted on paper, and fifteen minutes later, I am out of the hospital. I call a cab and go home. I manage to save the collard greens.

  The attendant might not turn up. A man might indeed be an island. But as long as he remembers what his grandfather taught him, he will be fine.

  Just before the winter in the Valley becomes unbearable for someone whose bones are now used to the heat of the plains, I want to make one trip there. But before that I must visit Jammu. I haven’t been to the refugee camps in years. Moreover, in 2011, the camps were dismantled and their inhabitants shifted to a refugee settlement on the outskirts of Jammu city. The news from there is heartbreaking. The settlement is facing acute power and water shortages. The relief money offered to non-salaried refugee families has not been increased for years. Friends call from Jammu; a few camp residents are on a hunger strike.

  I decide to visit Jammu first; from there I will go on to Kashmir. A few hundred Pandits have returned to the Valley under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s 2008 resettlement package. What has been their experience so far? Also, I need to escape from Delhi for a while. Sometimes it closes in on me. It is then that I need to return home, to get a grip on life.

  I call up Ali Mohammed. ‘Khodayas path, sochan osus phone karay—I swear by Allah, I was thinking of calling you,’ he says.

  ‘I’m coming.’

  ‘That’s the best thing you’ve done in months,’ he says, and both of us laugh loudly.

  There is another reason why I want to visit Kashmir this time. There is one thorn I need to take care of. I have visited Kashmir many times, and each time I have wanted to do this. I want to meet Irshad. After Ravi’s death, we have had no contact with him. He has never visited us, never called us; nothing. Did he not want to know what happened to us, to Ravi’s family, after his death? I have spoken to friends; they have found out that he teaches botany at the Kashmir University. This time I will meet Irshad.

  ‘This summer so many people died,’ said Bhushan Lal Bhat. ‘In the afternoon you are fanning yourself as there is no electricity, and suddenly you hear a wail rising from a neighbouring flat,’ he says.

  We were sitting in Bhat’s one-room set in Jagti Township, the new refugee settlement. The inhabitants, Bhat told me, refer to it as Jagti Taavanship (Jagti Hellhole). Situated twelve kilometres away from Jammu, about four thousand Pandit families shifted here from four refugee settlements in 2011. After the initial days of living in tents in the camps, the government constructed asbestos-roofed brick structures for the refugees to live in. The condition in these camps was pathetic. Now, the government was promising them a much better life in Jagti Township. And the camp inmates fell for the bait.

  Bhat remembered his first few days in the quarter allotted to him. It rained one day and water seeped into his room from the balcony because of improper floor levelling. In no time, streamlets came gushing into his room from the leaking roof. ‘I tried plugging in my television but the socket wouldn’t work. When I opened it up, I found that there was no wiring,’ said Bhat.

  The families soon realized that they had been cut off from the city. Many families depended on the monthly relief of Rs 1,250 per head (not exceeding Rs 5,000 per family). When they lived in Jammu City, many men had taken on small private jobs to augment their income. But living in Jagti, these jobs became financially unviable. ‘If I have to pay half my salary for transport then what do I bring home?’ a man told me later. He had been working as a shop assistant in Jammu City, but now that he lived in Jagti, it was no longer feasible for him to keep his job. Also, many families had started small businesses, like grocery shops, in the old refugee camps. That income was gone as well since the shops promised to them in Jagti were yet to materialize. The worst affected w
ere the children, who spent hours commuting to Jammu to attend school or tuitions.

  There is no provision for sewage disposal in the settlement. The bodies of those who die have to be taken to Jammu since there is no provision for a cremation ground here. No transport is available after 8 p.m., and the road is so bad and deserted that women who are returning from the city often ask their male relatives to come and escort them. There has been no construction work for eight months at the site of a proposed hospital. Since the refugees did not have to pay for electricity in the old camps, they refuse to pay for electricity in Jagti. The township faces a daily power outage of sixteen hours; sometimes more. There is no electricity from 10.30 p.m. till 7 a.m.

  Dr Ajay Chrungoo, one of the leaders of the Pandit political organization, Panun Kashmir, which has been demanding a separate homeland for the Pandit community with Union Territory status, told me that the refugees realized the folly of shifting to Jagti. But it was too late to do anything. ‘Immediately after shifting people to Jagti, the government dismantled the old camps. Had we protested they would have asked us to shift back to tents,’ he said.

  Throughout the period of our exile, successive state governments in Kashmir employed a novel way of thwarting any allegation that they were biased against the Pandit community. They would appoint a Pandit to the post of Relief Commissioner. This fellow would always be more than keen to follow diktats. One such officer, who was the Relief Commissioner till February 2012, created a small lobby of refugees in the camps who acted like his gendarmes in return for small benefits. Those who tried to raise their voices against inadequate facilities would have their ration cards scrutinized. Even if one had a genuine ration card, the scrutiny took months, during which the person’s rights to claim relief money were suspended.

  Over the next few days, I spoke to dozens of people at the Jagti Township. There were serious allegations that a major chunk of the Rs 369-crore fund allotted for the township had been siphoned off by various players. Independent tests conducted on building material revealed that the ratio of cement to sand in the plaster was less than half the normal ratio. Instead of the standard three-layer water proofing, only a single layer had been done. Electrical appliances and sanitary fittings were of substandard quality. Most of the allegations seemed to be true since within a year, the buildings developed cracks and suffered water seepage. ‘These buildings look like they were built twenty years ago,’ said Bhushan Lal Bhat.

  I tried sending a list of questions to the Hyderabad-based Rithwik Projects Ltd, the company that was given the contract for building the township. The company’s website had been suspended said a message on the site’s homepage. Later it got running again. An email sent to its director, C.S. Bansal, bounced back. Repeated phone calls elicited no response.

  That there had been a mass bungling in funds was also evident from the fact that the water plant at the township, built at a cost of eighteen crore rupees, has been non-functional from day one. So, most days, the township residents are left without water. At the height of summer, there has been no water for weeks. The management of the water plant was given to a private company, Sai Constructions, but they haven’t been able to run it. In July 2012, the state Public Health Engineering and Irrigation Minister, Taj Mohiuddin, had to accept in the assembly that the water plant has been a failure. Out of desperation, many families have dug their own bore wells but the soak pits are two feet shallower than the required average height, resulting in the mixing of sewage with water.

  I visited the office of the Relief Commissioner, which is situated near the canal. In one corner, a few Pandit refugees sat on strike to press for an increase in the monthly relief. The recently appointed Relief Commissioner, R.K. Pandita, was yet to arrive. A queue had already formed outside his office. Old men and women stood outside the closed door, perspiring, holding sheaves of documents in their hands. I saw a young girl standing there as well. An old man asked her what she had come for. ‘For some personal work,’ she replied. After a while, Pandita arrived in his official car and bolted inside his office. I waited for my turn to enter. The young girl’s turn came before mine. From behind the closed door I heard her crying. Pandita was trying to console her. But I couldn’t hear the reason for her tears. After five minutes or so, she came out. I stopped her and asked her to wait till I was done. She nodded.

  Inside, in the middle of the room, R.K. Pandita sat listening to a woman who wanted a job for her son. No chairs had been placed in front of his desk. This, I guessed, was to make sure that nobody could relax and take longer than a few minutes to narrate their cup of woes. I sat on a chair placed in a corner. When the room was empty, I pulled my chair in front of the Commissioner.

  Pandita told me that he had recently been appointed as the Relief Commissioner and was trying his best to make life easy for the Pandit refugees. ‘You see, I am a refugee myself, then a Pandit, and then the Relief Commissioner as well. It is my duty three times over to ensure the welfare of the Pandits. But they need to start paying their electricity bills,’ he said.

  That evening, I returned to Jagti and shared this with Bhushan Lal Bhat. Since the news of the lack of power in Jagti had been making the rounds, a few young men from Kashmir, who are on Twitter, had been pointing out that many among those who refused to pay electricity bills in Jagti had been using air conditioners. I mentioned this to Bhushan Lal Bhat, who heard me out and took a deep puff from his Capstan cigarette. ‘You see that,’ he pointed to a picture of a Shivling on his wall, ‘that used to be an old temple in my village in Pahalgam; after our exodus the militants blasted it. Tell me,’ he continued, ‘if my child is preparing for his engineering or medical entrance exam, and for his comfort I have installed a 0.8 ton AC, does that make me rich? I have to live and show my children that the world has not come to an end; we will live and prosper again, and we will rebuild our temples. What will make them (the government) happy? That we stand on the road and start begging for alms?’

  Bhat may have installed an air conditioner. But I knew from visits to numerous other quarters in Jagti that many were leading a very difficult life. Rajinder Kumar Pandita was sleeping when I visited him. His wife was fanning him since there was no electricity, while his four daughters sat nearby. In the refugee camp, he had run a small shop and worked as a typist in a court. After he came to Jagti, he had to forego his shop and his job. He developed a kidney infection and suffered from high blood pressure. He was advised not to do any hard work or venture out in the heat. A few years ago, he had taken a loan of fifty thousand rupees towards which he was paying a monthly instalment of thirteen hundred rupees. So, out of the relief money of five thousand rupees, he had only thirty seven hundred rupees with which to feed six mouths. Each family member lived on twenty rupees a day, which is even lower than the Planning Commission’s ridiculous definition of poverty. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how do I even send my children to school?’

  Often, Bhushan Lal Bhat told me, impoverished families would come to him, requesting him to give them a handful of grain or some fruits. He did what he could, dipping in to the small supply he kept aside to offer to a priest on his father’s death anniversary. Many, he said, reeled under heavy debt. Outside, old men playing cards spoke in hushed tones about a man who kept his front door locked and slipped in late at night through a window to escape the wrath of money lenders. Bhat said his business had failed.

  ‘This is worse than the first exodus,’ Ajay Chrungoo said.

  When I land in Srinagar, Ali Mohammed is waiting outside the airport. He hugs me and takes my bag. ‘It has been raining for days, but today it is sunny. You’ve brought the summer with you from Delhi.’ I sit next to him. He takes out a pack of cigarettes, and I take one. We both smoke silently. From the Ram Bagh bridge, we turn left. I know he knows, but I tell him anyway. ‘If we turn right, I will reach home.’ He just nods. We pass by the Iqbal Park and the Bakshi Stadium where a farce of a parade is held every Independence Day and Republic Day. It is ear
ly afternoon and I think of going straight to the university after dropping my bag off at the hotel. The academic session is on at the university and I will find Irshad there.

  I haven’t been to the university in two years. The last time I was there, I was following a huge crowd of protestors agitating at the death of a teenage boy in a police firing. As the police charged at the crowd I took refuge inside the university. After a few minutes I came out only to be chased by a police vehicle down a street where I was pulled into a house by a helpful boy who was also a stone-pelting veteran. He looked at me, smiled and said, ‘Bacch gaye!’ I was offered water and an invitation to the attic from where the action on the road was visible.

  I remember coming out of the house and returning to a spot near the university gate. A boy rushed across the street. He had been hit on his head by a stone and blood was fast spreading over the rabbit on his Playboy T-shirt. There was teargas smoke all around. A magistrate wearing a cricket helmet stood at the gate. ‘I don’t know when this will end,’ he said.

  I remember walking with him for a short distance. A man in shabby clothes passed by us. The magistrate tried to stop him. ‘Ashfaq, it is me,’ he said. Ashfaq looked at him blankly, mumbled something and ran away. ‘Allah!’ the magistrate sighed. ‘Can you imagine? This man has a PhD, and now I don’t know what has happened to him.’

  Meanwhile more teargas shells were being fired at the protestors. At one end of the road, a constable holding a transparent shield with ‘Sexy Ayoub’ scribbled on it, smoked a cigarette. Without looking at me he said—‘This teargas smoke doesn’t bother me any longer; even my tears have dried up.’