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  A few years earlier, in our locality, a few Pandit families had tried to construct a small temple out of wooden planks. Although there was a temple nearby, during the harsh winters the snow would make it difficult to walk on the road, so some families thought of building a temple closer to their homes. But as soon as the planks were assembled and the idols placed on a small, wooden platform, some Muslim men gathered and began to hurl abuses. One of them brought the whole structure down with a kick. There was no protest. We had learnt to live that way. Whenever things went sour, we would just lower our heads and walk away. Or stay at home, till things got better. I remember visiting the site a few hours later when some of the Pandit families were carrying away their desecrated gods. I was heartbroken at the sight of a broken idol of Hanuman. For us children, he was like Superman. We would sing his praises in the form of the Hanuman Chalisa.

  I returned home and hid myself in a patch of our garden, and lay there, face down. I must have stayed like that for a few hours till Totha came looking for me. Totha was Tathya’s younger brother, and he lived alone in a small room in his brother’s house.

  Totha turned me over onto my back and I held him tight. ‘They broke the temple,’ I said. He was silent for a while. And then he spoke. ‘You know, Swami Vivekananda—his photo is in our thokur kuth—he came to the Kshir Bhawani temple many years ago and spent a few days alone there. While performing a yagna, he had a vision of the goddess. “Mother,” he addressed her, “I am so disturbed; everywhere I see temples being destroyed by Muslim invaders.” That is when the goddess spoke to him. “It doesn’t matter if they enter my temple and desecrate my idol. It should not matter to you. Tell me, do you protect me, or do I protect you?’”

  Totha then held my hand and led me to his small room. From the pocket of his Nehru jacket, he pulled out a stick. ‘I got this for you,’ he said.

  ‘What, you got me a stick!’ I cried.

  He smiled. ‘Bite into it.’

  I did as instructed and was overjoyed. I had never tasted sugar cane before. Totha was like that—full of surprises. God knows where he had got that sugar cane from, since it was not grown in the Valley.

  The dose of sugar calmed me down, and I soon forgot about the incident. But I think it changed me a little, and I became conscious of my identity as a Kashmiri Pandit. A few weeks later, my paternal grandfather came to visit us for a few days. He was quite old now and spent most of his time in prayer. Even when we children created bedlam while playing around him, he would not even raise an eyebrow. One day I stopped playing and sat next to him while he recited his prayers. I waited patiently, and as soon as he finished and opened his eyes, I asked him what prayer he was reciting.

  ‘Durgasaptashati,’ he replied.

  ‘Is it the same one that is supposed to have so much energy that some people lose their mental balance while reciting it?’

  ‘Yes, that is the one.’

  ‘So how come you can recite it and nothing happens to you?’

  He laughed and said, ‘I don’t know, son. Maybe one has to prepare oneself for it. It has taken me years to ready myself.’

  ‘So teach me how to recite it, won’t you?’

  ‘No, son, you are young right now. It requires a lot of patience, a lot of discipline. You don’t even bathe everyday. When you grow up, I’ll teach you.’

  I threw a tantrum. I insisted that until my grandfather taught me how to recite the mantra, I wouldn’t eat. Nobody took me seriously at first. But when I did not eat the whole day, Father got angry and stormed into my room.

  ‘Don’t be a fool; come and eat.’

  I was quite afraid of him, but that day I held my ground. In the evening, Ma said Grandfather wanted to see me.

  ‘Okay, I will teach you a portion of it,’ he said. And he did. I practised it for days and learnt it by heart.

  My faith in what Grandfather taught me that day has never wavered. I’ve tested that mantra in the most adverse moments of my life. And it has never failed me.

  Totha lived in a small room on the first floor, overlooking the kitchen garden. Though he lived with his brother’s family, he was fairly independent. He washed his own clothes and refused to use modern detergents, using instead a crude soap he got from the Khatri shopkeepers in Maharaj Ganj. He ate frugally and was not fussy about what he ate. He was a chain smoker, and in the evening he would come to our house and Ma would give him tea in a steel tumbler. He never used a cushion and always sat erect with his right leg resting on his left. I think in the evenings he felt a little lonely. My uncle worked as a teacher and was posted in distant villages for long periods, and my aunt would be busy in the kitchen. Whatever spare time she had, she liked to spend with her friends in the neighbourhood. The two children went to college and had no time to spare either. So Totha came to us in the evenings and told stories about his postings in Ladakh and Gilgit to my father who always listened patiently to him. He had served in these places before Independence. Later he worked in the Chest Disease hospital in Srinagar. Totha had diabetes and one day I asked him what that meant.

  ‘That means there is sugar in my urine,’ he said.

  I had seen him pissing sometimes beside a shrub behind their house. After he said that, I went several times to that spot, hoping to find grains of sugar.

  Totha used to pamper us. Every day he brought us something new—an Ajanta fountain pen, a toy pistol, a packet of lotus seeds, a roll of Poppins candy, Amul milk chocolate, digestive pills, elaichi-flavoured toffees.

  Behind our house was stationed a battalion of the Border Security Force (BSF), and sometimes we crossed the barbed wire and sneaked in to steal shuttlecocks after the officers had played their game of badminton. In the mornings and evenings, the soldiers sounded the bugle and we children would imitate its sound.

  Sometimes, Mother would take us to a wedding feast. A huge tent would be erected, and inside, long strips of white cloth laid on the ground and guests seated on either side of them. Two boys would come bearing a basin of water, a cake of soap, and a towel for the guests to wipe their hands with. Then, one by one, men who were relatives or friends or neighbours of the bride or groom, would come with brass plates, and then dishes of food and rice. The quantity of food put on one’s plate depended on one’s age, with the elders receiving the most generous helpings. The head cook would come out last, doling out portions of the main dish. If there was an important guest—like a son-in-law—he would be accorded special treatment, which often meant someone from his wife’s family would hover around him, instructing the men who carried the meat dishes to put additional helpings on his plate.

  At our marriages, Muslim women celebrated with us by linking their arms and singing traditional songs to welcome the groom and his family and friends. My mother’s best friend was Shahzaad. She also worked with the health department. They travelled together to distant villages for work, and shopped together, and exchanged gossip, and bitched about their mothers-in-law.

  Kashmiris have a way with nicknames. In old Srinagar, there lived a man called Jawahar Lal who was a fan of Sartre and would always be seen carrying one of his books. His neighbours named him ‘Javv’e Sartre’. In Habba Kadal, there lived an eccentric professor who had been named ‘Deen’e Phil’asafer’ (the professor’s name, I believe, was Dina Nath). The locals said he was often to be seen on the bridge mumbling mathematical equations to himself. One of them supposedly went like this: ‘I’m on bridge, bridge is on water, bridge-bridge cancel, I’m on water.’

  My parents were protective, and I think their lives revolved around their home and the welfare of their children. There are sepia pictures of my parents enjoying day-long picnics at the Mughal Gardens. In some of them, my father sports a Dev Anand puff while Ma wears a sari like the dazzling Waheeda Rehman. But after we were born, their entire focus shifted to our education and well-being. Whatever money was saved was spent on the house. Ma ran the affairs of the house like a seasoned manager. She knew exactly what was kept
where—dried chillies, woollen socks, coal powder, candles.

  After office, many men would typically go to a bar to have a drink discreetly and then savour lamb mince kebabs at roadside stalls in Lal Chowk. These were made by Muslims, and some Pandits found it a little embarrassing to be spotted in front of these stalls. So, they would place their order quickly and then stand in a corner, as if waiting for something else. Once the kebabs were made, the man signalled, and the Pandit would come and quickly gobble them up.

  But Father returned home at six on the dot, ringing the fish-shaped bell that I had chosen, and my sister and I would rush to receive him at the door. He would come inside, change, and drink his tea and talk to Ma.

  I remember once Ma and her entire family had gone to Baramulla for a cousin’s wedding. My sister and I stayed back with Father. In the afternoon, he got us dressed and said that we were going to watch a movie. We took an autorickshaw to the Broadway cinema where they were showing Hero. Back in school, some classmates had already seen it and had begun to sport red headbands as Jackie Shroff had done in the film.

  We reached the cinema hall well in time, but the queue for tickets had spilled out on to the main road and by the look of it we knew that we had no chance.

  ‘Wait, I’ll go to Moti Lal, he will surely manage,’ Father said. Moti Lal lived on our street and was the manager of the cinema. Father got us a softie cone each and asked us to wait for him. After a while he returned, empty-handed.

  ‘Did you get the tickets?’ I asked him. He said nothing. After a minute he told us that Moti Lal had seen him but had turned his head away. Father understood that he was avoiding him. He must have realized that my Father might ask him for help with tickets. So Father returned without talking to him.

  ‘Are we to go back without watching the film?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no, never,’ he said. ‘Have faith.’

  We waited and after a while a shady-looking man passed by. Father went after him, and from a distance we saw him speaking to the man. I almost shouted when I saw him handing over the pink slips that I knew were tickets to my father. He had bought the tickets in black. He held our hands and in no time we were inside the hall with popcorn and Gold Spot, watching Jackie Shroff with his red headgear, performing stunts on his motorbike.

  That day my father became my hero.

  In early 1984, one name came up repeatedly during after-dinner conversations between my father and my two uncles—Bhindranwale. From what I gathered, he was some kind of Sikh leader and had taken control of the Golden Temple in Amritsar. My mother often raved about the Golden Temple; it was the only place she had visited outside Kashmir. She had very fond memories of visiting it and more than anything else, she had been impressed with the cleanliness of the entire complex.

  It was a hot day in June 1984 when the news began to trickle in that something dangerous was happening in Amritsar. The Indian army, we learnt, had attacked the temple to get rid of Bhindranwale. Mother was sad to see the desecration. She kept describing how the temple looked from inside and how peaceful one felt there while the Sikh priests sang the soulful gurbani. That evening, one of father’s friends came by and told us that in retaliation to the army operation, a mob had descended upon the Hanuman temple in Amira Kadal and thrown the idol into the Jhelum. The priests were beaten up as well. I couldn’t understand why the Hanuman temple had been targeted for what had transpired hundreds of miles away, events in which Kashmir had no role to play.

  It was in October of the same year that Indira Gandhi, who many held responsible for the assault on the Golden Temple, was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. I had skipped school that day for some reason and in the afternoon we heard the news on All India Radio that the prime minister had been shot, and that she was in critical condition. It was later in the day that the BBC finally declared her dead.

  The radio had begun to play the mournful shehnai. My sister returned from school in tears that day. She said there had been celebrations in her school and on the streets. The previous year Mrs Gandhi had visited Kashmir and she had addressed a rally in Iqbal Park where men sat in the front row naked, waving their genitals at her. It is not that we were traditional Congress supporters, or for that matter followers of politics. I don’t remember anyone in my family stepping out on election days. They had neither the time nor the inclination for it. But for us, Indira Gandhi represented the emotional connect we felt with India, or more specifically with Jawaharlal Nehru, who we thought of as one of our own.

  In Delhi, the anti-Sikh riots began soon after Mrs Gandhi was declared dead. From the Indian Express, we learnt the horrific details of how scores of innocent people were done to death for no fault of theirs. ‘One day, something similar will happen here, to us,’ one of my uncles said.

  Five days after Mrs Gandhi’s death, Dedda passed away too, in her sleep. She had begun to hallucinate about a person who she said was aiming at her with a gun from atop a tree in the backyard. Dedda’s death came as a big blow to Totha. Tathya had died years ago, and so Dedda, his sister-in-law, had been Totha’s only companion.

  A year later, my paternal grandfather passed away as well. Ma had been visiting him in the hospital, and that night she asked father not to lay any elaborate bedding at home. She had a premonition of Grandfather’s death. At midnight, we were woken up. Grandfather’s body was brought home in an ambulance. The children of the house were made to put water into Grandfather’s mouth with a spoon, and then we were sent to Totha’s house for the night.

  The following morning, Grandfather was taken on his final journey. As my father and uncles lifted up his bier, I silently recited the prayer he had taught me not very long ago.

  I don’t know what Shahar means to me personally. In so many ways, we were protected in Shahar from the trickery and the treachery of big cities like Delhi. In Shahar, as I realized later, speaking one’s own language meant so much. It filled one with contentment and an undefinable happiness. From the late 1990s onwards, years after the exodus, when I went to the Valley on reporting assignments, it was as if a tap opened up suddenly. Kashmiri words did a foxtrot on my tongue and I uttered them—words that I had forgotten even existed. Once, in the dead of the night, when nobody was out on the streets except army convoys, I sneaked out from my hotel with a few local friends and sat on a wooden deck that extended out over the Dal Lake. A radio crackled somewhere in one of the houseboats, and the Hazratbal shrine shimmered in the still waters of the lake. A lone light, perhaps from a sentry post, shone from the Hari Parbat Fort. We sat there, taking swigs from a bottle of Old Monk rum, and laughed over a tragicomic incident a friend was narrating—

  A few years ago, early one morning, hundreds of army troopers surrounded a village. They said they were looking for militants. This was in the early 2000s, and by then the Kashmiris were quite used to the humiliation of being made to assemble in a ground while soldiers conducted searches inside houses. Such search operations—the Kashmiris called them ‘crackdowns’—would sometimes last for the entire day.

  In this village the men were made to assemble in a school ground. They sat on their haunches while soldiers, wearing bulletproof jackets and helmets, kept a watch on them. A man had the urge to shit, and it made him restless. He looked at the soldier hovering over him, held his chin (that is how Kashmiris ask for a favour) and muttered: Sahab, gussa aa raha hai.

  Now, in Kashmiri, guss means shit, and in Hindi, gussa means anger. The man thought by adding an ‘a’, a Kashmiri word could turn into a Hindi one. It did, but unfortunately it meant something else now. The soldier let out an expletive and almost hit the man on his head. ‘Bastard,’ he shouted, ‘we have not been here for five minutes and you are already feeling angry!’

  It was then that the man’s neighbour pitched in to explain his friend’s predicament. ‘Sahab,’ he begged, ‘he doesn’t know Hindi. He means: Usko gobar aaya hai.’ Gobar in Hindi means dung. He must have remembered some school essay on the cow. The soldier’s rifle
slipped off as he collapsed on the ground with uncontrollable laughter.

  While we laughed as well, the story also filled my heart with sadness. And I was sure it saddened my friends as well. They had to live through this every day. But we did not share sadness beyond this. Because then the topic always veered towards the events of 1989–90, and that was the point at which our truths became different. For them, the events of 1990 were a rebellion against the Indian state. For me, these same events had led to exile and permanent homelessness. When I visited we laughed most times, and sang songs, and hugged each other.

  Sometimes we just sat quietly, and at times like these, even the crackle of burning cigarette paper could be heard.

  At times like these I remembered a girl.

  When we were still in the Valley, at home, one of my distant cousins ended her life by jumping into the Jhelum. At first she was thought to have gone missing, and there were rumours of her having eloped with her lover. Apparently, for weeks before she disappeared, she had sat in a corner of her house, listening to a Rashid Hafiz song:

  Yeli chhe myonuy maqbar sajawakh, paanay pashtaavakh

  Asmaan’ik taarakh ganzraavakh, paanay pashtaavakh

  You will repent only when you decorate my grave

  You will count stars in the sky, this is how you will repent

  They found her bloated body a week or so later in the river waters somewhere far away. Since I was young, I was not allowed to attend her cremation. I had met her for the first time when Grandfather passed away and her family stayed with us through the days of rituals. I had played cricket with her younger brother, and spent hours looking at her in secret admiration of her nail paint, and of the lipstick she hid in the pocket of her pheran, and of her diary in which she had copied verses of Rumi.