Our Moon has Blood Clots Read online

That winter evening in 1990, the lady sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return. Mohan Lal sits outside. He has a habit of repeatedly looking at his watch and asking passers-by what time it is. Two men clad in pherans throw a cursory glance at him and enter the house.

  ‘Where is your husband?’ one of them asks the lady inside.

  ‘He is not here; he will come tomorrow,’ she replies. She senses that the men do not mean well. She lies to them about her husband’s arrival.

  The men look at each other and leave without saying another word. They come out and find Mohan Lal still there. One of them whips out a gun and shoots him dead. Mohan Lal falls down with his mouth open, one hand clenching his wristwatch.

  The guns are never silenced after the September of 1989. Every day, news pours in of attacks on military convoys or bunkers. Srinagar city turns into a war zone. Armed men exchange fire with paramilitary forces and many civilians are caught in the crossfire.

  Once the Pandits have left, novel methods are used to alert people of an impending ambush in the marketplace. The militant commander Mushtaq Zargar—he hits international headlines ten years later as one of the three men India is forced to free in exchange for the hostages of the hijacked flight IC-814—sends vegetable vendors to such places. Pushing his cart, the vendor shouts in Kashmiri: Tamatar paav, Bae’jaan aav (Tomatoes, one-fourth of a kilo, big brother says hello). While the soldiers from the mainland of India understand nothing, civilians take the hint and discreetly vacate the area to avoid being caught in the crossfire.

  But for the Pandits, there is no such concern. For the Ghazis invoked by Benazir Bhutto, we are infidels. And we deserve to die.

  In October 1989, we still didn’t know.

  On October 31, the militant commander Hamid Sheikh is critically injured in an encounter with military personnel. He is among the first groups of men to have crossed the Line of Control in 1988 to undergo arms training. By 1989–90, thousands of boys have followed his example.

  By October, a few other Pandits have been killed. Retired judge Neelkanth Ganjoo is waylaid by three men on Hari Singh Street, in the heart of Srinagar, and shot at close range. His body remains there untouched for fifteen minutes. Later, the police arrives and takes his body away.

  On December 6, 1989, exactly three years before the demolition of the Babri Masjid created a deep laceration in Indian society, a Kashmiri politician was unexpectedly appointed Union home minister by the central government in Delhi. Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, whose political career began with the Congress party, is someone whom the Pandits hold responsible for the 1986 Anantnag riots.

  Two days after Sayeed took over, armed youths kidnapped his daughter Rubaiya from a minibus as she returned from the Lal Ded hospital, where she worked as a doctor. The militants demanded the release of five imprisoned men in exchange for Rubaiya. These five were part of the first batch of men who had crossed the Line of Control to receive arms training.

  Kashmir was like a deer’s neck in a wolf’s grip.

  Eight days later, five militants were released in downtown Srinagar to secure Rubaiya’s release. One of them was Hamid Sheikh. On the morning he was to be released from the Soura Medical Institute, a photographer from a local newspaper asked him to pose for a picture. He did it happily, flashing a victory sign. I couldn’t help noticing that on a table behind him there was a tin of Cinthol talcum powder. From 3 p.m. onwards, celebrations began in the Kashmir Valley. Lal Chowk was lined with JKLF flags. A throng of people assembled at Hamid Sheikh’s house in Batmaloo. Candy was showered and women sang songs traditionally sung to welcome a bridegroom. There was celebratory gunfire in many places. In Shopian, in south Kashmir, a mob came out and beat up Pandit men on the streets. Scores of women were molested to make merry. Shortly afterwards, militants issued a diktat to newsreaders to quit their jobs in radio and television so that the government information mechanism would collapse.

  January 19, 1990, was a very cold day despite the sun’s weak attempts to emerge from behind dark clouds. In the afternoon, I played cricket with some boys from my neighbourhood. All of us wore thick sweaters and pherans. I would always remove my pheran and place it on the fence in the kitchen garden. After playing, I would wear it before entering the house to escape my mother’s wrath. She worried that I would catch cold. ‘The neighbours will think that I am incapable of taking care of my children,’ she would say in exasperation.

  We had an early dinner that evening and, since there was no electricity, we couldn’t watch television. Father heard the evening news bulletin on the radio as usual, and just as we were going to sleep, the electricity returned.

  I am in a deep slumber. I can hear strange noises. Fear grips me. All is not well. Everything is going to change. I see shadows of men slithering along our compound wall. And then they jump inside. One by one. So many of them.

  I woke up startled. But the zero-watt bulb was not on. The hundred-watt bulb was. Father was waking me up. ‘Something is happening,’ he said. I could hear it—there were people out on the streets. They were talking loudly. Some major activity was underfoot. Were they setting our locality on fire?

  So, it wasn’t entirely a dream, after all? Will they jump inside now?

  Then a whistling sound could be heard. It was the sound of the mosque’s loudspeaker. We heard it every day in the wee hours of the morning just before the muezzin broke into the azaan. But normally the whistle was short-lived; that night, it refused to stop. That night, the muezzin didn’t call. That night, it felt like something sinister was going to happen.

  The noise outside our house had died down. But in the mosque, we could hear people’s voices. They were arguing about something.

  My uncle’s family came to our side of the house. ‘What is happening?’ Uncle asked. ‘Something is happening,’ Father said. ‘They are up to something.’

  It was then that a long drawl tore through the murmurs, and with the same force the loudspeaker began to hiss.

  ‘Naara-e-taqbeer, Allah ho Akbar!’

  I looked at my father; his face was contorted. He knew only too well what the phrase meant. I had heard it as well, in a stirring drama telecast a few years ago on Doordarshan, an adaptation of Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, a novel based on the events of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. It was the cry that a mob of Muslim rioters shouted as it descended upon Hindu settlements. It was a war cry.

  Within a few minutes, battle cries flew at us from every direction. They rushed towards us like poison darts.

  Hum kya chaaaahte: Azadiiii!

  Eiy zalimon, eiy kafiron, Kashmir humara chhod do.

  What do we want—Freedom!

  O tyrants, O infidels, leave our Kashmir.

  Then the slogans ceased for a while. From another mosque came the sound of recorded songs eulogizing the Mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The whole audio cassette played through, and then the slogans returned. We were still wondering what would happen next when a slogan we heard left us in no doubt. I remember Ma began to tremble like a leaf when we heard it.

  ‘Assi gacchi panu’nuy Pakistan, batav rostuy, batenein saan.’

  The crowd wanted to turn Kashmir into Pakistan, without the Pandit men, but with their women.

  They’ll come and finish us. It is just a matter of minutes now, we think.

  Ma rushed to the kitchen and returned with a long knife. It was her father’s. ‘If they come, I will kill her,’ she looked at my sister. ‘And then I will kill myself. And you see what you two need to do.’

  Father looked at her in disbelief. But he didn’t utter a word.

  We are very scared. We do not know what to do. Where would we run away to? Would Ma have to kill herself? What about my sister?

  My life flashed in front of me, like a silent film. I remembered my childhood with my sister. How I played with her and how she always liked to play ‘teacher-teacher’, making me learn the spellings of ‘difficult’ words.

  B-
E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L

  T-O-R-T-O-I-S-E

  F-E-B-R-U-A-R-Y

  C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S

  P-O-R-C-U-P-I-N-E

  I remembered the red ribbon she wore; I remembered how she waited behind the closed gates of her school to catch a glimpse of father’s shoes from beneath; I remembered how she threw a duster at one of her friends who tried to bully me; I remembered how I left her alone in the middle of a game of hopscotch because I saw Ravi’s mother entering the house with a parrot in a cage. Would Mother stab her? And herself? What would we do?

  ‘The BSF will do something,’ Uncle said. But nobody does anything. The slogan-mongering continued all night. We could see searchlights from somewhere making an arc over and over again. Was the BSF keeping a watch? Why were they not stopping this madness?

  The slogans did not stop till the early hours of the morning. We remained awake the whole night. As the first rays of the sun broke, I dozed off for a while and when I woke up everyone was still there. Ma was still holding on to the knife.

  The crowd took a break in the morning. I don’t think we had ever been as happy as we were when dawn broke that day. It gave us an elemental sense of hope, of security.

  It was later that we realized that it was not only in our locality that this had happened. These incidents had occured all over the Kashmir Valley at around the same time. It was well orchestrated. It was meant to frighten us into exile.

  Three hundred kilometres away, in a former palace, a man spent that night feeling absolutely helpless. Jagmohan had been sent by New Delhi to take charge as the governor of Jammu and Kashmir. On the afternoon of January 19, he had boarded a BSF plane that had brought him to Jammu. While being driven to the Raj Bhavan, he saw people lining up on both sides of the road to greet him. Jagmohan was a very popular administrator and, during a previous stint in 1986 as the governor of the state, he had won the hearts of the people by undertaking large-scale reforms. That night in Jammu’s Raj Bhavan, the phone began to ring from 10 p.m. onwards. ‘They are coming to kill us,’ a scared Pandit from somewhere in the Valley whispered to him. ‘Please ask the army to help us,’ begged another. But that night, Jagmohan was not in a position to help them at all. The administration, he knew, had collapsed completely. Some sections of the police were sympathetic to militant groups. No one was in charge. And as usual, in New Delhi, the babus in the government had no idea what was happening. On Doordarshan, as Jagmohan would recount in his memoirs later, a special programme on the ‘ethnic revolt’ in Azerbaijan was being telecast. Only a week earlier, in the Azerbaijani capital of Baku, a massive crowd demanding independence from Soviet Russia had attacked the Christian Armenian community, killing hundreds in a bloodied frenzy, and looting their homes and business establishments. And oblivious to New Delhi, a similar episode was about to occur in Kashmir.

  Only the gods could save the Pandits now.

  The next morning, the exodus began. Families stuffed whatever little they could into a few suitcases and slipped away to Jammu. In some places, we later learnt, people had suffered worse than us the previous night.

  At Draebyaar, Habba Kadal, for hours stones had been showered over Pandit houses. In several places, families were threatened. ‘Bring petrol, let’s burn them down!’ someone had shouted outside the house of father’s colleague in Jawahar Nagar. The next morning the family left, leaving the house keys with their Muslim neighbours.

  Sometimes I think back to the events of the night of January 19. How does one depict the fear we felt that night? I found my answer much later in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a graphic novel in which the author interviews his father, a holocaust survivor. Depicting the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats, Spiegelman asks his father how it felt to be in the Auschwitz concentration camp. His father startles him by producing a loud ‘Boo!’ and says ‘it felt a little like that. But always!’ That is how we felt on the night of January 19.

  Two days later, a massive procession began from our locality to Jama Masjid in downtown Srinagar. The crowd was demanding azadi. One of our Muslim neighbour’s sons was very young, not a day older than three, and he had curly brown hair. That day he went missing. A frantic search was launched for him but he was nowhere to be found. Later in the day, one of the family’s acquaintances reported that the boy had followed a few older boys to downtown Srinagar to take part in the procession. Four days later, on January 25, four unarmed personnel of the Indian Air Force were gunned down near our house. It was about 8 a.m. and the men were waiting for their bus when gunmen riding on motorcycles sprayed them with bullets. One of the dead was a squadron leader.

  The slogans and the war cries from the mosque did not stop. So, in a way, every day in Kashmir after January 19 was January 19. The cries just became a little more systematic. They would begin during the night and continue till the wee hours of the morning. After a break, they would resume until late morning. Then another break and so it would go on.

  Processions would stream into Srinagar from all over. There were several instances of Pandits being forced out of their homes to lead such processions. This was done to ensure that in case the paramilitary charged at the crowd or fired at it, the Pandits would become the first targets.

  Initially, the first few killings of Pandits were carried out quite surgically. But as the euphoria reached its zenith, the killings turned more macabre. On February 2, a young Pandit businessman named Satish Tickoo was called out of his home by a few men and shot at point-blank range. Tickoo knew them. One of them lived nearby and often took lifts from Tickoo on his scooter. When the man whipped out a pistol, Tickoo tried to save himself by hurling his kangri at the assailants. But it missed them. The first bullet hit him in his jaw. As he fell down, the men pumped several more into his body.

  Tickoo’s main assailant, the same man who often rode with him on his scooter, was identified as Farooq Ahmad Dar alias Bitta Karate. He was arrested in June that year. In a TV interview shortly afterwards, he confessed that he had killed twenty people, most of them Kashmiri Pandits and that his first kill was Tickoo. Here’s an excerpt from that interview:

  Journalist: How many people did you kill?

  Karate: I don’t remember.

  Journalist: So you killed so many people that you don’t even remember?

  Karate: Ten to twelve I must have killed.

  Journalist: Ten to twelve or twenty?

  Karate: You can say twenty.

  Journalist: Were all of them Kashmiri Pandits? Or were there some Muslims as well?

  Karate: Some Muslims as well.

  Journalist: How many Muslims and how many Pandits?

  [Silence …]

  Journalist: So there were more Kashmiri Pandits?

  Karate: Yes.

  Journalist: But why so?

  Karate: We had orders.

  Journalist: Who was the first person you killed?

  [Long silence …]

  Journalist: When did you commit your first murder?

  Karate: Let me think. First murder I committed was of Satish.

  Journalist: Satish who?

  Karate: Satish Kumar Tickoo.

  Journalist: Satish Kumar Tickoo! Who was he?

  Karate: I got the order from the higher up to hit him and I did that.

  Journalist: Who was he?

  Karate: A Pandit boy.

  Though Karate spent sixteen years in jail, he was not convicted. While releasing him on bail the judge remarked:

  The court is aware of the fact that the allegations levelled against the accused are of serious nature and carry a punishment of death sentence or life imprisonment but the fact is that the prosecution has shown total disinterest in arguing the case, which is in complete violation of Article 21 of the Constitution.

  Karate’s case is not an outlier. In hundreds of cases of Pandit killings, not a single person was convicted. Karate has returned to normal life and has since married and become a father. In a sparse room in Jammu, on the other hand, Prithvi Nath Tickoo look
s at a photograph of his son and tears well up in his eyes. ‘He (Satish) had an inkling that something would happen,’ he recalls. The father–son duo ran a medical agency. Just before he was killed, Satish had told his father that they should shift to Jammu. ‘But to avoid arousing suspicion that we were leaving, he said we shall shift our belongings gradually,’ Prithvi Nath Tickoo says. After they shifted to Jammu, the Tickoos finally sold their house for peanuts. ‘My house was three-storeyed and it had forty-seven windows,’ remembers the senior Tickoo inhaling the stale air of his windowless room.

  On the morning of February 8, I was studying at home when I heard a loud noise, as if a building had collapsed. Then there was absolute silence. We came out onto the veranda, not sure whether we should venture out further. ‘I think there has been a heavy burst of firing somewhere nearby,’ father said. One of our neighbours came out on to the street and she was crying. Her son was out and she was worried about him. But, thankfully, he returned soon afterwards. He had been at the milkman’s shop buying curd, when all of a sudden there was firing followed by complete chaos. He dropped the steel pitcher he was carrying and ran away.

  In a few moments, the entire locality was surrounded by BSF soldiers. A soldier positioned himself just outside our house. We climbed up to the roof to get a better view. The soldier saw us and asked us to go inside. We learnt that two BSF soldiers buying vegetables at a shop had been shot dead. The gunfire had come from the temple opposite the shop, and it had also killed the milkman from whose shop our neighbours’ son had bought curd. I knew that milkman very well. Sometimes, in the severe cold, when curd wouldn’t set, I, like my neighbour, would be sent to fetch some from him.

  A day later I went to the scene of the incident with a friend to have a look. All the shops were closed. Outside the vegetable shop, bloodstains were clearly visible. A few onions lay strewn on the ground.

  On the night of February 13, we learnt about yet another death, this time of Doordarshan Kashmir’s director, Lassa Kaul. The Kauls were known to my father—he knew that Kaul came from a humble background, and had, through sheer grit and determination, made it to the prestigious post. In the past few weeks, Kaul had been finding it difficult to continue working amidst threats. This had made him move, two days prior to his murder, to a guarded government accommodation. On the night of his murder, he had visited his house in Bemina to meet his handicapped father who lived there alone. An investigation conducted after his death indicated that information about his movements may have been leaked to the militants by one of his colleagues.