Our Moon has Blood Clots Read online

  We children compared these presenters to a brilliant Kashmiri comedian who in the mid eighties had kept us glued to the television with the two roles he played. In one, he played the part of a weird, autocratic king who would have to be hit with a royal hammer to bring him back to his senses after which he would ask for water in such a funny way that we would mimic him for months in school. After our exodus, we heard rumours of his death in a road accident. But I was both happy and relieved to watch him perform in a festival in Delhi a few years ago.

  ‘We cannot stay like this any longer,’ Father said one day. ‘We need to leave, we need to put you in a school.’

  For the last few days, Father had been watching me and my sister and it had set him thinking. My sister was in college. I would take out my books every morning, but for the rest of the day I would simply flit from room to room, play cricket, or read comic books when it was too cold to venture outside.

  It was quite sunny the day Father finally decided that we should move to Jammu. He had spoken to a colleague who had promised to help. He arranged a taxi to take us to Jammu, and advised us not to tell the driver that we were leaving permanently. There had been reports at various places that mobs had beaten up fleeing families and looted their belongings. In one instance a family had called a truck to load their possessions to escape to Jammu, but at the last moment a mob had descended and lynched them and then taken away every article the family possessed.

  In our case it was not so difficult. We had hardly any luggage to arouse suspicion. And though Father had left our house with a sense of finality, somewhere in his heart I think he still liked to believe what many of us did at that time—that this would be over sooner or later.

  The taxi arrived the following morning. All we had was a small bag and two suitcases. And my school bag. The driver was told that we were off to Jammu to attend a wedding. As he was putting our luggage in the boot of his Ambassador car, the driver looked at my school bag and smiled. ‘Pandit ji, I know you people lay a lot of emphasis on education, but at least let this kid have fun for a week.’

  The driver turned his key in the ignition and we began our journey. ‘We’ll be back soon,’ Mother shouted to her sister. It was quiet in the car. Father sat in front and I sat behind with my mother and sister. Both of them had covered their heads with a dupatta.

  ‘We need to beat the army convoys on the highway, otherwise we will be stuck for a long time,’ the driver said. On the highway, by the shops, men stood huddled. At some places there were tyres smouldering in the frost. A little further ahead, we could see the ruins of the Martand sun temple.

  We drove on silently. Eventually, we had to slow down to give way to oncoming vehicles on a narrow stretch of road. Suddenly a man appeared from nowhere. He was pushing a small wheelbarrow. He looked at us and pumped his fist in the air. He shouted: ‘Maryu, Batav, maryu!’ (Die, you Pandits, die!)

  We were scared. The driver said nothing. He kept looking ahead as if he had not heard anything, as if the man did not exist, as if his fist did not exist, as if his voice did not exist.

  As if we did not exist in his taxi.

  Travelling on the highway had always been a pleasurable experience. Every winter, we would take this road to Jammu and stay there for a few days, accompanying my father on his official trips. Ma always made sure that we ate home-cooked meals. So she would carry a few utensils and a small gas-stove and homemade spices and we would check into the Dak Bungalow or a small, cosy hotel near Jewel Chowk in Jammu city.

  When I was much younger, I had accompanied Father on one such trip. It proved to be difficult for him since I refused to eat anything from the hotel. Ultimately, he took me to the Jammu railway station. We stood on the platform while he cracked open peanuts from a packet he had bought, and fed me. As we watched, a train chugged into the station and I was very excited. After the train left, we stood there for a long time, Father and son, like two philosophers ruminating on life and its meaning. Afterwards, we went for a night show of an Amitabh Bachchan-starrer, Ram Balram, and I embarrassed him by eating popcorn from the person sitting next to me. Later, Father also bought me a cricket bat inscribed with Kapil Dev’s signature.

  And now, we were leaving for good. Everything had changed and the journey was a torment. We reached the Jawahar tunnel, and I looked at Ma. She was mumbling a prayer.

  Soon after crossing the tunnel, we reached Ramban, a quaint midway point on the Jammu–Srinagar highway. What we saw there left us stunned. I remember the traffic had been halted due to a minor landslide that was in the process of being cleared. In truck after truck, there were Pandit families escaping to Jammu. In the villages of south and north Kashmir, the situation was far worse than what we had experienced.

  Women had been herded like cattle into the backs of trucks. Father and I got out of the taxi to stretch our legs. In one of the trucks, a woman lifted the tarpaulin sheet covering the back and peered outside. There was nothing peculiar about her except the blankness in her eyes. They were like a void that sucked you in. Years later, I saw a picture of a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz. When I saw his eyes, my mind was immediately transported to that day, and I was reminded of the look in that woman’s eyes.

  We finally reached Jammu early that evening. After we had crossed the Jawahar tunnel, Father’s worries about finding suitable accommodation had taken over. The Dak Bungalow where we usually stayed would be expensive, since we didn’t know how long we were going to stay. Eventually we checked into a small, relatively cheap hotel. Ma immediately set up a kitchen on one side of the room and my sister was sent to fetch a bucket of fresh water. Until a few years ago we had not even heard of overhead tanks. It took us a while to understand that the water that came out of taps in Jammu and elsewhere was not fresh water.

  On the first day I filled water in a bucket to take a bath. The first mug that I poured over myself singed me. I was reminded of how we would bathe back home in Srinagar. In the winter, Ma would wake us up before sunrise. In the bathroom there would be water steaming in the traditional copper tank. We would have a bath while she kept a set of fresh clothes on a kangri to warm them. We would then dry ourselves vigorously, wear the clothes warmed on the kangri, and snuggle back under our quilts. In summers, just for fun, I would bathe at the tap in the kitchen garden when Ma was away.

  In Jammu, for me the biggest symbol of exodus turned out to be a pair of shoes. Back home, my father once saw me playing football at the polo ground with men twice my age, and he was so impressed that he bought me a pair of studded football shoes from a store called Sunchasers. But those shoes had been left behind. The ones I came to Jammu wearing were falling apart. So, Father had bought me a pair of cheap canvas shoes from Gumat market. I despised those shoes. But I understood his position. He had no money and there was total uncertainty about our future.

  Our only concern during our last few days in Srinagar had been to somehow survive, to go somewhere where there would be no slogans, no loudspeakers, no fists and middle fingers raised at us, no hit lists, no Kalashnikovs, no freedom songs. So we were relieved to come out of the other end of the Jawahar tunnel.

  Once we were in Jammu, other worries took over. Where were we going to live? Where would the money come from? Was everyone else safe—our friends, relatives? Suddenly, the premise that everything was going to be all right in a few months didn’t seem plausible at all—it would take much longer to return. But the thought that we might never return still did not cross our minds.

  Living in the hotel beyond a few days was not possible. There were hardly any savings to dip into. Father had put all his money into the house. When we had left, he had been extending our attic. He had ordered the choicest deodar wood, and weeks before the crisis erupted the wood had arrived in planks and had been stored in the attic. The carpenter, Farooq, had been called and he had been shown designs for cupboards, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe.

  After spending three days in the hotel, Father began to look around f
or more suitable accommodation.

  In the evenings, we would go to the Geeta Bhawan temple in the heart of old Jammu. It was there that the enormity of our tragedy, of our exile in our own country, struck us. The Bhawan had a large central courtyard. Portions of the building had been taken over by families who had nowhere else to go. Rags or saris or blankets or even bed sheets had been hung up to create small, private spaces.

  We would all flock to the Bhawan to find out about the welfare of other families. Neighbours met neighbours, brothers met brothers, colleagues met colleagues, and in that courtyard they took stock of the catastrophe that had befallen them.

  ‘Trath ha se peye’ was the common refrain those days. Lightning had struck us. Some smoked cigarette after cigarette. Women walked to the storage tank to collect water. Everything looked like a nightmare, including the unreliable water supply. Old women wearing their traditional pherans in that heat cooled themselves with bamboo hand-fans.

  It was at the Bhawan that the fate of others became evident to us—stories of what had happened in Anantnag, in Sopore, in Baramulla, in Budgam, in Kupwara. In Handwara, a massive crowd had spilled out on the streets on January 25 and the people carried axes and knives and iron rods. Some of them wore shrouds. The procession was in response to an announcement that had been made the night before: ‘We have achieved Azadi and tomorrow we will all come out and celebrate in the main market square.’ The crowd passed through Pandit localities. ‘Take out your Kalashnikovs, let’s finish them!’ shouted one. At Safa Kadal, the fleeing Pandit families were showered with coins and shireen to tell them they were already dead. The mob had shouted: Ram naam sat hai, akh akis patte hai (Ram’s name is truth, Pandits are leaving one after another). At Poershiyaar, an elderly Pandit saw a young man being brought to the steps leading to the Jhelum. He was being held by his hands and feet. His head was repeatedly banged on a stone step till blood flowed from his nose and mouth.

  Those who escaped were on the streets now. We had lost everything—home, hearth, and all our worldly possessions, which had taken generations to build. Everyone mourned over the loss of this or that. An elderly woman known to my mother sat on the steps leading to a small temple, shedding silent tears. Her great-grandmother had passed on some pashmina and shahtoosh shawls to her. She had kept them safe for decades, mothballed for protection, to pass on to the next generation—divided equally between her daughter and her prospective daughter-in-law when the time came. And now they were all lost, left behind in the wilderness of Baramulla.

  ‘I wish I could call my neighbour and request her to keep them safe,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ her husband snapped. ‘Don’t you realize what your friend has done to us?’ He turned to my father and told him what had happened. They were planning to take their possessions with them to Jammu. The man had spoken to a transport company and they had promised to send a mini load-carrier. As they waited a few men arrived, banging at their door. Then they kicked the door in.

  They entered menacingly as the old couple cowered in a corner. ‘Pandit, I believe you want to leave. Balaay Dafaa! Good riddance! Leave, but you cannot take anything with you.’ So the mini load-carrier was of no use. The family came to Jammu empty-handed, thankful that they had been allowed to leave unharmed. The old man said, ‘I’m sure the neighbours knew. By now they would have taken all your shawls.’

  The woman looked crestfallen, and I think her husband immediately regretted what he had said to her with such certainity. Sometimes it is best to leave things ambiguous, suspended, so that some hope remains. I think it was on those steps that the woman lost her will to live.

  A few months later, she died in a one-room dwelling.

  It was at Geeta Bhawan that I had an experience that could have altered my life forever. One evening I saw some boys and a few elderly men gathering at a ground behind the Bhawan. They wore khaki knickers, and one of them erected a wooden pole in the middle of the ground with a saffron flag on it. Then they formed two rows and put their hands over their hearts and chanted some mantras. One of the men spotted me watching them and signalled me to come towards him.

  ‘Are you a Pandit sharnaarthi?’ he asked.

  He made me sit next to him. Another boy joined us, sitting in front of us on his haunches, listening intently to the man.

  ‘You’ve been evicted out of your own homes by Muslims. You know that, right?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, they evicted us,’ I replied.

  ‘What does it do to you?’ he asked.

  I was not sure what he meant so I kept looking at him. The boy intervened. ‘What Guruji means to ask is whether you feel something inside about it. What do you feel?’

  I tried to gauge how I felt about it. For a few seconds, so many images crossed my mind. Of those boys claiming our house. Of the fear on the dark night of January 19. Of the searing heat in my room. Suddenly I felt very hot under the collar.

  ‘I am very angry,’ I said.

  He looked at me sternly. ‘How angry?’

  ‘Very angry.’

  ‘Say it loud. How angry?’

  ‘Very angryyyyyyyyy!’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now the question is: what do you want to do about it? Will you accept it silently like a napunsak or do you want to take some action?’ he asked.

  Napunsak. Impotent. Suddenly I wanted to do something. Suddenly I wanted a gun in my hand and I wanted to kill. I wanted a bomb in my hand and I wanted to throw it in Lal Chowk at one of the processions.

  ‘We are from the RSS. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. We will give direction to your anger,’ he said. ‘Come, let’s go join the others,’ he continued, looking at the other men.

  We went and stood in front of the saffron flag.

  ‘Put your hand on your chest,’ the man said.

  I had seen them doing this earlier. So I did it exactly as they did. And he made me recite a mantra.

  ‘Come here every day,’ he said. ‘We meet here every day. We will teach you many things and make a man out of you. A man who is willing to fight for his rights, not only for himself but for his entire community. We are Hindus after all. Have you heard of Parshuram?’ he asked.

  I had. I knew some of the verses of a poem about the warrior ascetic’s dialogue with Lord Ram’s younger brother Laxman. I recited some of them. He looked at me, not understanding what I had recited. He did not know those verses. I explained what I had recited.

  ‘Oh, of course, now I remember,’ he said, breaking into a smile.

  ‘Come tomorrow, I will see you here,’ he said.

  They all shook hands with me.

  I was so excited I ran all the way from the ground towards the main building of Geeta Bhawan to look for my father. It was very crowded so it took me some time to find him.

  ‘There you are,’ Father said the moment he spotted me.

  ‘Kot osuk gaeb gomut?’ he asked. Where had you disappeared? That was my father’s favourite phrase when he was mildly angry. I ingored it and began animatedly telling him about my encounter. I was so excited that I did not see his expression change.

  ‘I am going to see them tomorrow and every day now,’ I went on. ‘They will teach me how to fight the Muslims who made us flee from our home.’

  ‘Listen, you fool!’ My father tried suppressing his anger, but the tone of his voice hit me like a slap. ‘We are not here to fight but to make sure that you go to school and get your education. You don’t need to worry about anything else. Where we live, what we eat, where the money will come from—none of it is your concern. You just concentrate on your studies. And, yes, tomorrow we are admitting you into a school.

  ‘And don’t you dare meet those men ever again,’ he hissed.

  Years later, I saw Father reading a report on the slain Ehsan Jafri, brutally done to death by a Hindu mob in Ahmedabad’s Gulbarg Society, a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood. As I sat next to him, I read how Jafri had nurtured a nest of barn swallows in his room and to protect
them, he would not even switch on the ceiling fan. That day I realized that Father had gifted me something invaluable. Something that enabled me to calmly face an uproariously drunk army general one night in a television news studio. We were there to debate human rights violations in Kashmir and I pointed out that there needs to be zero tolerance towards such crimes. ‘How can you say that?’ he barked. ‘It is they who have forced you out of your homes, turning you into refugees.’

  I looked him in the eye and said: ‘General, I’ve lost my home, not my humanity.’

  Father’s search for suitable accommodation continued. Many Pandit families had rented out rooms from the local people in Jammu. But even that was scary. We had heard many stories of exploitation and harassment by landlords.

  After a few days of searching, father finally announced that he had found a place. It was a cheap dharamshala owned by the Rajput community in the middle of a bazaar in the old city. Known as the Rajput Sabha, it had a few rooms reserved for the community members who visited the city, mostly to pay obeisance at the Vaishno Devi shrine. It was also used as a community hall to solemnize marriages and other functions. It was surrounded by shops selling bridal wear. There was a famous sweet shop nearby, and a number of shops where girls arrived in hordes to have their dupattas dyed. The room itself was quite small, and from the ceiling hung a rickety fan, donated by someone in memory of his grandmother.

  Unlike the hotel, there were no beds and mattresses here. Apart from a blanket and a bed sheet, we had nothing. For days we slept on newspaper sheets spread on the floor. On a small kerosene stove, Ma cooked and we ate hoping that the power wouldn’t go off, leaving us drenched in sweat. It was so hot we couldn’t sleep at night. After a week or so, Father bought a couple of cotton mattresses for us to sleep on. The water supply came only once every morning, for about an hour.