Based on an account I heard in 2013 from a cousin of my father. The family lost a member in the violence that erupted in 1990 and is now what would be considered right wing in political outlook. And yet, this is the account I got…
January 21st
The house was on Nai Sadak. From the main window of the house you could see the bridge that connected the locality to Maisuma Bazaar, the place that was going to be the epicenter of violence in 1990, the bastion of JKLF. This is the bridge known as Gaw Kadal or the Cow Bridge. The line of sight from the house was such that if someone was standing on the center of bridge, you could see him completely, but further down, the other side only partially visible.
That day inmates of the house were glued to the window as they tried to fathom the sounds. They could see a large sloganeering crowd on the other side of the bridge, approaching their side. On this side, they could see a picket of about twelve CRPF men blocking their way. The city was under a curfew. These men were issuing orders warning the people disperse and move back to their houses. The people were protesting exactly against such orders. The inmates of the house thought maybe the security men were worried about their security. There were a couple of Pandit households in this vulnerable area. The men watching the procession from the window were a bit anxious. But this was Kashmir, even this was normal. They had seen may such processions in their lives. The people in the crowd had probably taken part in too many processions in their life. It was just another average Kashmiri day. The neighbourhood mosque which was under JKLF control was time and again advising the crowd over the loudspeaker to not touch the Pandits and their houses, to maintain peace and to march forward. The crowd continued to move forward.
Suddenly, without a rhyme, shots rang out. At first a tickle of loud bursts. From the window you could see a figure taking position, a quick thinking uniformed sikh man who hinged his semi-automatic gun to the railing of the bridge, and squeezed his finger to unleash death. In the later news reports, this action came to be described as ‘indiscriminate firing’. The inmates of the house, with reflex of a cornered animal, ducked and lay flat on the floor. The wooden walls of the house it seemed had been blown away, it was as if the fire was directed at them. And the firing just wouldn’t stop. It was like rain, like a thunder storm, even maybe like a cloud burst. Ashok Ji, a neighbour, another watcher in the house next door, was a bit slow in deciphering the scene. A bullet flew past him and glazed his ear. The reports were to say that the firing on the crowd was carried out from both ends of the bridge. People were caught in the middle. Initial official reports said about thirty people were killed. Over the years, as the stories grew, the number grew to about two hundred. Out of blood came accounts of people jumping into river and drowning, injured executed at point plank range, people chased and shot dead. The man blamed for ordering fire was given a name: Allah Bakhsh, SSP of J&K Police, with family ties to all the high and mighty of Kashmir state bureaucracy.
When it was over, the entire neighbourhood was drowned in sound of wailing. Up until now, a Pandit was still expected to join his neighbours in grief. And most of them did join. But not after that day. Bloodletting of that day, changed the core of the people. When an inmate of the house showed up at a neighbour’s house to offer condolence, he was chased away. ‘Battov, ye korov telephone‘, ‘Pandits, you telephoned them!’, was intermixed with the wailing sound. People swore revenge. The Pandits were suspects. The rumor blamed the pandits for calling the security men and somehow ordering the massacre. Over the next few days a new phenomena was observed in the city, people climbed up the telephone poles and pulled apart the wires. City was now plunged into a blackout of another kind. Every family was marooned, on its own and drifting in an unending nightmare in which monsters of all kind took life. Monsters that were to haunt Kashmir for a long time to come.
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Das Gerücht, “The Rumor,” (1953) by German artist A. Paul Weber.
Perhaps the person best to understand nature of propaganda, having produced quite a bit.
An ambiguous figure who produced anti-Semitic and war mongering illustrations in his love for Germany and
Father came back inside and said they wanted everyone out in the yard. Everyone, including women, children and old. So on that dark, cold night along with everyone else , I too lined up against the wall and faced Kalashnikov. I was eight. It happened somewhere between January and February of year 1990.
Despite every obvious reason, the incident wasn’t a significant memory for me. It attained a meaning much later in my adulthood when I realised the absurdity of it all. I also realized, it had a different meaning for my family. They had rationalised it. For them it was all normal.
The incident: The blackouts were the beginning. I still don’t understand them. If the city is over run by masked gunmen, why should everyone turn off their lights? Everyone should have been asked to sleep with lights on. Take a torch to bed. Kashmiri nights are in any case always darks and disquieting. Yet, the city was under spell of blackouts. That night too, we were supposed to maintain a blackout. Now, blackout didn’t entirely mean lights out. It was winter, as was the norm, our windows were already sealed with newspapers and plastic sheets for insulation against cold. The windows were already tightly shut. Inside, we would light candles at night and wait for morning. We went back to living in primal caves. We tried to be invisible. But, men would be men. It was during these days, with nothing else to do, my father and his brothers started having marathon sessions of Paplu. The games would begin in morning and end in evening. In the afternoon, between curfew breaks, some of their friends would also join in. Scores, winnings and losses, would be maintained on inside leaf of Cavenders and Wills Navy Cut cigarette packets. Women would make Kehwa all day, and make grudging runs to the top room with trays of tea cups. The room on the top most floor of the house was converted into game room. It started to smell like a mix of tobacco, sugar and almonds. This room belonged to my family. Grandfather had purchased it from a kin member for eight hundred rupees after they had moved to a bigger house at Nishat. Our family now had four sections in the house. There was Naya Kambra, the new room, just near the main gate, the room I called my own. Across the courtyard, in the hundred year old wooden house, there was the Thokur Kuth, of the main hall with the main kitchen where everyone would sit down to eat. This became our primal cave during blackouts. There was my father’s room on the first floor. The room on the top floor would have gone to my uncle after his marriage. Other rooms in the building belonged to two other families of kin members. They had in addition, each a newly constructed ‘two room with kitchen’ set in two blocks that lined right side of the courtyard. In all there were twenty two people living in the house: Six children, five old and eleven Adults. Of these, five adults were now Paplu addicts. The play would usually stop at sunset, certainly before dinner and continue the next day; but that fateful night they all decided to have a night session. They lit candles in the room and continued playing. The windows were still shut, blackout was still respected, yet voices occasionally rose with excitement of the game. They forgot about the world outside. They forgot the war that was waging outside. They were in their house, the house that their ancestors built and re-built over may summers, and in it they were safe and invisible. Or so they thought. There was a chink in their cave.
The bunker had cropped up outside our house somewhere in January. It grew just next to little cart shop of small things run by Mad Karim. The first day, the men from bunker just walked across to our house, knocked and asked if they could use our lavatory. My father made some joke about their need for Jangal Pani, and welcomed them. After that, they always welcomed themselves to our lavatory. Family thought it was maybe a good development. Mad Karim was the first to die, he died in what was called crossfire. His sister Posha was to tell me years later that some men from the bunker came to buy cigarette, they bought some and went back. A moment later there was firing and he died on spot. The size of bunker grew, more men arrived, always new men.
That night someone among these men noticed a single beam of light coming out from the top floor of the house opposite their bunker. The beam it seemed was talking. It was talking in a cryptic manner. It flickered like a morse code of ominous light. One moment there was light coming out and the other it was off. The watcher looked more closely. He could now see the dark shadows getting formed on the warmly lit canvas of window panes covered in sun stained, brownish newspapers. It looked like a bunch of men in the room were moving rhythmically, in some kind of a religious ritual: men squatting, their backs upright, moving back and forth at regular interval, bellowing. The watchers senses grew even more keen in the darkness. Now, he could hear the occasional frantic sound formed in an indecipherable ugly language. Something evil was stirring in the room. Something that was contemporaneously acknowledging the blackout with light. Unseen to him, inside the room, the men were picking and dropping cards at their turns. Shouting in ecstasy on picking the right card. Unknown to them, there was a small hole in tone of the old wooden windows. The hole had always been there, I remember watching a ‘Azadi’ procession secretly one afternoon from the hole when my mother wouldn’t allow me to open the window. Now, the light escaping out from this hole was causing an entirely different play outside.
Outside, the man watching this dance of light grew nervous. He decided to call it in. He rang his superior officer, after all these were serious times. Anything could mean something. So something like this could not be taken lightly. A raid party of eight was formed. The superior called in the local police station. These were times were the local administration was still included in the process. The local SHO was ordered to join the raid party and help in establishing communication.
The raid party stood in the courtyard. They probably jumped the walls, even though the main gate was just locked from inside by a small wooden latch that only needed a small push to open. It was the heavy knocking that shook everyone out. Gamblers had come running down on the sound of the first knock itself. My father and uncles went out to talk. They were ordered to gather everyone outside.
We stood with our backs to the wall, forming a single line, facing the men with guns. The men were either BSF or ITBP. All of them were in their winter gear, green overcoats, big black leather boats, all neatly tied, their hands kept war by a gun and an Everyread torch. By the time I lined up, conversation had already taken a sad, ironic turn. Gamblers were trying hard to explain what they were doing in the room. The leader of the raid party was not buying any of it. This was a man much older than the men in his party. His fur lined overcoat probably befitted his superior post, even his voice, he sounded like Jamvant from Ramayan. The kind of man you might run into in a North Indian highway dhaba, a man who might ask you in all seriousness, ‘You want butter Nan or plain Nan.’ This man was now pointing his big gun at my father and asking him in all seriousness if he knew which gun it was.
The gun he was holding was a Kalashnikov. I could never forget that. He answered the question himself and went on to tell exactly how many rounds it is capable of spraying per second. Ten rounds per second. There were about 20 twenty of us. It would all have been over in two seconds
‘But we are Hindus.’ That was my father’s response. He asked the man to go inside the house and see the photographs of various gods on our walls. ‘I did NCC in school,’ an uncle chipped in helpfully, as if asking a favor. Someone volunteered to sing a Bhajan.
In reply, the man put the nuzzle to my father’s nect. My father remembers it was cold like shishargae’nt, an icicle. A shiver ran down his body.
None of it mattered. The man with the gun was going to teach us a lesson. Or they were now just having fun? Or was it their ‘area domination’ technique at play? The unarmed men kept trying to reason with the armed men. That seldom goes right. The fact these men were arguing back was getting on the nerves of the men with guns.
Finally, the SHO, who had till now had been a silent spectator, intervened. He told my father, ‘Pandit ji, Yem gaye hooyn…masa kariv vaad-vaad. These men are dogs, no point talking. Just apologise.’
A few days after the incident, the rationalisation began. ‘It wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was good for us in a way. At least no one will now suspect us of collaborating with the security forces.’
A few days before the incident, Teng Sahib from across the the street had come in with some bad news. Teng Sahib knew a thing or two about such matters given that some of his students were the men who had taken up arms. That day he told us that he had heard whispers that our family was helping the security forces. Everyone in the family was alarmed as a rumor like that was exactly what could get a person killed in Kashmir. He had heard that we were offering food and water to the men in bunker. He couldn’t tell much details just that someone in the family had been seen talking to them frequently and he asked everyone to be careful about such matters. After he left, everyone knew who the culprit was. But the culprit plainly refuted all charges.
It was only this year, after 23 years, when under extreme provocation I repeated the story of Kalashnikov night, my grandmother accepted that she may have a couple of times talked to the men in bunker and asked them if they needed water.
Getting out of the Auto-Rickshaw and dropping the bags to ground, father announced our arrival to the refuge. He could have added a ‘Ta-Ta-Da’ before or after the sentence and the feeling he wanted to convey would have been the same. Ta-Ta-Da, we are in Jammu.
We had a place to stay in Jammu. It was a house of a kin. For the first few days, we had the entire first floor of the house for ourself. In a few days my father was to leave again for Srinagar to get my grandparents out of Kashmir. But before that, a cycle of life had to begin afresh. Purchases were to be made.
A kitchen was set up. An electric stove was the first thing we bought. Then a bowl, an exact number of plates, a knife and some spoons. Pressure cooker we had brought along from Kashmir. A milkman was sought and easily found nearby. Just next to the house was a field. In the field was a tree to which was always tied a sickly cow. The owners of the cow lived nearby in a shed that stood next to a tall pile of green grass. In the field lived some watery eyes buffaloes, tied to a pole by steel chains. I could see it all from the roof of the house in which we had taken refuge from Kashmir. That tree’s top was just within my reach from the roof. I could pluck its leaves, if I could learn to avoid its long pointy thorns. Jammu was kandi area they said. From the branches of that tree hung no fruits, but few round beautiful brown nests of weaver birds. With what mad fervor they build their homes!
Tea was ready. But it’s taste caused an instant revulsion. I imagined it tasted like smell of a buffalo. I hated it as it made me nauseous. Kashmir had cows. But cow milk in Jammu was costly. Salaries were three digit and savings five digit. Cows would have to wait. Note for future refugees on getting their priorities right: The first are only two – Food and Shelter, and often in that order. In summer of 1990, we were also at first only seeking these two things. Food and Shelter. And the number of seekers kept swelling. As often happens, other refugees kept pouring into town, first a trickle and then a downpour. At first almost unseen, silent. Too ashamed to be alive. Then not sure of their existence and in the end alive, and consumed by a new world.
About three weeks after our arrival in Jammu, grandparents also were refugees. A few days after the arrival of my grandparents, a newly arrived migrant family took the first floor on rent from the owners of the house. This migrant family belonged to Anantnag, a name I first heard from them. With their arrival we moved to the top floor. To the top of the top floor. To the roof. On the roof was a store room. Our first refuge. I liked it. The roof of a traditional Kashmiri house is an endearing space, a intimate cave. It’s a triangle. A crown. But seldom does anybody live there. Maybe cats. Maybe Ghardivta, the lord of the house. This space is used for storing wood for harsh winters, grains at times of weddings and always the ghost stories. I wanted to live there. I wanted to live in such a roof forever. The roof I got in Jammu was flat. All the houses in Jammu were crown less.
Note for future refugees on setting up spaces and boundaries in the new world:
A kitchen was set up in the store. Electric stove, bowl, plates, a knife and spoons, all parked neatly in a corner. Next, to preserve an archaic concept of pure and impure, an old cloth was rolled and set on ground to mark the boundary for pure ‘Kitchen corner’. Over the next few days, as the space kept getting accidentally defiled by miss-steps, this boundary was re-enforced by bricks. Not that it helped much, but an illusion of a room within a room was enough to satiate minds seeking a certain familiar order in an unfamiliar territory.
The next thing they say a refugee seeks is shelter, a shade, a place to sleep. This need is somewhat overrated. Pushed enough and given enough time, people would sleep anywhere. But still, some may try to get a bit comfortable. The storeroom on that roof wasn’t big enough to house eight people. But the roof was like an open field. The next big purchase was a folding cot. At least one person need not sleep on the ground. We took turns. But I liked sleeping on the ground. It’s warmth even in summer a welcome hug, a fine Kashmiri rug. In the dead of the night, if you put your ear against the surface, you could hear the distant hum of a ceiling fan. For me, folding cot with all its Nylon stripes proved to be a thing of wonder only for a day or two. I soon realized those things are not reliable. One night, just before the start of summer, a thunderstorm broke in the sky. A mad wind blew and rains lashed down like whips, catching us all unaware in sleep. We ran into the storeroom. But in our panic forgot to fold the cot and bring it in. Next morning, we found the cot open and spread out in the middle of the road. It had flown away with the wind, People were walking around it, avoiding it like it was a holy cow or a car parked in the middle of a road. Getting that thing back up from the road and on back to the roof was more embarrassing than being forced to live on a roof in a storeroom.
As the summer started, it was obvious that the table fan we had bought with us from Kashmir was not enough. Even if we had brought with us the other fan we had left in Kashmir, the two would not have been enough for Jammu summer. We perspired more, unnaturally, certainly more than the locals. It was like our skin had become surface of a CampaCola bottle freshly moved out of a fridge. Something had to be done. Our next purchase was a big one. We got a big coolar. It was love at first sight. It was like getting a personal robot of red and green eyes and big knobs for control. I bought some He-Man stickers and posted them on to its dashboard. It was obviously going to be our savior. In the sun burnt afternoons, we would keep the door of the room open, and move in the coolar (which was so great that it even had pearly rollers at the bottom). The angle of the sun after noontime was kind enough not to light up the room, and the coolar, once its belly was full of water, would magically turn the killer loo to a cool breeze. To truly enjoy a coolar, you have to sit really close to its mouth, let it blow your hair, dry the sweat off your brows, and then wait patiently for this electric deity, in its benevolent mood, to spit some cool water into your expectant smiling face.
The only problem with coolar was it had to be fed water, and that too, frequently. At least five buckets every five hours. And on good hot day, two buckets extra. Since we were living on a roof, getting water in itself was a huge challenge. There was a water tank on the roof, a big steel one, conducive for getting boiling water in Summer, but there was no tap. So an engineering solution was applied. Father dropped a rubber pipe into the tank. And the tap was ready. My father explained how to operate this fancy tap. ‘When you want water, just suck on the pipe, suck till water reaches you, then drop the pipe. If your level is lower than water, hydraulics will take care of the rest. Greeks built great cities on this principle. You can certainly learn to have a bath using this principle.’ Why I will build a city on this roof. A city that shall shame the Greeks.
As summer progressed, there were other sources of water too. On the day of Baisakhi, a small drain just across the road sprang to life like a snake. They called it a ‘Kanaal’. Icy muddy water of Chenab making its way down from high mountains, passing through sweltering plains, on a particular day, ‘released’, diverted through a network of canals named after the old Dogra Monarch of the State, Ranbir canal, reached our door step, passed us to reach the farms at the outskirts of the city. This canal was lined with mulberry trees, their branches brimming with a sweet fruit at start of Summer. The tar road near the trees at that time would be a canvas of violet on black. The fruit was edible. I was told. The tempting cold water in the canal, not. I was warned. So instead, I jumped into the canal for a cold bath. The water barely reached my knees. There was no chance of drowning. I liked it. It could be my private pool, I thought. After an hour of lounging in the shallow waters as I came out of my pool, some buffaloes took my place. Goodbye pool! I hated buffaloes.
With time, I did get over my dislike for some things. Like I did find a good use for that folding cot. It was ideal for watching TV. It took the experience of watching television under an open sky to the next level. Get the TV out of the store, spread the cot, light some Kachua Chaap, apply some Odomos, spread yourself long on the cot and watch some good old TV. It’s practically a heaven. No fear of scorpions or snakes. There are none in this high Paradise. Even this fear is actually overrated. After few days of stay on the roof, I did discover scorpions, I did lose some sleep over it but eventually if you are alive and young, the sleep always wins over fears.
Best thing about watching television in Jammu was that you had multiple channels. There was always Doordarshan but Jammu offered a great reception for PTV too. On Saturday nights PTV offered English movies. I remember watching ‘Jaws’ one night. In the evening, we could hear news on both the channels. People were dying on both the channels. But the number varied. On one: 50 people dead while protesting bravely on a bridge. On another: 5 militants dead in an encounter, 5 bystanders in crossfire and a bridge burnt down by unidentified men. I figured if my schooling hadn’t been disrupted, I would have learnt the laws that explained these numbers. I thought I would have learnt why it was all morbidly entertaining. These deaths. Most of all I would have picked a better sense of geography and direction.
Towards the west, in the direction of sunset, Pakistan was only miles away from where we stayed. In Srinagar, our house was actually further away from Pakistan, which was miles and miles past Gulmarg. It seemed we had moved closer to Pakistan after moving to Jammu. It made no geographical sense. At night, one could see red bulbs lining the sky. ‘That’s where Pakistan is.’ I was told. But it was obviously too far from Kashmir, from Chattabal, the place in Srinagar where I was born. And yet in Jammu, it was closer. I couldn’t grasp how long the borders of countries could run, how deep.
Every morning, my Grandfather took to going for walks in this direction. I never liked getting up early but on a roof there isn’t much choice in the matter. Sun is a cruel alarm clock. With it arrived the singing parakeets, and from a nearby marshy field, mad war cries of a early rising titahari, Lapwing defending its land against invisible aggressor. Did-e-do-it.Did-e-do-it. Did-he-do-it. Did-he-do-it.
Most morning I would get up at dawn, pick my pillow and get some extra hours of sleep in a corner of the storeroom. But then kitchen too is a cruel alarm clock. Either Mother, Grandmother or Aunt would start stirring things. A ting of a bowl hitting a spoon. A tang of a spoon hitting a bowl. So some mornings, I too would accompany my Grandfather on his morning walks. These walk would usually end with a bath in a fresh water pool he discovered somewhere off the main road. He always liked to walk. Over the years, he taught me to walk the whole length and breadth of Jammu, covering it within hours, from one end to another, taking trails through fields and ravines, learning together short cuts that often turned out to be long cuts. Jammu back then too was called a city. Jammu city. BC Road, Parade, Panjtarthi on one side of river Tawi and Gandhi Nagar, Nanak Nagar, Satwari, Airport on the other. One, the old Jammu and other, the new Jammu. Everything else was mostly uneven open fields covered with wild bushes. Or, Nallas that came alive in monsoons. And in these spatial spaces often lived a few Gujjars here or a few Duggar there, some Sikhs here or some Mashays, the new Christians. That’s about it. Beyond it, on one side there were villages grown around an irrigation canal. Villages in which people bravely tried to be cultivators. And on the other side of town, settlements of transporters around the highway. If you walked blindly in one direction, you could find yourself in Pakistan and if you walked the other way, plains of India awaited. The city that Jammu is now was born somewhere in between these spaces. Feeding on a growing population. The pandits built houses in ravines, buying land from Gujjars. I learnt to walk these spaces even if these weren’t the space I wanted to traverse. In Kashmir, my Grandfather used to take me to the ghat to get rations. I couldn’t carry much weight but he would pretend I was a help. In Jammu, at our first refuge, he would take me to a wheat mill by a canal. Buying aata this way was cheaper and the quality better. He explained. I felt wiser. I liked walking with him. I used to pretend I was a help. It made me happy. In fact, I remember most of that year as a happy year.
I was happy there was no school. A few months later, as a new school session began, all the school were already full to their capacity. There were classes being held in playgrounds, prayer grounds and even rooftops. Later, when I did get in, I got a rooftop there too. And I had to repeat a school year. Thinking about it now makes me feel like a rat running on a treadmill. I feel like I was part of some great failed experiment conducted by history and civilisations. Which reminds me of a funny story from that year:
One day news spread that government was doing evaluative work to see what kind of monetary help could be offered to Pandits. At Shastri Nagar (in a school, I think) was set a make-shift office of a government representative doing this evaluation. Pandits were happy that finally the government, their ‘Center’, was doing something for them. They thronged to the place, all lined up dutifully outside this office. Here, a man handed them all a form to fill-up and list all their movable and immovable assets. Some filled it out right there standing in the queue. Some took it home, to deliberate. I still remember the lengthy discussion that my grandfather, father and uncle had about the dilemma posed by this miraculous form that promised to ease their financial troubles. But it also posed a puzzle. They wondered if they should mention things like ‘1 old Table fan’, ‘2 new Tubelights’, ‘1 very old Philips Radio set’, ‘a brand new Geyser’, ‘a pile of galvanized steel sheets’…over assets like these they wondered if listing everything truthfully was going to send them into some ‘income-tax’ bracket and instead of receiving money, they will have to pay money. In the end, after much thought, they did list all their assets into that form. Next day, this form was duly submitted at that office. Some days later, just as suddenly the office had opened, it closed. The man with the forms was gone. It was much later that the Pandits realized that the man was probably just a poor student working on his PhD on ‘migrants’.
The only worry I suffered that year was the thought of not seeing my father again. In the first month, my father disappeared for two days. He just took off. Didn’t tell any body where he was going and just went away. I became worried only on the second day of his disappearance as all those Hindi movies started running through my head, ‘Tumhara Baap kaun hai?’ Think Rajkumar from Mother India. And that union leader guy from Deewar. That evening father returned with a coconut and some red shiny golden bordered cloth in hand. He had gone to Vaishno Devi. From the roof at night I could see the hill that housed the cave shrine. A hill dotted by a stream of bright lights. A God visible from this far! Obviously, now this Sherawalli, I took very seriously. Some years later, when I did visit the place, lack of Sher on the hill proved to be a bit of disappointment. I would have been a believer today had I found a single tiger on that hill.
The only traumatic memory I have of the year on the roof is of my grandfather breaking the television one day. He threw a metal jug on the screen. It happened one evening when the elders were having some discussion in the storeroom behind a locked door while my sister and I roamed around on the roof. I didn’t think much of it. Locked door discussions were common that year. Even before leaving Kashmir, the subject of leaving was discussed by elders behind a locked door. I thought it was one of those normal family talks but then suddenly, I could hear my grandfather’s raised voice and the next thing I heard was glass breaking, followed by the long winding sound of metal ringing on the floor. The discussion ended. There was no television that day. I wondered what they must have been discussing in the room. I never found out. I guess they were not happy on the roof. It was a silent night. A horrible thought took root in my mind. What if it really was a sad situation? What if it was a permanent state? What if we never return to Kashmir? I hadn’t met any of my cousins during this entire time. Everyone had stopped visiting each other. I wondered if they too were living like this. What would happen to my treasure trove that I had buried in Kashmir before leaving? Before leaving, in a far off corner of the courtyard I had dug a hole in the ground and buried inside it my precious things for safekeeping: a small wooden black horse, a plastic wound up Jeep toy with a missing roof, half a magnet, some tips of broken pens, some empty casings of sketch color pens, a dead silvery lighter belonging to a dead grand-uncle, some marbles and a piece of a blade of a hand saw. What would happen to them? There were more…a hot-wheels car, one EverReady cell, bottle caps, a shard of green colored glass, whistles collected from sauf packets, two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle…the one that were part of Taj Mahal. Counting my treasures I went to sleep. Next morning, father made me carry our broken 14-inch television to a repair shop to have its tube replaced. It survived. We survived. The show continued.
“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.
Me, I am only interested in nature of text and its relativity. ‘Our Moon Has Blood Clots’ provides some interesting twists to the known text about the events of 1947. From my family, I had already grown on stories of an earlier pandit migration, flight of relatives, from the border towns of Princely State of Kashmir to the capital Srinagar during the Kabili raid . But I first read about the scale of this migration in a Pandit community magazine some years ago. It was an entire series documenting the hardships faced by these people, all told mostly in personal narrative. I believe bits of these have gone into ‘Our Moon Has Blood Clots’ in the section dealing with 1947. Here, in this section I found an interesting bit. In most of the historical texts dealing with the events of 1947, destruction of Mahura power grid by tribal men and the subsequent plunging of Srinagar into darkness is one of the most dramatic events of Kashmir story of that time. But in ‘Our Moon Has Blood Clots’, we read that the Mahura power grid may well have been switched off by an unnamed Pandit to signal fellow Pandits in a nearby village that their lives were in danger. Isn’t that interesting. Is it a literary invention? Is there space for invention in memoir? Or did the earlier texts miss this detail because no one even back then asked migrant Pandits their end of the story?
This book is letting the Kashmiri Pandits connect their stories and experiences in a way that no other book has done before. Rahul Pandita’s house was in Chanpore. Chanpore was my Matamal, the place of my Mama and Massi. I know that place. It too have taken walks along Doodhganga. Walks organized by my Nani, who would sometimes take the kids to a Gurudwara too. Rahul Pandita mentions the evening when the mosque got stuck by a lightening. I was there that evening. I was in the crowd that had gathered in front of it. Rahul Pandita mentions the night of 19th January. My sister was in Chanpore that night. Only six, and about two years younger than me, she doesn’t remember but when the mosques started playing the ‘Jihadi Tapes’, my Massi stuffed her mouth with Parle-G biscuits to shut her up. Rahul Pandita in Jammu went to Luthra Academy, it was the first school in Jammu that I too could find admittance in. I lost a school year in the process. Rahul Pandita changed 20 homes in Jammu. For me the number is more like 5. He writes about living at a place called Bhagwati Nagar. My Matamal, my Massi’s place in Jammu for a couple of years was Bhagwati Nagar. I know the sweet spot along the Neher where the water falls off with a gush. He writes about not belonging anywhere. I have spent last ten years moving from one place to another, living out of a bag. For him Kashmir is home, rest are all a house. And so it is with me.
In ‘Acknowledgments’, among many other people, Rahul Pandita thanks me and this blog for triggering memories of home. I am content to say that my contribution to this saddening book has been addition of some happy memories. Memories that I can’t truly call my own. I was delighted to see Deen’e Phila’safar‘s ‘Man in the river’ proof used in this book to embellish a sentence. It’s a story that I can’t call my own as it was shared by a friend of my father. I am told Professor Dinanath’s progenies are now settled in Germany. I was delighted to see the sentence that mentioned the play of bursting fish bladders. It’s a game I have never played, it was a memory shared at this blog by a reader, Arun Jalali.
While I am on nature of memories, isn’t is wonderful that bits and pieces from this blog have already gone into an Indian Publication, into Kashmiri Muslim publications and now a Pandit Publication too.
I remember exactly what I was doing on the day of 26th January in year 1990. I remember it because I was playing stupid that day.
Just before the winter of 1989 set in, at Biscoe school, in a crafts class, I learnt a useful lesson. I had learnt how to make the flag of India.
On 26th January, I was bored. But a thought occurred to me. Since the nation, with all its glory, had arrived at the footsteps of my house in Srinagar, with its uniformed men and bunkers and armoured vehicles, all apparently to guard us from something horrible, I decided to celebrate the Republic day of India in grand style. I decided to make Indian flags, not just one or two but as many as I could and put them all over the house. The process of making the flag was simple and I had all the materials it needed. The process went like this: You tear a fresh page from a notebook, you turn this page around so that the length become the breadth and the breath becomes the length. Then using a pencil you draw two parallel lines on it in such a way that it divides the page into three equal part. If the partitions don’t look good, erase the lines using a rubber and start afresh. If you still fail, tear a fresh page and start all over again. Once you get the division right, in the center partition, make a circle touching the two lines and inside this circle draw exactly 12 lines dissecting each other and meeting in the center of the page, inside the circle at a single point. They will magically give you the Dharma wheel of Ashoka with its 24 spokes. Now, take two sketch pens, one orange and other green, and using your teeth pull out the caps from both of them and get their wet spongy innards out. You might get your hands dirty and colored in the process, but that’s the fun part. After this, take the orange filler, leaving the center partition untouched, paint one of the partitions orange. Take the green filler and paint the other partition green. Your flag is almost ready but have to attach it to a staff to be able to hold it or stick it somewhere. For this you will need a broom and some cooked rice. Get them from your grandmother. Don’t tell her what’s it for. There is good chance your will be denied access to both, if you do tell her. Once you have the broom, take a twig out of it, and using the rice as gluing agent, attach the flag to it. While attaching, keep in mind that the orange partition is supposed to be at the top of flag and green at the bottom, and not the other way round. If you follow all the steps to the T, you will have your Indian flag. The symbol of your nation.
I repeated the process over and over, till I made about two dozen flags. Then I went about putting them all over inside the house. I put them on windows and on doors, looking for familiar cracks on the ageing wooden structure. I stuck them inside rose bushes and on evergreens. The last one I put on the wobbly old wooden handle-lock of the main door to the house. This one hung outside the house for everyone to see. There was no curfew that day, there was much movement on the road, so a lot a people could see it. I wondered if the men in bunker could see it, but there was no movement there.
It was done and it had taken me less time than I had expected. The afternoon was over but the day still remained. I was again bored. I decided to play another game. I had seen these other kids on road outside who would nail a used and empty boot polish tin pack to one end of a stick and would then run the contraption around like they were driving a wheel. A wheel-stick. That seemed fun. I was going to make me a wheel-stick. I already had a stick with me. A stick from a cloth roll. It was perfect for the job. I knew where to find the nails, a box in the dark storeroom. All that was missing was a pack of Cherry Blossom. No matter where I looked, I couldn’t find a single empty pack. I found some filled one, but somehow decided that in the end the play may not be worth a beating. However, a lack of a wheel was not going to stop me. I held the stick in my right hand and just imagined that there a wheel at the end of it and started running around, with the other end of the stick touching the ground. I ran and ran, faster and faster, past all the fluttering flags greeting my parade from the rose bushes and the evergreens. It was fun till the stick suddenly caught a bump in the courtyard and in response the other end in my hand slipped out in recoil, catching me in my nutsack. In a never experienced before kind of pain, I fell down on the ground and rolled and rolled, hoping it would end before the white stars that I was seeing would engulf me. Saw saw Shankar Bhagwan laugh. A single tear rolled down my face. It was over soon enough but felt like an eternity. I threw away the stick and swore on the name of all the gods I knew, I would never play this game again.
I was still lying on the ground when an unfamiliar old man walked into the house. A man unlike anyone I had ever seen. This man had a black karakul cap on, and was dressed in all black. He walked upto me and in a very respectful manner asked if this is where the Razdans lived. I looked at him and although there was a gentle smile on his face, a smile that a dirt rolled kid would elicit, I could see this was face of a sad man. A very sad man. Smile couldn’t cure the deep lines on his brow. I told him, he was at the right place and pointed him to the building that was our house. He walked on slowly keeping his head low. It seemed like he was climbing up Shankracharya hill.
Much later, in fact decades later, I learnt that the old man was the boss of my Choti Bua. Since Bus had stopped going to office, he had come to enquire if everything was okay. Nothing was okay. There were direct threats in papers. There were dress diktats. He was told that Bua had already left for the safety of Jammu.
While I was still in the courtyard, I saw the old man go out the way he had come, out the main door. As he opened the door to go out, I noticed that the flag on the main door’s handle was missing. I ran out to the door, indeed it was not there. I looked around. And found it. On the outer top floor window of a house just across the street. I knew the kid who lived there. We had recently become friends. My parents were probably worried I spent too much time playing with my sisters or inventing too many games that could be played alone. They probably thought I had reached the age when some male friends would be more appropriate for proper all round personality development. So this kid from across the road, a gour boy, son of a priest was introduced to me as a friend. He would often come over to my house and we would play cricket. And now this phoney friend had stolen my flag. I would not let it pass. I walked over to his house, called him out and asked him to return my flag. He denied stealing it and said he had made it himself. Had he not planted it so high up on his house, I would have just taken it and ran. But in this situation, there was one one thing to be done. I went back home and complained to my grandmother. I told her how this nasty kid, the one they call my friend had stolen my flag. Her response wasn’t the one I expected.
‘What flag?’
I told her how I had spend much of the afternoon making these beautiful flags. She walked out into the courtyard and was for some reason horrified by what she saw. She looked at all those flags I had placed all around the courtyard and yelled, ‘Myani Bhagwaano! You are going have us killed! Why? Why would you do such a stupid thing?’
Then she went about pulling out the flags from all the places and tearing them up.
‘That old man too must have seen them. We are going to die. We are going to get struck by lightening! Reign of darkness descends!’
I wanted to protest. I couldn’t understand what it was that I had done wrong. But there was nothing I could do to stop her. She was angry about something and I had never seen her angry about anything, ever. Even when one time I got her to catch an injured parakeet for me and it bit her fingers. And yet here she was tearing these harmless flags with such violence that her hands were shaking. And her hands never used to shake, never, never ever even as she would descale and cut to pieces quivering big fish using a knife. Yet here she was, meting out violence on pieces of paper and twigs. Then her eyes fell on something on the ground that made her a bit less angry and a bit more sad.
‘And you destroyed my broom too! My la’tchul!’
A few days later, I overheard the news about some members of a Kashmiri Pandit family living across our street getting shot in their house by ‘militants’. Many years later, as I first tried to understand the concept of nations, I wondered if it was the flag thief’s family that was killed.
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Summer 2008. The courtyard where it happened, in front of the old house that doesn’t exist.
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‘Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming, The clouds methought would open, and show riches Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again.‘
This blog is now definitely floating in some strange waters. A couple of weeks ago my sister went to Jim Corbett National Park with her colleagues for an ‘Office Picnic. The place she works for, an IT firm based around Noida, has quite a lot Kashmiri Muslims on its payroll. In fact, the firm has a mini-branch of a sort operating from Srinagar. It was simple, they hired a Kashmiri in Delhi who good at what he did and they got him to hire some more. Because the work involves technology, the firm was just as happy having them work from Srinagar. For the Picnic these outstation employees were also invited. So at Jim Corbett my sister got to interact with some Kashimiri Muslims. Her impression of them was of the usual type: one a bright beautiful girl but head ever covered and other a decent, honest, zealous boy who asks questions like, ‘So, why did you leave?’
On that infamous January night in 1990, my mother and sister were at my Massi’s place in Chanpora while I was at home with my Grandmother in Chattabal.
‘Your sister, who must have been 6 at the time, was quite a screamer as a kid ( in fact still is), master in the art of Baakh. When the loudspeakers from the mosques started their death songs about creating a new paradise on earth, your devil little sister, probably disapproving, or perhaps afraid or just hungry, or just for the fun of it, started crying at the top of her lungs. Your mother and I tried to console her as we were terrified that the sounds emanating from her loudspeaker were going to attract the attention of whoever was singing the hit number ‘Death to Kafirs’ from the mosque. After all our attempts to reason with her failed, we did the only thing we could think of: we stuffed her mouth with Parle-G biscuits, chunks and chunks of it. Megha chup ho Ja! Megha Dam Kar! Please shut up! That shut her up good and we again focused back our attention to the long-winding sermon from the mosque.The sermon stopped a few hours before dawn, it stopped just as suddenly as it had started. It was only next morning that we realized that it was all probably audio-taped sermons imported from Pakistan. No one could have stayed up that late into the night just to sit in front of a microphone and talk about killing. Most of it was in Urdu, in any case. Next morning, I asked a neighbour about happenings of the last night, but only to be greeted by silence. Not a word was spoken. As if he didn’t hear anything.’
At this point my Massi’s narrative as broken by her Bahu who added:
‘Yes, I too remember the night. When the sermon started, my mother shut me and my younger sister in a storeroom under a staircase.’
‘Where did you used to live?’
‘Jawahar Nagar. The night was same all over the city.’
I don’t remember what happened that night in Chattabal. I have no recollection of it. All those nights are the same to me now. All I remember is that just around that time we stopped sleeping in Naya Kambra, the room closer to the outer wall and started spending nights in the Thokur Kuth, the main God Room, all eight of us. Those days, there were stories of people getting killed in sleep, in their beds. We stopped sleeping. I slept.
Given the nature of this blog, one would expect that I have a lot of Kashmiri Muslim friends or that at least I interact a lot with them or that I interact a lot with Muslims. That definitely is not the case. As a Kid, growing up in Jammu, I did have a lot of Kashmiri Muslim ‘Cricket’ friends who taught me reverse swing. I had a Muslim friend in college who regaled me with stories like the one about Muslim men planning to melt all of American Gold at Fort Knox by crashing mercury filled plane into it. Given my ‘Muslim Parast‘ concerns, one would think I must be hanging out with Muslims all the time. That definitely is not the case. In fact, I became conscious of this fact only last year when hoping to join my family for a holiday on 2nd October, I reached my mother’s place only to realize that she along with my sister had gone to the wedding of a U.P. Muslim friend of my sister somewhere deep in Ghaziabad. It occurred to me that even though I have read a bunch of books on Islam and Muslims, and even though my sister has read none, it was she who can now say that she has been to a Muslim wedding and not I. In fact, I am sure she doesn’t even think of it as a big deal. ‘You live there, We live here.’ is how she simply answered the question, ‘Why did you leave?’
I am writing all this after running into a Kashmiri Muslim from Baramulla last night at a Lohri ‘Party’ thrown by a bunch of couples from Ranchi and Kota living in Dwarka. It was a ‘beganay ki shaadi may Abdullah deewana‘ kind of scene for me as I just knew onlt one of the guys and that too only because we briefly worked together. On realizing that I am a Kashmiri, one of the hosts pointed to a guy in the room, a college buddy of his, and said, ‘He too is a Kashmiri.’ Indians are generally ignorant about complexities of ‘Masla-e-Kashmir’, this ignorance is often a cause of heartburn for Kashmiris but in this particular case, it somehow gave me pleasure that these simple working guys knew nothing about our history and didn’t care about its complexities. To them, we both were just Kashmirirs. Just when you put people in cozy, comfortable definitions, people break out of them. And so I met a fellow Kashmiri and we started a brief conversation with the usual questions, ‘So, where do you live?’ ‘Where I used to live! Well, you know Chatchbal.’
Photographs from the ‘Kashmir’ section of 15th Anniversary issue of India Today published in 1990. If there is a Kashmir ‘special’ issue today in any Magazine, you will probably see similar form of story telling through pictures. Photographers who first figured out the Kashmir template include Raghu Rai, Prashant Panjair and Pramod Pushkarna.
The Kashmir section of 15th Anniversary issue of India Today published in 1990 ends with a photograph shot by Prashant Panjair. It’s a Migrant camp. Other than the evocative footnote photograph, there is no mention of the migration in the reports that trace the origin and consequences of what must have been back then a disturbance. Maybe no one thought it possible, something like this almost never happens, certainly not to people who have possessions, migration must have seemed like a temporary situation, so these desolate people were referred as Refugees, people who may not need refuge anymore someday. Or that the situation threw some uncomfortable questions that were best ignored for greater good. So all we have is a photograph of a camp which in this case, from the looks of it, for the looks of its walls and floor, was probably the Dharamshala next to a temple whose courtyard in old city of Jammu seldom saw sunlight, the coolest camp which soon with the coming of monsoon proved to be the dampest. A place that now reminds me only of paracetamol and phenol, sleep and steel trunks, .
In May 1990 we were living in a storeroom on the rooftop of a two storied house in the outskirts of Jammu. The house belonged to a step-relative of my grandfather. We had the entire roof for ourselves while another Pandit family lived on rent on the ground floor. I spent part of that summer collecting frogs and toads in old paint cans that I thoughtfully kept in shade below a rusty Iron water tank. Most of my collection died in those tubs till the day I realized nyen’mondij can’t live for long in a paint tub full of water, sand, pebbles and grass.
