Our Moon has Blood Clots Read online

  I was born at a time when double-decker buses had just been introduced on certain routes and I vaguely remember that a ride from Lal Chowk to our locality would cost twenty-five paisa. My sister had been born six years earlier. The clock tower in the main square in Srinagar intrigued me since it looked so ancient and never kept the correct time. It stood like an old patriarch in the middle of the city. It was next to this clock tower that Jawaharlal Nehru had climbed atop a table, along with Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, and had spoken about India’s commitment to Kashmir and its people.

  In the early eighties, I remember visits to the ancient Shankaracharya temple built on a hill overlooking Srinagar city. The temple was named after the Hindu philosopher-saint Adi Shankaracharya, who is believed to have visited the temple in the ninth century. We also visited the shrine of Kashmir’s patron goddess Sharika inside the Hari Parbat Fort. On Basant Panchami, we would go for day-long excursions to the Ramchandra temple in Srinagar.

  My mother’s sister lived near the cantonment area, and my uncle was a movie buff. Hoping to catch a glimpse of some film stars, my uncle would seat me on the crossbar of his bicycle and ride to the Oberoi hotel, where most film stars stayed. He was so fond of movies that he would often sit all night long in front of the television, keeping the volume low, smoking Panama cigarettes and noting down the cast with a pencil on a wall next to him. I was amazed by his skill in recognizing old film actresses: Nimmi, Suraiya, Geeta Bali, Bina Rai, Nalini Jaywant. It was the time when the actress Tabassum would appear on television with a rose in her hair, hosting a film-based programme. I also remember watching the singer Hemant Kumar on her show, a shawl placed neatly on his left shoulder, his head tilted towards the right as he sang one soulful song after another. Besides these outings and the Sunday evening feature film on television, the only source of entertainment was listening to stories from our grandparents. And then there were family gatherings and festivals.

  Being Shaivites—followers of Lord Shiva—the most important among our festivals was Shivratri, which would be celebrated over a period of one week or so. It falls in either February or March, during the severe cold. Preparations would begin a month earlier. The whole house would be thoroughly cleaned and the larder replenished. Two days before the festival, Father and I would visit Habba Kadal to buy pooja paraphernalia from Kanth Joo, a toothless man who ran a small shop as ancient and mysterious as its owner. From there, we would go to the Muslim potter who sold us earthen pots, and the Shivling for rituals. Then we would make our way to the bridge—one of the eight built across the Jhelum—and bargain with the fishermen for the best rates.

  We would return home, Father and I, while I held his hand and a bag of roasted chestnuts. At home, Father would clean the fish in a basin and scrape off the scales under a tap beside the kitchen garden, while I watched in fascination as he cut open its guts and sliced the fish into pieces. We children would wait for the fish bladders to be extricated so that we could jump on them, making them produce a noise while bursting. I would then help Father make garlands and little round thrones for Shiva and his bride Parvati from dried straw.

  On the evening of the festival, an area in the kitchen would be cleared to conduct the ‘marriage rituals’. The seat of prominence would be given to Parvati, represented by an earthen pitcher. It would be filled with water, and the choicest walnuts and sugar cones. Its neck would be decorated with marigold and bhelpatra strings, vermillion mixed with clarified butter, and silver foil. The rituals lasted till midnight. As children we would struggle to remain awake till the ‘marriage’ was solemnized. The next day, scores of lamb, fish and vegetable dishes would be prepared, and the elders would give money to the children to buy anything we wanted. During the day, the men gambled at cards while the children played juph-taakh, a game played with cowries. They symbolized fertility and playing with them was an old practice because of the dwindling population due to religious persecution and high infant mortality rates. The cowries were procured from Bombay by a Pandit family that had settled hundreds of years ago in Bajalta near Jammu. From there, the shells would be transported to the Valley on mules.

  On the final evening of the festival, the ‘bride’ and the ‘groom’ would be bid farewell. Taken to the river, they would be immersed in its waters. Upon returning, the custom was for the farewell party to knock on the main door of the house. A family member would enquire who was at the door, and one of the members of the farewell party would respond, ‘I’ve brought with me money, food, prosperity, and happiness.’ It was then that the door would be opened and the farewell party welcomed back. Then walnuts from the pitcher, sweetened with milk and sugar, would be eaten along with rotis made of rice flour cooked on a slow fire.

  Sometimes it snowed during Shivratri, and we would make snowmen in our garden. We had an unwavering belief in our gods and in our festivals. During Afghan rule in Kashmir, the Governor, Jabbar Khan, upon hearing that it invariably snowed on Shivratri, ordered that it be celebrated in June–July. But even on that night, due to some unusual atmospheric cooling, snowflakes fell, silencing the vicious.

  Vidyam deehe Saraswati … O Goddess of Learning, grant me knowledge. Under the apple tree that stood in our garden, like a sage doing penance, Grandfather made me recite this hymn after him. He told me how, when I was an infant, he had dipped a wooden nib in honey and written on my tongue one syllable that would guide my life: Om. It was the key to all secrets, he said, that I ever wished to have unravelled. It was an antidote to all poisons that would try to ride on my breath. It would keep rabid dogs away from me and, likewise, Rahchok, the Will-o’-the-wisp—the one with a bowl of fire placed on his head who misled people towards doom when the earth was covered with snow. Its recital would bar bad thoughts from polluting my mind; it would keep me from harm’s way, no matter what shape or form it took.

  One room in our house was dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. Its wooden shelves were lined with books, some of them covered with brown paper. The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. Arabian Nights. Kalhana’s Rajatarangini. Gandhi’s The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Tagore’s Gitanjali. Phanishwar Nath Renu’s Jaloos. The collected stories of Premchand and Saadat Hasan Manto. These would be brought out on a particular day in spring, and worshipped. The night before, Ma would fill a brass plate with grains of rice over which she placed a pen, a portrait of the goddess, some milk in a small bowl, and a bunch of narcissus flowers. The next morning we were required to first look at this offering—that was how we welcomed the coming of the new year, praying that we acquired a few more droplets from the ocean of knowledge. Vidyam deehe Saraswati.

  Apart from these old customs, there was a thumb rule that guided our lives. You could say it was a story the moral of which was left unsaid, deliberately, I think. It was too evident, too stark for even a dimwit to miss. The story went like this: Two boys got into a verbal duel in downtown Srinagar. It turned into a fistfight and, in no time, the two lay on the road, with one boy overpowering the other. As he lay over him, the stronger boy’s sacred thread which identified him as a Pandit, became visible.

  ‘Bloody hell, you are a Pandit!’ shouted one boy. In a moment, the tables turned and it was the other boy who won the fight. The fact that his opponent was a Pandit gave the other boy strength. Nobody was expected to lose to a Kashmiri Pandit in a physical fight.

  No one knew exactly when this apocryphal fight had occurred. I had heard this story many times from men who belonged to my grandfather’s generation and from those of my father’s generation as well. It had probably trickled down, this piece of wisdom, from generation to generation.

  I didn’t read much into the story as a child, but I remember creating quite a scene after hearing my parents discuss my thread-wearing ceremony.

  ‘Why, son?’ my grandfather pulled me onto his lap. ‘All of us have done it. My father, me, your father, and now you. This is what distinguishes us, and makes us who we are: Brahmins,’ he tried to reason it out with
me. My groans grew louder and I flailed my arms.

  ‘All right, tell me why you don’t want us to put the janeu around your shoulder?’ he finally asked.

  I remained silent for a while. And then I said it.

  ‘Because, then Tariq will know that I’m a Pandit and he will overpower me.’

  I don’t quite remember how Grandfather reacted to what I said. Perhaps he laughed as he always did at my childish remarks.

  Tariq was my friend in school. A photo of the class of 1984 I once possessed showed him next to me, his arm over my shoulder. It was the same year that the school magazine had a portrait of the goddess Saraswati on its front page.

  On the afternoon of the day the magazine was distributed among the students, some of us were playing cricket on the school grounds. In the classroom, Tariq and I were inseparable, thick as thieves, as our English teacher said. But on the playground we were arch-enemies—he was Javed Miandad, the famous Pakistani batsman, while I was Kapil Dev, the great Indian fast bowler. With a tennis ball and a bat made of a broken wooden plank, we would put up the fight of our lives. Most days, Tariq’s side won, but that day it was my turn. On the last ball, bowled by Tariq himself, I hit a sixer. My team won the match.

  Later, on my way back to the classroom, I saw a group of my classmates standing in a circle.

  ‘India won the match,’ I shouted. They would be crestfallen, I knew, since all of them supported Tariq’s team, which called itself ‘Pakistan’. They would all hurl abuses when the national anthem was sung during the school assembly and kicked those of us who sang it. One of them looked at me, and then all of them ran away suddenly, throwing a bunch of papers on to the floor. I thought my victory had embarrassed them. But what were the papers they had left behind? I picked one up, and recoiled in disgust—the paper was covered with snot. I threw it away. It was then that my eyes fell on another, partially crumpled paper. A shiver ran through my body. It was a page torn from the school magazine—it was the portrait of the goddess Saraswati. It was covered with snot too. My heart sank and my stomach felt as if someone had punched me. I was very scared. I thought the goddess would punish me for my friends’ behaviour. Vidyam deehe Saraswati. No more. I raced out towards the grounds to report the incident to Tariq.

  I ran through one corridor and entered another. At one end in semi-darkness, I saw Tariq, his head bent over something. I slowed down. He didn’t notice me. It was then that he tore off something from what lay on his lap and brought it towards his face.

  ‘Tariq!’ I called out.

  He was startled. The page fell from his hands. He got up and just ran away. I prayed that it wouldn’t be what I thought it was. I was paralysed, unable to move. After what must have been a minute, I finally walked towards the page. I didn’t have to pick it up. The goddess’s musical instrument—the Veena—was clearly visible. I kept staring at it, transfixed. It was when the school bell rang that my trance broke. I lifted the page, carefully folded it, and put it in the pocket of my shorts.

  I didn’t tell anyone about this incident. Tariq avoided me for many days. Afterwards, when he spoke to me, I tried to avoid thinking of that day. He never mentioned it either. We got back to our respective roles in the playground.

  But I don’t remember us putting our arms around each other ever again.

  Sometimes, glimpses of Kashmir are shown on the Discovery Channel. One day Father spotted the Dal Lake, and he almost shouted, pointing it out to my niece: ‘Look, this is where nadru comes from!’ He had forgotten that the lotus stem we sometimes bought in Delhi might have been grown in the polluted Yamuna waters, for all we knew. But I didn’t say anything.

  My parents shifted to Delhi from Jammu in 1998, a year after getting my sister married. Three weeks before they shifted, Ma paid me her first visit in Delhi. I went to receive her at the interstate bus terminus; she refused to travel by train, which she found filthy. In the autorickshaw, on our ride home, she had a good look at me and her eyes moistened. I was working for a television news channel at that time and kept long hours, often skipping meals. I had lost weight and this made her unhappy.

  ‘You have grown so thin,’ she said.

  ‘Girls here like slim boys,’ I quipped.

  But Ma was not one to appreciate humour. ‘I hope some Punjabi girl has not cast her spell on you,’ she said with genuine worry.

  She spent three days in Delhi, and I took her around to show her the sights. I also bought her kulfi, which she relished. I knew that, unlike my father, for whom a proper meal had to include rice, Ma relished hot, crispy tandoori rotis. So we ate at a small, clean restaurant where she had two rotis with a bowl of dal and cauliflower.

  One Monday morning, three weeks after Ma’s visit—Monday was my day off and they knew it—my parents landed up at the doorstep of my one-room flat. I was surprised to see them and shocked to see the number of items they had brought along with them. I was not even sure so many things would fit into my room. But in two hours, Ma had set up a kitchen. From the Kashmir Valley, we had been forced to shift to Jammu. And now, from Jammu, my parents had come to Delhi.

  The day after, when I returned from work close to midnight, I saw Father pacing in the balcony. There were no cell phones then, and he didn’t have my office numbers. ‘That is why I had been dissuading you from shifting here,’ I said before he could complain. Father remained silent.

  ‘Eat your food,’ Ma said. She had cooked some of my favourite Kashmiri delicacies.

  It took my parents months to come to terms with my gruelling work schedule. Sometimes, when I returned home visibly tired, Ma would ask: ‘So, how much do you earn?’ After I told her, she would say, ‘Sit at home, I’ll give you a thousand more than that!’ Gradually, they became used to it. So much so that if I got home early, they would ask if all was well.

  Wherever we went, moving from one flat to another, Father forged friendships with vegetable vendors, owners of daily utility stores, and with electricians and plumbers. Wherever we lived, few knew me by my name. They only referred to me as Pandita sahab’s son.

  Every few months my parents would go to Jammu to catch up with relatives who had settled there after the exodus of 1990. After Ma permanently took to her bed, in 2004, they were unable to return. So, our only contact with the family is on the phone or when relatives come to Delhi for short visits. When they come from Jammu, my relatives bring with them souvenirs from home: collard greens, raw walnuts, or sesame bagels made by Kashmiri bakers who have now set up shop in Jammu. Sometimes Father forgets that he is not even in Jammu now, that he is even further away from home. So he sometimes refers to Jammu as ‘Shahar’, or city—Shahar was always meant to refer to Srinagar. That is a habit my father’s generation has: calling Srinagar ‘Shahar’—the city that is home. And when I gently remind Father of his mistake, he smiles an embarrassed smile. But for days afterwards, he goes silent. For days, he does not read the newspapers. For days, he does not watch Doordarshan Kashmir and hum along with Rashid Hafiz. I can only imagine what images the mere mention of Shahar evokes in him.

  Shahar was our home. Shahar was our shahrag—our jugular. Shahar was us.

  In Shahar though, by the age children learned the alphabet, they realized that there was an irreversible bitterness between Kashmir and India, and that the minority Pandits were often at the receiving end of the wrath this bitterness evoked. We were the punching bags. But we assimilated noiselessly, and whenever one of us became a victim of selective targetting, the rest of us would lie low, hoping for things to normalize.

  But Shahar was also about friendships, bonding, compassion, and what the elders called ‘lihaaz’, which, in simple terms, means consideration. But in the Kashmiri context, it was many things. It was throwing away a cigarette if one spotted an elder approaching. It was offering a seat in the bus to a woman from one’s locality. It was taking a heavy bag from an old man’s hand and carrying it till his house.

  Sometimes during a summer sunset, when the sky t
urned crimson, serene old men taking leisurely puffs from their hookahs would look at it and then sigh and say, ‘There has been khoonrizi—bloodshed—somewhere.’

  On Eid-ul-Zuha, we would go to our neighbours’ homes to wish them happiness. One of my father’s Muslim friends lived nearby, and when Father would be out on long official tours, he would stop by, knocking gently at our door, refusing to come inside, and asking if we needed anything. My sister sometimes taught his children, and on Eid-ul-Zuha I would slip out and visit his house to watch their family sacrifice sheep. A piece of lamb’s meat would later be sent to us, uncooked, because some families avoided eating at each other’s house for religious considerations. Though, by the time of my father’s generation, these considerations had almost been dissolved. Our neighbours wished us on Shivratri, and we would offer them walnuts soaked in sweet milk and water.

  We hardly knew of life beyond Kashmir. I remember a cousin had gone to Meerut to study agricultural science. On returning, he would tell us how common murders were there, and I remember how a hush fell when he recounted how a man had been called out of his home late in the night and then stabbed. In the Valley, the biggest crime we had heard about was how in a fight sometimes a man would pull out his kangri from underneath his pheran and hurl it at his opponent. When somebody fought or used foul language, he would be immediately dubbed a ‘Haaen’z’—a member of the boatman community, known for their crude language and whose wives apparently fought bitterly.

  But this lihaaz, this peaceful coexistence, would be threatened every now and then. It was as if the minority Pandits were to be blamed for everything that went wrong. It could be anything, as our experience would tell us.

  In 1986, major anti-Pandit riots broke out in Anantnag in southern Kashmir in retaliation to rumours that Muslims had been killed in the Hindu-majority region of Jammu. Some believed the riots were a conspiracy by one political party to bring down another party’s government. Whatever the reasons, the Pandits became the target. Houses were looted and burnt down, men beaten up, women raped and dozens of temples destroyed. A massive statue of the goddess Durga was brought down in the ancient Lok Bhawan temple.