Our Zoon isn’t Cheese enough

“Either it brings tears to their eyes, or else -“
“Or else what?” said Alice, for the Knight had made a sudden pause.
“Or else it doesn’t, you know.”

I still recall that late night phone call. Someone, a relative, had been killed in Srinagar. That killing became a vindication for my parents that the decision to move to Jammu, a decision much contested by my Grandfather, was right. A storeroom on roof of a relative was the right place for us, it was our refuge.

The stories of Pandit migration that most people read and write, is a story of a single night, and it goes like this, ‘And then that morning our family left in a …’ In my family’s case, it didn’t happen in a single moment. It wasn’t just one morning. We moved in parts. And there was more than one such morning. First one to leave was my choti Bua, who back then I used to call Didi. This was the time when threats to Pandit women were openly advertised. Then a few months later, as the frequency of killings increased, it was the turn of wives, children and some essential goods, mostly clothing and gold. My grandparents stayed back. After dropping his wife and children at a relative’s place, my father and some uncles went back for their respective parents. They got stuck in the city for a few week. It was the time when Srinagar experienced some of its first few long spells of curfew. During a brief pause in these spells, they too reached Jammu. My family reached Jammu from Chattabal.

And all this time, feeling of fear was unknown to me. In a way, my feeling of normality was protected by my parents and grandparents even as they were experiencing a situation that was questioning their sense of normal. In Srinagar, a city burning under a thousand guns, I was busy chasing cats and dogs. In Jammu, a city burning under a thousand suns, I got busy tracking toads and frogs.

Even that late night phone call didn’t change much for me, except for seeding a feeling that something terrible was in fact happening. That it all was not a game that gods were playing. That it was a game of men who believed in gods and paradise. That maybe I should remember it all.

The stories of those days arrived much later. Only after we learnt to speak again. As we learnt to revisit our memories. I heard these stories, over and over again, and because I was listening carefully, I saw them change and evolves, tales getting appended and deducted from the narrative  Till they achieved a definitive narrative form. Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots captures all the major points of this narrative. It’s a narrative that most Kashmiri Pandits believe in and hold close to their heart. And now for some families Rahul Pandita’s ‘Our Moon Has Blood Clots’ too will become part of a family heirloom and an inheritance that consists of books like ‘My Frozen Turbulence in Kashmir’ by Jagmohan, ‘Converted Kashmir by Narender Sehgal  (Utpal Publications, 1994) and some old issue of various community magazines. Based on one’s political position, one can judge whether it is a good or a bad company of books to keep. But one can’t deny that this book is trying to do what these older publications were never even aiming to do, or had no chance of doing. Trigger a debate, bring the narrative of Pandits into the mainstream, even perhaps rescuing it from right-wingers. A few years ago, the possibility that a Ramachandra Guha or a Patrick French should be interested in the story was there, but that they would openly talk about it, or even back it, wasn’t. So, I do think it is an improvement. It is something that Pandits were waiting for a long time. A public telling of their personal sorrows.

On page 86 of the book are the details of that phone call. Description of that killing which I grew up listening to in much more brutal details. A story recounted many times by my mother. It goes like this: They say when the killers shot him down on that bridge, the man fell to ground. His killers, with pistols in hand, came around to check on him and to make sure he was dead. The man on ground, in pain, raised his one hand and told his killers, ‘Bas. Be ha Mudus. Stop. I am already dead.’ A killer shot him through his hand.

The dead man’s son, a distant cousin of mine and more of a friend, just about the same age as me, went to a college only miles away from the college that I went to. Even during college days he remained one of the most decent guys I knew.  The decadence of college life barely touched him. They say he is a copy of his father, a man about whom a poet friend (in a poem quoted in the book) asked:

“I used to ask him every time
why doesn’t he possess the cunningness of Srinagar
I still await his response
My friend! Yes, I changed my address
since after your murder
it ceased to exist
the bridge of friendship, this Habba Kadal”

The son of that man is not online trolling Kashmiri Muslims, asking for their mass-killing at the hands of Indian Army. He is busy working, building a life, raising a family. He isn’t clinging to any sense of victim hood. But that doesn’t mean that the killing on that bridge didn’t take place. It shouldn’t be brushed aside just because it complicates an already complicated situation. Usually at this point, it becomes a question of who suffered more: ‘A lot of innocent Kashmiri Muslims, not just one, died on these bridges at the hands of Indian security forces.’ And then the usual. ‘True.True. But in this case, the perpetrators of these crimes are known to you. You know where to put your anger. The Security forces. The State. But who were killing the Pandits? Men with a dream. Men funded by another State. Men with orders. Men who were worshiped as saviors. Men who inspired at first fighters and later writers. Men who after spilling blood of innocents in the day, at night went back to a life of wives and children. Together dreaming of a bright future. Of course, Pandits question this dream itself. They curse the men who were dreaming. This idea of a religious state that will be a paradise. They point at the present and ask if this is the future they wanted. They point at the state of the State that funded it. They curse the idiot who first labeled these killers ‘Secular’. Then they curse the ‘Sickulars’. They curse the idiots who formed cozy narratives about what transpired.’

A million things transpired. You need a microscope, not a telescope.

In a world where victims, to prove a point, are increasingly either setting themselves aflame or blowing themselves up along with a few more people, it is not surprising that even well meaning people find it difficult to understand Pandit response (or even a lack of it). They fail to see a possibility that it is a community in which I can still have the freedom to argue with relatives of a dead terror victim about the political nature of help offered by Shiv Sena. I can critique their single track narrative of 1990s. It is a community in which I can keep asking my father questions, uneasy questions, till he acknowledges that he did see an innocent Kashmiri Muslim die at the hands of Security forces on a street outside his home during the weeks he was stuck in Srinagar back in 1990. Yes, this free space is at times shrinking and at times expanding too. It is a community always evolving. Always changing. There are Pandit writings from 1920s in which old men complain that the young are not following the ways of the old! That a way of life is dying. Of course, it is dying. But something new is always born.

What Kashmiris ask of each other, ask of the world, ask of the written text, is something that they themselves, the world in general and the text itself, seldom offers. They ask for an absolute truth.

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