Even at the worst of times, it is only love that reaches out to me from Kashmir.
Talked to Posha today. It was after almost fifteen years. That was when she visited our house in Jammu. She talked so fast, so animated, so alive, just the way I remembered her. She talked of old times. Kashmiri flew out of her mouth like little sparrows. I wanted to keep pace. Catch all I could. I needed time to find the right words. To reply. I failed. She talked and I listened. And then all my memories of Kashmir came flooding back. She said I had all grown up. She had brought her young son along. We played ‘bat-ball’. I balled and he batted. A debt I needed to pay. She used to ball and I used to bat. She was the first stranger I ever knew. My first friend. When I must have been younger, just a toddler, she too must have sometimes picked me up, hurled me in the air and then caught me. ‘Ha’tay’e Posh’ey! Wai Bhagwaan!‘ Mother must have screamed. And Posha would have just laughed.
Today, she visited again and asked about me. My father told her I often talk about her. He then rang me up and handed the phone to her. We talked for a minute.
I can’t write what we talked about and none of it would make any sense. Even at the worst of times, it is only love that reaches out to me from Kashmir.
-0-
Summer. 2008
Veena Didi with Posha’s mother Mohul, entering their home.
Posha wasn’t home.
After marriage she has moved to a new place about half-a-mile down the road.
-0-
Update[26th Feb 2013]: Talked to my mother a few days ago and got the full import of the story.
Posha had an accident while riding her ‘scooty’ around Chattabal. Yes, she drives a Scooty now. Given the serious nature of the injury, Posha decided to get herself checked up at a better hospital in Amritsar. But there was one problem: her husband was in Bung’lore selling shawls and other Kashmiri merchandise, so there was nobody to take care of her three young children. But bones need mending. So Posha left her eldest son with one neighbour, other son at the house of a friend and her little daughter with her mother Mogul. Then she traveled to Amritsar. While Posh was in Amritsar, Indian Government decided to hang Goru and declare curfew in most of Kashmir. Posh was now stuck. But then she remembered something. She remembered she has a place to stay in Jammu. Posha headed straight for our house, house of her old neighbours from Kashmir. She stayed at our place till the road to Kashmir cleared. She slept in the same room, on the same bed next to my mother, a room with more than half a dozen Gods on four walls. She looks so pretty now. No more running nose. She is not the same old Posha now. She works as a laboratory assistant. Draws a salary of 25000. In her toes, she has gold rings. Despite her recent injury, for the time she stayed, Posha, not so quietly, singing some song sometimes, sometims shouting,’Bhabhi, Be havav! Aunt, let me show you how to do it!’, went about cleaning and dusting old cupboards, shelves and clearing ceiling corners of cobwebs. She stayed for two days and then went back to Srinagar after the halaat got better.
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.
-0-
Summer 2008. The courtyard where it happened, in front of the old house that doesn’t exist.
-0-
Winters are not easy on elderly. Bhabhi, one of my grand aunts, passed away recently. Last month, thanks to a chance visit to Jammu, I met her for the last time. It was obvious she was in much pain. Cancer isn’t easy on body. And extreme diabetes, blood pressure, don’t make it any easier either. You live on a diet of medicines, drips and biscuits. You live on warmth of relations. That helps till a point. Till it all again comes down to a diet of medicines, drips and biscuits.
There is no ‘touch-feet-of-elders’ among Kashmiris. We hug and kiss. As I hugged her that day, even in pain, she kissed me and repeated our old joke. In my ears she said, ‘I stole you from your room while your were sleeping. Remember!’
I remember.
I once passed into sleep. When I woke up, I realized I hadn’t woken up in my room, the naya Kamra, the new room. I hadn’t woken up to the familiar sight of a Philips B&W TV, instead a smiling curly haired Baba in Saffron robes was showing me white of his one palm from a photograph sitting cozy inside a cabinet of an almirah. But this too was a familiar sight. I was looking at the Gods Cabinet of Bhabhi. She was sitting in front of it, praying, lighting agarbattis, diyas, arranging and re-arranging marigold and rose petals around more than a dozen photo-frames of various gods. A silvery bracelet studded with beautiful blue and green stones jingling on her left wrist. ‘It is for pressure,’ she would always say when I would often quiz her about that strange piece of jewellery. A few years later, her son, my uncle, also got one. ‘It is for pressure,’ he says. As I looked at that bracelet, I knew I had woken up in Bhabhi’s room which was right across our naya Kamra.
Still in a daze, I crawled my way to her and asked ‘How did I get here? Did I sleep here last night?’ She looked away from her gods and staring at my face, reading the confusion which must have been well writ on it, she replied with a straight face, ‘No. I stole you from your room while your were sleeping. At night, after you went to sleep in your room, I sneaked in and quietly picked you up and brought you here.’
‘Is that possible? If that is possible, any body can walk in and steal me at night. Am I safe? How could they let this happen!’ These troubling thoughts crept into mind. I got up with a start and ran out of the room to find my grandmother and ask her if it is true and if yes how could she let this happen. As I ran out of that room, and out of the door, the sullen darkness of a Kashmiri living room suddenly gave way to the brightness of the glorious Kashmiri summer sun. In an instant my mind cleared. I understood the joke. I went back into her room and screamed at her ‘You are quite a thief Bhabhi!’ We laughed for sometime. Then she went back to her pooja as I sat next to her, watching in silence.
-0-
Summer 2008.
The spot where once stood Bhabhi’s room. It is now a garden lawn or a saw mill. Just across it, my naya Kamra, my sleeping room, although now looking worn out, with the smoothness of its outer walls all gone. Itis the only old structure that survived.
‘So, the temple! Is it going to fall to the left or to the right?’
We wondered. My grandfather couldn’t remember the way to his house. He didn’t recognize the chowk, the tang adda nor the left turn that led to the house that was once his. When we reached the house, he asked, ‘Is this the place?’
His memory had probably started to disintegrate the previous summer. Memories flowing in his blood were forming a clot in his cranium. In a condition like that, pulling the directions to a neighbourhood temple from memory was perhaps too much to expect. Yet, we engaged in a play. Many a games like these we had played together. The pace at which the bus was moving, everyone had to pick a side or miss having the darshan. Everyone in the bus looked left and then right and then left. I chose right. I knew the temple was to the right. It had to be.
One the the earliest memories of Kashmir I have is of a day, not a particular day, rather sum of many such days, one of those days when my grandfather would take me to the ghat to get monthly ration. On way to the river bank he would tell me about the weir. The weir on Jhelum was built around 1906, an engineering feat performed using British help, to maintain the water level of the river, to keep the river navigational and to keep an old river going. Back then I didn’t know all this. I didn’t realize rivers could die. But the sound of ‘Veer’ excited me. Veer had been part of Kashmiri language for decades now but when I heard the word ‘Veer, I asked him to explain what this Veer thing looked like. What is a Veer?
‘It’s a big wooden structure built across a river…’
One could simply say it’s a small dam like structure but as I heard and misheard and missed my grandfather’s explanation, the picture that my mind chose to draw was no simple dam. My mind took: from the pair of snakes in Medical insignia of Soura hospital, one snake and comity; from the cranky old wooden electric pole in our yard, it took a slippery and wet wooden pole and an uncertainty; from the rows of those giant taps that someone put alongside a railing of an old bridge on Jhelum and then left them all open as if by mistake, a fountainn-tap to pump oxygen (not water) into a thirsty river, it took sound and breath; and from the dying moments of a black and white television screen, it took its last slow murmur of life, a single beautiful dot of blinding whiteness in the center of a finite darkness. A picture emerged, my eyes could now see the Veer: it was an unreadable god, in the middle of a deep river a huge pole reaching for an overcast grey sky, wound around it, a giant dark serpent with inviting diamond twinkle for eyes. Can it call out to people? Can its voice be heard? Why it looked like Skeletor’s ‘Snake Mountain’!
‘That’s way to the Veer,‘ he pointed in a direction, ‘…will take you someday.’ I couldn’t see anything. The vision faded. Or did it appear only later in a nightmare I had on a Sunday. This day must have been a Sunday.
‘Aren’t we going to go?’
‘Maybe later. First we will go get ration. Don’t you want to see the houseboats.’
‘Yes…’
I wanted to see it all. I wanted to run to the shore as soon as the whiff of the river reached me. But before going to the houseboat-shops, grandfather stopped. He stopped in front of a structure that looked like a storeroom. A storeroom with a locked door.
‘Is the shop closed? Will we have to agin come back tomorrow? What do they sell here?’
‘This is our Bhairav Mandar,’ my grandfather answered even as he offered a head-bent namaskar tothe iron lock.
‘What’s inside?’
‘God.’
‘Why is it locked? Can we look inside?’
As he proceeded to circumvent the structure, I followed him, holding on to a corner of his kurta and on with my questions.
‘Which one?’
‘What?’
‘Which God?’
‘Bhairav’
Is Bhairav also Shankar?
He then started talking something about chappals.
In the bus, he repeated the old story: ‘They threw chappals into the hawan kund. The government put a lock on the temple and we were barred from praying there. Just like that. The matter went to the court. We agitated. I too fought the police. I think the matter is still in the court.’
He ended that sentence with a snort. For a moment all his memories seemed lucid again. The dispute over the Bhokhatiashwar Bhairov Nath Mandir of Chattabal arose in 1950s and peaked around 1973 when a mob attacked the temple premise which had been a center of cultural and religious activities for Pandits of Chattabal. Food Control department of the State government laid claim over the temple’s ghat. Pandit fought back the claim with a surprising resolve. They were out on streets facing police lathicharge. The matter reached the court which locked down the temple structure till a verdict was reached. But the verdict never arrived. In 1990, the families of people who took part in temple agitation were doubly afraid for their lives. There were old scores to be settled. As their temple was already locked, temporarily, they locked their houses too. The locks remained until 1992 when, in the aftermath of Babri Masjid Demolition, Bhairav temple, like many a Pandit houses, lost its lock, lost its door, windows, roof, the walls and the stones and anything valuable or un-valuable or invaluable inside. Does it make sense? Any of it. Talking about a temple in Chattabal and a temple in Ayodhya. Love may not tie humanity, but the violence already does. Does violence offer greater intimacy? Is Chappal a God too?
My grandfather didn’t take me to the weir that day. I never saw it. But I did try to find it, on my own many time. I was just starting to discover the place where I was born. I had started to walk out of the house alone, tracing the by-lanes, just to see where they led, to a bridge or a river, or a dead-end or a grocery, or a butcher’s shop. Out for running home errands, buying eggs, butter, milk or zamdod, followed by crows and eagles, cats and dogs, horses and tongas, I would sometimes take a new route, take a wrong turn, just to see how far I could go before that ‘lost’ feeling churns in stomach. On these walks, one of the boundaries of my daring adventures, Lachman Rekha of my kingdom, my point of ‘better-return-back-home’, was a bridge from which I could see the houseboats on the ghat. Somewhere near this bridge, to the left, was a shop that sold mint candies that looked like Digene pills, only, white and not pink. White like those white pebbles used to emboss Gurmukhi Omkar above the door of that Sardarji in Chanpore near Massi’s house. Didn’t I always want to pluck those white dots out from that wall, just to confirm they were in fact not edible? Is Chappal a God too? Did I really ask Daddy that question? How after long walks with Nani on the dry river bed of Tawi in Jammu, on a river bed baked red in summer sun, I used to bring back to her those beautiful stones. She would ask us kids to look for a Kajwot, a perfect grinding stone, and we would run back to her carrying a stone with white stripes around it, a mark like a Brahmin’s yoni, a janau. ‘Ye ti Shivji‘, she would exclaim and send a little prayer. We would pocket the god. Few minutes later we would again run back to her to confirm if we had again found another god. The river bank only had too many gods and too few Kajwots to offer. She would again say a prayer. Our pockets were too small and the world had too many stones. We would throw the stones in the river. While we looked for a perfect Kajwot, she would often talk about Doodhganga. We used to have these walks in Kashmir too, in Chanpore, on the dry bed of a river called ‘Milk Ganga’. They say in the old days a single stream of milky whiteness used to flow in the center of that muddy river. Hence the name.
‘Where could that shop selling white mint candies be? That was to the left of the bridge.’ I wondered and turned my head left to look for the shop.
‘There. To the right. There somewhere should be the temple. Yes, there it is. The ruins. All burnt.’
‘Where? Where?’
I had missed it. In the mad dash, I couldn’t see a thing. Facing right, staring as a fast passing train of trees, shacks, a muddy river, a dry river bed, a rolling polythene bag, empty crushed plastic bottles, metal of electric poles and wires, I could see. I couldn’t see the temple. I kept shooting the camera blindly, hoping to capture something, anything. The moment passed just as it came. Did I miss it? I believed I did. I wanted to see the place where my father used to accompany his father to buy cheap American IR-8 rice in 1906s. I wanted to see the temple. The boats. I wanted to see the veer.
‘I think it is settled.’
Grandfather exclaimed solemnly. After a brief pause he added, ‘This is how things are settled…conflicts resolved.’
A sad laughter escaped deep from his throat and turning away from the car window, he went back to reading a local Urdu newspaper from Kashmir.
I turned the big wooden bolt and threw open the gates. I was in. The old house was on left, whining, grunting, wheezing, as usual. The horses were inside. Were they tied proper? I hoped they were. Nobody else home. I didn’t have much time to loose. I looked at the wall in front of me, our side of the common wall. Gauging from the speed at which beer’e ball shot off from my bat and the point and the angle at which the ball then crossed the wall, it was most likely to have dropped somewhere to the right. I turned right and my eyes met mounts and mounts of horse dung. The smell now hit me. It seemed half the courtyard was buried under 4-feet of dung. Further away from me, the dung seemed months old, hardened, but closer to me, one look and I knew it was fresh. On one of these mounts, not too far from me I found beer, the precious wooden ball that I had earlier in the day stolen from the cabinet of uncle Nanu. It was a remnant from his schooldays. I was not supposed to play with it till I grow-up a few more years. I never saw him play with it. He said it was dangerous, these were his words: It is so hard, it will break your empty skull. Having lost it, I now feared for my skull in any case. Last summer, I had started believing I was He-Man. I would return back from school, take off my uniform, but before wearing anything else, I would put on my marvelous winter gum boots, run out of the house, out the old wooden door and into the yard, holding up over my head a pencil in hand, screaming my lungs out, ‘Iiiiii haaave dhA PAawaaaR!’ This went on for days, or a few weeks and my Castle Grey Skull was only besieged when one day after my superb performance Nanu, simply pulled the shoes out of my feet and threw them out. A proper Kash’kadun, as they say in Kashmiri. One landed on the roof of Naya Kambra, the newly built room next to the main gate and the other, based on the angle it was tossed, probably crossed over the wall and landed on horse dung. I had tried to recover the shoe that landed on roof and failed (there was no proper stair to roof-top). The other, I hadn’t even thought as recoverable. I mean, this house was the ground of my most precious but forgotten nightmares. On some nights, even as the sound of distant trucks moving on national highway receded, these horses kept on singing their wheezy lullabies and they kept on thumping our house to sleep with their hooves. On some nights, I thought they were sad and in most nights I wished they would go to sleep. Were Ghardhivta giving them bad dreams? There were ghosts in that house. Wasn’t Mansaram the family house help from Orissa slapped one dark night in that house by an unseen hand? At one time, like most houses in the area, this house too used to belong to the Razdan clan. If stories are to be believed Razdans were settled here by Badshah. If one explanation is to be believed, the people who were settled in the marshes of Chattabal by Badshah were given the name Raz-Dan as they got to eat from royal oven. There is a pass near Gurez named Razdan pass. Pass that. Just before my birth, sometime in late 1970s, most of these families moved out of Kashmir to Indian plains, moved to Ghaziabad or Faridabad. Before leaving they sold on half of the house to a Gur Tang’e Wol. The way these houses were designed and the way these families lived meant that splitting a house wasn’t easy and often aesthetically unpleasant. So now the house next to us was owned by a Tongawalla.
It was house of horses and ghosts. A perfect setting for bad dreams and good adventures. So here I was trying to recover this stupid ball. I retreated from the house.
I returned. I stepped into shit. I had come back prepared. I was wearing my shiny new red snowshoes. I only had to take two steps in that valley of dung to reach the ball. One step in, I started sinking. I didn’t drown but I was ankle deep. I tried to roll the ball towards me using a stick. It worked. It wasn’t long before I had it in my hand. It was over. I did get it back. World was a beautiful place. Man could do whatever he willed. God was with those who help themselves. Thirty cross and his mighty pebbles. It was all true. I started to make my way back. As I pulled my one foot out of shit and on to the solid ground, the other foot somehow slipped deeper in shit. In the same instant, the shoe stuck and only my foot came out. I lost one more shoe.
That morning we were left in care of Mogul. We were not to return back home until someone came for us. Standing on Mogul’s creaky old balcony, I looked out in the direction of our house. The courtyard was out of sight, hidden by cement and tin of rooftops, top-view of rooms of cousin Sheebu and Binnu. Towards the right the old house stood tall. Too tall. I stuck my neck out to see the top. Did I expect to see anything? It was hopeless. Straight ahead I could see the little cart-shop of Mogul’s eldest son. He sold little packets of Sauf which always had a pink or green plastic whistle inside or maybe sometimes a ring. In his cart shop were stacks of peanuts and channa, and fried green peas, peppered, and grams of all color. His wide rimmed glass bottles held candies, always orange, half molten, looking licked, and stuck to wrappers. There were bottles of Bubble gum and mint. There were toy guns and balloons. There were games, a hand-held roulette, a maze with rolling balls, a puzzle set – order the numbers and get to see Taj Mahal at the back. And then there was the fish shaped ‘water game’ – press the big rubber button on the water-filled hand-held device and hook the little plastic multi-colored rings dancing in water inside to the two poles. People said Mogul’s elder one was a little slow of brain, and that he just couldn’t bargain. But he worked so close to home. That ought to count for something. And why was water inside the belly of those plastic fish so sweet? Was is really poisonous? How exactly did he die? I again looked back at the house from Mogul’s Kaini. It was a nice spot. In morning, sun would light it up perfectly. I would often come to this place and find Mogul sitting on the floor spinning her wheel, churning cotton to thread. Singing something. I would ask for Posha, an excuse, and sit and watch the woman work her Yedir. Posha, Mohul’s young daughter started talking about something that ought to regale us kids, make us laugh. She was always for laughs. I would have joined in but that day something else was keeping me engrossed. The wailing, when it started, in middle of one of Posha’s Jokes, was unlike any crying sound that I could identify. So it had begun. The house still looked calm. But the wailing now came in waves. Rising and falling. It came from the courtyard. I could identify the sound of my grandmother, grand-aunts and together they sounding like sound of someone unknown previously, but now intimately known . The women of the house had started mourning the death of my grandfather’s bachelor brother. That day I spend the entire afternoon in Mogul’s Kaini watching and listening to the songs of death for first time. For the longest time, I wrongly believed the old man died of smoking. He died of kidney failure. For the longest time, I believed death meant an empty room. Death meant now absent. I thought it meant a room cleared of useless belonging. I thought it meant finding beautiful shiny old lighters long buried in ground.
Mogul’s eldest was the first one to die. It is believed he died in cross-firing. Of other two, one died of drowning, and the other went on to join JKLK and died too. Posha went on to marry a grade three government officer. For her dowry, she took my mother’s dressing table with her. Mogul’s Kaini now it seems is a point of minor neighborly dispute. Mogul gripped my grandfather by his hand and asked him to confirm whether or not he had explicitly let her build that balcony out and intruding on his land. He answered. She found hope in his answer and he found hopelessness.
She asked him to repeat it out loud and aloud to all, especially to the new owners. And then she proclaimed the matter as settled, forever.
“Simi Ji! Simi Ji!” A little girl living in that house would sometimes call out loud at odd hours. I never knew the caller by face. I could only hear a voice coming somewhere deep from the inside of that Muslim house and then I would hear the laughter. My mother would run to the window with a false start and then half-way, catching onto the prank, she would curse, “Trath Temis”. If it wasn’t enough that she had neighbours who would clear-out their spittoons and night soil into her courtyard, now she had to deal this bratty child’s game. Sometimes I would run to the window to catch the little jester. But I never saw anyone. Our game would continue.
My Nani had a strange habit. She would visit her daughter’s place but would try to keep her visits reticent. She wouldn’t knock on the door or ring a bell. She wouldn’t walk into the house and simply meet her daughter. No, for my Nani, these visits were part of a ritual of checking up on her daughter’s married life. As part of this ritual her would stand under the second-floor window of our house and call out my name, my Other name. On hearing my Other name, mother would look out from the window and find my Nani with maybe a bag of fruits, baker’s bread or something such. Moments later, she would run down and standing below that window, a bit embarrassed, she would ask her mother to be more proper and not create such scenes. But only weeks later my Nani would again be under the window calling, ‘Simi Ji! Simi Ji!’
My Nani wanted that I be named Sameer. Naturally, the nick name would have been symphonic and girly Simi. But then I was born on a wrong day. An elder Bhabhi of my Dadi vetoed that for someone born on such a great day, Vinayak Tchorum, and that too a Sunday, only Vinayak would be a proper name. Simi would have been lost like Sameer but for my Nani and the unseen neighbour girl, the two custodians of my other name.
