Unimagine every Sikh you have known in your life time. Imagine you have just heard about them and have never come across one in life. Imagine hearing stories that they used to be your neighbours but don’t live there anymore. Imagine their empty houses and towns. Imagine they are all gone. Imagine Gurudwaras across India, some shut, some crumbling, some looted, some secured by Security forces, some run by Hindu men as part of job or homage to past. Imagine running into an occasional sikh pilgrim who you befriend and talk nostalgia with.
One might ask, “Where have they all gone?”
“Of course, Canada to seek material prosperity. Why they left is another question! Sitting in Canada why they curse India is understandable.”
In 1980s, when Punjab was reeling under militancy, Sikhs were about 3% of Indian population. A prosperous productive community. But just 3%. Yet, it is unimaginable to imagine that this 3% can disappear from India almost overnight. A sick thought. One would imagine, Indian society would forever be needled about an event like this. After all, disappearance of communities doesn’t happen in India. And if it does happen, it is not brushed under the rug of “hota hai, move on!”. Right?
Kashmiri Pandits were just around 3% of Kashmiri society in 1980s. By the end of 1990, this 3% was just gone. Who imagined it? Now, ask that question too often and you are being a nuisance. A nuisance that holds 97% hostage. 97% that in some cases wan’t Hindutva and in come cases an Islamic paradise.
Meanwhile history tells us 1980s saw the migration of Punjabis from border town of Punjab. Some of these Punjabi Hindus moved to a place called Faridabad near Delhi. The land prices sore. When the Punjab militancy settled down in late 90s, the land prices in the area crashed. Just as they crashed, Kashmiri Pandits moved in fleeing hope of returning to Kashmir. They bought land a low prices in arid wild lands where now societies have grown. Land prices in Faridabad have steadily increased over the decades. One can’t imagine them ever going down with a crash.
-0-
While in Jammu, I decided to give Kashmir a break and took up Punjab instead. However, Kashmir doesn’t leave you alone once it grabs your soul. I read “My Bleeding Punjab”, a compilation of Khushwant Singh’s notes on the violence in Punjab of 80s.
This is from around 1986 when threat letters and selective violence were previously successfully used to engineer a mass migration. Interestingly, none of the Kashmir experts on Pandit exodus mention this phenomenon. Another interesting point made by Khushwant Singh is about this the do numbri “Shiv Sena”. It is this Shiv Sena that also figures in stories from Kashmir of 80s where politically aggravating pandits were getting branded as Shiv Sainik by the majority community. I am sure even the people doing the branding had no clue that this Shiv Sena had nothing to do with Bal Thackeray. In all this, I have also realized that the tribal ritual of beating utensils to send out morse coded threats of violent death upon minority is still prevalent in Hindu society. In 2008, the method was used in Jammu while in Kashmir stones were flying. We are all in a one bad symphony of violence that has a secret language of its own. Sometimes it rings out like a shrill metal sound in that night and draws the children to its tune. I have heard this terrible song. Tie your children to the mast, the song is still playing.
In winters the population of Jammu increases as people from Kashmir and Ladakh move in. A good time for fairs. Seen here ‘Maut ka Kua’ (Well of death), at a fair held in a ground that in early 90s was a ‘ migrant camp’ in Muthi.
Earlier such fairs were common in Srinagar where performers would come from all over India to perform. Most awaited feat used to be ‘Jump’ in which a man, ablaze, would jump from a great height into a small pool of water [the act was called “‘Naarevoth“].
As the winter of 1990 set in, we moved to a newer better place. This was the third move. The place was in a mohallah of old Jammu city known as ‘Chogan Salathian’, overlooking the Tawi river from a high ground. The area is just next to Mubarak Mandi palace in Jammu, the power seat of old Dogra kingdom.
A century ago, in this mohalla lived the administrators and relatives of the old Dogra ruling class.
By 1990, some of them had already moved on to other destnations, leaving only their big old houses behind. At this place, we took on rent a diwan hall of an old haveli known as ‘Diwan Ki Haveli’. It cost us nine hundred rupees a month. Given the conditions in which most pandits were living in Jammu at the time, it was the most luxurious place that money could rent. That hall is still the most specious room I have lived in, ever. I felt like a royalty. It still amazes me that more than a decade later when my father moved to Noida, Delhi-NCR, he took a hall on rent, quarter in size with no windows, that cost him around fourteen hundred.
The room came with no furniture. Previous owner had only left a copy of Gita and a small bronze statue of Krishna.
New Door. The place was locked, no one lives here anymore. So, I couldn’t go in.
Door of the house just opposite the haveli. The old door of the haveli looked something like this. It had those protective metal spikes.
There were at least three other Pandit refugee families already living in the haveli, beside two Dogra families, one of them caretakers of the Haveli. The other families had taken up various rooms of the house. In our case, we created our own room.
We carved three room out of the hall using bedsheets and curtains. In the first room: kitchen and parents. In the second room, the middle one: my parents and sister. Third room, near the door: uncle and guest room. I was free to live in any one of them. I liked the outer room the most in the day. It had a big old window on which you could sit and watch monkeys steal cloths. At night I would sleep in the kitchen, nestled between my grand-parents.
We also had an extra room. Under the stairs that led to the hall from the coutyard, we build a bathroom. Given the number of people living in the haveli, access to bathing space was going to be an problem. So building our own private bathroom was a good option. There was no shortage of water (at least not in winter), haveli had a big water tank, that looked like a white tiled walled swimming pool. Toilet, however was an issue. The entire Haveli, for its about fifty inhabitants, had only one. Of course, the door to it had no bolt. I now realize, it is a deliberate ploy. This way, whoever is inside, is always under threat of being forcefully removed if one does not get out in time after the first few warning knocks on the door.
The window would be the one at absolute top (not clearly visible)
When summer came of 1991 came, it became obvious why my family moved here. My family, due to my grandfather’s state government service, had experience of Jammu thanks to ‘Darbar Mov’. They knew where to stay safe from Jammu’s summer. These old haveli’s, due to their build and design, would stay relatively cooler even as outside temperatures rose dramatically. The windows of the hall were facing only late afternoon sun. You could sleep it off the noon heat. But, I guess only elders worried about the sun, temperature and sweat. I spent most of my time on the roof.
The haveli was proving to be a mysterious playground for me. On the roof top, under a mud mould, I once found a bag of marbles. There must have been five hundred of those multi-coloured glass balls inside it. I didn’t know how to play Kanchey, so I just kept giving them away to random people. I made friends. There was a Dogra boy in that house that used to make torches using match-boxes, pencil- cells and LEDS. Just opposite the hall, on an outer ‘chajja’, balcony, of the haveli, lived a family of ‘Bhats’ comprising an middle aged couple, a granny, an adult son and two young daughters. The son, jobless and with nothing to do, would often join me on the high roof in the evenings to watch the setting sun. From the roof you could see the entire old city covered in gentle red glow. He could play flute beautifully. He was a cross between Anil Kapoor and Jackie Shroff for his hair style and moustache. But he would never play that 80s tune.
I remember watching Aashiqui on a VCP in the haveli. The system had been brought on rent for viewing Bua’s marraige cassette. The last time we had borrowed VCP, I had watched Rakhwala. It was summer of 1989. In 1991, Aashiqui with its songs was the rage in town. There was even a brand of Gutkha named after it. It still exist. The general rule back then, and still applicable, was: stay away from people who carry Aashiqui. It was flavor of anti-socials.
I had my first taste of racism here at this place. On the day we moved to the hall, me and my sister noticed a small park near by. We never had parks in Srinagar near our house. We played in house and not in public parks. Park was a novelty. In Srinagar only the newer colonies like Chanpora had them. We wanted to explore the park. However, I remember getting chased away from the park by kids. Moments ago they had been teasing monkeys. And now they were on to us. As we enter the park, they told us we did not belong to the place. That we were outsiders. Kashmiris. They wouldn’t let us enter. Their language was new to my ears. In that moment, it was the language of primal violence. We ran.
A few months later, I celebrated my first Holi at the same park. There was no Holi in Kashmir, atleast never like the one in Jammu. When I first heard what people in Jammu did on Holi, I thought of hiding away. There was no escape. On the day, a toli reached our place. Uncle had his kurta torn away. He was blue. I was red. Everyone was drenched in water, some mud. There was much dancing on the street. I think some of the men were drunk. A few years later, I was among the Holi toli people.
The monkey park
Way round the house.
The place nearby where a relative lived. The room on the roof is gone and the house
is crumbling
Nothing bad really happened that year. Only Badi Bau arrived one day with her head bandaged. A monkey had dropped a brick over her head. It was funny then and still is. She was crossing a particular spot in the lane the led to the haveli. There was a rundown house at the spot where monkeys could often be seen conferring. That’s where it happened. One of them just dropped a brick on her as she was passing. After that brick incident, it became a habit with me to never cross that spot without looking up, always expecting a monkey holding a brick in its hands.
House of monkeys
The only other significant event that occurred during over stay at this place, also involved an animal. Grandfather game home one day with a swollen hand. Billoo Bhel, Billoo The Great Bull, had swung his tail at him. Tail had barely brushed past grandfather’s hand but given him a swelling. Billoo Bhel was a legend of old city. The size of Billoo Bhel was just as huge in real life as it was in tales about him. And as nasty was his temper. If Billoo Bhel took a nap in the middle of the road, the road would get blocked, but no one could dare to get it to move. No one would even honk the horns on their cars. They would just for him to move. Every one knew what Billoo was capable of when angry. There shops in the area that have broken furniture laying about, a victim of Billoo’s blind rage. It is said once an army vehicle tried to get Billoo to move. National business could not be stopped on account of a sleeping stupid bull. Billoo didn’t care. He just rammed their vehicle off the road. Billoo Bhel ruled the area like a king. Everyone knew him, everyone was afraid of him, everyone cursed him, but everyone knew a tale of two about him and liked to talk about him. To honor him I stopped wearing red as he was always said to be offended by that color. But that didn’t stop him from chasing my cousins once even though they were not in red. Billoo Bhel was a freak. It is said he was poisoned (or shot dead) a few years later.
Billoo Bhel’s spot
Galli Wazir Sobha Ram, wazir under Pratap Singh.
The ‘shortcut’ lane that lead to my first school in Jammu. It was a walking distance from the Haveli.
I saw things in Jammu that I would not have seen in Kashmir
Thing that never seize to amaze me
Luthra Academy
When the migrant children arrived in Jammu, there weren’t enough schools for all of them. Slowly, after a few months, space was created. Almost every school had ‘Migrant sections’ for each standard. Classed would be carried in open or on the rooftops. Me and my sister were admitted to Luthra Academy. I had to go through 3rd standard all over again as I couldn’t finish the standard in Srinagar. So, here I was in Jammu, finishing 3rd standard on the roof top of a school in Jammu. I was glad I wouldn’t have to see Biscoe’s swimming pool again. The place I was sure I was going to die.
The day we left that hall for another refuge, while packing things up, I accidentally knocked the Krishna statue over from a shelf. It’s base fell off. Inside the hollow of the statue, I found a dozen old lithographs depicting various scenes from Hindu mythology done in what I now recognise as basohli art. I can’t say how old those lithographs were. I packed them back inside the statue and left them as they were. Sometimes, I still wonder if I should have stolen them. I wonder if it is still there.
A scene from early 90s. “On a makeshift fire, Kashmiri migrants run a kitchen in Delhi to support themselves.” Since there in not single work in early 90s on this specific tribe, these pieces come from multiple sources. This one is from the book, “The Kashmir Tangle : Issues and Options” (1992) by Rajesh Kadian.
The story of Delhi Migrants that I remember from this era involves an unnamed Pandit who became a bus conductor in Noida. The man, a misfit in the big bad city, was murdered, it was said by fellow conductors over petty professional rivalry. I waited, but no one wrote his story.
In summers, our small garden would come alive with colors of red amarnath, yellow marigold, purple salvia, white alyssum and roses of all colors. At that time of the year, an old woman from Delhi would come visit us in Kashmir. She would stay with us for weeks and then return. I remember it used to take her forever to cross the courtyard, walk past that garden and get to the house. Even with her sleek brown walking stick with a cursive handle, it would take her ages. My grandfather and his brothers would walk patiently behind her, watching her steps anxiously, one of them always holding her hand. At the door everyone would dutifully lineup to greet her. Calls of warm ‘Wariays’, would ring out. Once inside, happening of the year would be passed on to her.
I learnt her story only a couple of years ago.
Ben’Jighar was my grandfather’s elder sister. She was the only sister of four brother. Since, my grandfather’s father died at a young age, my grandfather and his brothers were raised by his mother and the elder sister. After the death of their mother, Ben’Jighar, even though already married, was the titular head of our family. She was loved and respected by the brothers for all she had done for them. Since my grandfather was the youngest, he was especially fond of her. She look out for him. And in his own way my grandfather looked out for her.
In 1947, when war broke out between India and Pakistan, Ben’Jighar was in Gilgit along with her husband who was a minor government employee, a teacher in Bunji. As the news of war reached Srinagar, people started counted their losses, all those caught on the other side were considered as lost.
The general narrative of the conflict in that region tells us this story:
There was uprising against the Maharaja in Poonch, and much bloodshed. Masood tribemen were preparing for Srinagar. The Maharaja was still fiddling with his options. The news of partition violence from Punjab was to add further fuel to this combustive situation. Meanwhile, Gilgit, remote from these happening, but not untouched, was starting to rumble. Gansara Singh, the Wazir of Gilgit, a cousin of the Maharaja, acknowledging his vulnerable position tried negotiating with locals. The local feared an attack from Maharaja’s garrison at Bunji in Astor. In October 1947, when Maharaja finally went with India, the people of Gilgit decided to act fast. On 1st November, after taking their two young British officers in confidence, the Gilgit Scout staged a coup. Telephone lines were cut, the Governor was put under house arrest and the Hindus interned. Soon, India, probably thinking less about regaining the region and probably more thinking about cut-off the support Gilgit Scout were providing to raiders in Ladakh region, was air dropping 500 Lb bombs on Gilgit. Gilgit’s transfer to Pakistan was simple affair compared to other war zones in the region. People representing Pakistan arrived two weeks later to take charge of the treasury on 16th. After almost a year of fighting and a UN intervened ceasefire, a political prisoner exchange program was carried out. As part of this deal, Gansara Singh finally reach India in 1949. On reach back, much to the embarrassment of India, he refused to state that he was ill-treated by the enemy side.
In all these official narratives, I try hard to imagine Ben’Jighar in Gilgit. Did she hear the bombs drop?
After a certain time, a conflict becomes a summation of moments in lives of the lead actors of the war theater. The common people and their woes, apparently the good basic cause over which a conflict usually starts, in the end just become a dead mass of props on the grand stage, a number, of dead, wounded, killed, missing, looted, stabbed, burnt, raped; a date, of wins, defeats and ceasefire.
Even we don’t remember. This all history becomes just another vague family anecdote told in passing.
Her brothers had given up hope of finding Ben’Jighar alive. These were desperate times. But after months of fighting refugees from the other side started tickling into Srinagar. This was taken as a sign of hope in distressing times. Return of someone from the other side was treated as a second coming. ‘Duba’re Yun’, as they say in Kashmiri. Ben’Jighar and her husband reached Srinagar almost after eight months. How? What did they experience? Nothing is told, or remembered. What is remembered is the state in which they arrived and how they were welcomed. The first thing my grandfather did was to hire a tailor and have them measured. They were to be given new clothes. They arrived destitute. A Shamiyana was set, cooks hired, relatives invited, a feast was organised. It was like organising a marriage. This part was important to get them back into the family and the society. Similar procedures were followed by other pandits housing refugee relatives. Kashyap Bandhu set up a group of volunteer in Srinagar to look after the refugees. Given the strict caste rules of Pandits, it was important to show publicly that they were welcome. That the refugees were ready for a new life.
Jumoo wasn’t his real name. Although he was from a migrant
camp in Delhi, nobody at college called him Dilli. They called him Jumoo for
the way he pronounced Jammu.
‘You can keep two. But I will keep one.’ That’s how he
introduced himself to me when we first met. He was just behind me in queue for
submission of admission forms to an engineering college. I turned around to see the face of the person who had whispered those cryptic lines into my ears. I found a sun
burnt face with a long beak and two squinty eyes. I stepped back a little to look at the complete form. He
was skinny, like a boy just out of teens, and short, like a man shortchanged by
evolution. I couldn’t understand what he meant by that “two-one” business. The
boy read my face and pointed to the girls in the alternate queue. He meant the
pandit girls. He let out a big laugh. The smell of his soul engulfed me. The
boy had horse breath. His innards were eating him inside. But he looked like a
cheerful person, a person full of cheers even though he probably didn’t have
much to cheer in life. I knew he was trying to be friends with someone from his
own kind. At that moment I knew I was going to avoid this person for rest of my
coming years in college. But something told me it wasn’t going to be easy.
Next time I saw him, he was crouched in a ‘murga’ position
on top on an almirah, his head only inches away from ceiling. These were the
first day of ‘first year’ ragging. We both were getting ragged. A boy in the
room had ordered me to fetch water for him. This boy was a super senior, which
meant he had been in college for years and wasn’t going to pass out anytime
soon. He was really from Jammu. While I was fetching water for him, he had found better entertainment. As
I entered the hostel room, the boy on the almirah greeted me by flapping his
arms like a chicken and laughing. The tone of his relation with this world was
set.
Although for a year we lived in the same hostel, our friend
circle was different. I moved in with guys from Delhi. He moved in with guys
from Bihar. So I only heard stories about him. Jumoo was seen dancing on the road pretending to be Hritik
Roshan. Jumoo was seen at a roadside stall pretending to be Sunny Deol, trying
to lift a bicycle on his head. On Holi, a group of boys ganged up on Jumoo and
torn off all his cloths and left him without a stitch on his body. Sometimes he
would come to meet me, ask me to help him with studies, then would suddenly change topic tell me about some
girl that he thought liked him but who he thought I might like, then he would
suddenly try to sing English songs…mixing Metallica with Backstreet boys and lot of cuss words. He
would stay till some of my roommates would ask me to show the door to my mad friend.
I would tell them he isn’t my friends. He is just another mad Kashmiri. A Jumoo. Jumoo would
leave but not before making some more self deprecating jokes. The world
avoiding him like something of him would rub off on them.
A year ended. Before the start of next session all the
students went back to home towns. I didn’t go home. I went to Jammu. Jumoo went to Delhi. Then
one day in summer, he showed up at my place in Jammu. He had some relatives in
Jammu and was staying with them. While in Jammu he thought of catching up with
me. During our conversations I had only
given him brief details about the place where I lived and yet he managed to
find my house. As cruel providence would have it, while trying to trace my
address, in the bus he asked a woman about directions to a certain locality. This
woman lived in the same locality so she asked him some more question. The woman
he met was my aunt and she led him straight to our house thinking Jumoo was my college
friend. I was angry. The rules of randomness that govern the universe, should
not have let this happen. Even my real friends, my best of friends had not been
to my house. The last time I had invited a friend home, I was in Kashmir, I was
at home, at our real house. And now this mad boy knew my corner on this planet.
My hiding place. Jumoo invited himself to lunch after an inspection of our
house. I made an excuse about some urgent work in the city and told him I could
accompany him the way back to town. We got in the bus together. I got down from
the bus at a stop, waived him goodbye and returned home. It was all an inconvenience,
something not even worth remembering.
Back at college, I passed to second year. Jumoo failed most
of the papers. He somehow blamed me. We both moved out of the hostel. I was
still with people from Delhi and he was with people from Bihar. Over the next
couple of months I heard less and less about Jumoo and his performances.
Meanwhile, I was having my own set of problems with the world. I was reading books.
And what I read of the world and what I saw of the world, didn’t match. I read
some more. Marquez, Nabokov, Coetzee, Dostoevsky, Kundera, Bellow, Burgess, Conrad,
Camus, Faulkner, Eco, Heller, Huxley, Gandhi, Malamud, Koestler, Orwell…Puzo,
Sheldon, Newspapers, Comics, Magazines… whatever I could find. Still nothing
made sense. I was training to be an engineer, but the drabness of its technical
text was making me mad. I knew I was being taught bull crap. My grades were
dropping. It’s not that I didn’t understand the topics, I did. What I didn’t understand was how any of this was relevant. They taught you Turing and Chomsky but told you nothing
about their lives. Maybe I was at the wrong place. Over the next coming year, I
was to know failure in its truest sense. I failed at everything. I knew I was
going down into a dark pit that probably had no end.
During this time, one day a roommate told me some terrible
news about Jummoo. ‘Your friend Jumoo has finally gone completely mad!’
That morning, Jumoo had been found lying unconscious on the
steps leading to the rooftop of the college by some girl students who run away screaming on witnessing the scene. The people who arrived in response to the alarm found Jumoo conscious
but in a state in which he was not able to comprehend anything he was seeing or
hearing. His eyes were blank. It seemed he had spent the whole night on those
stairs. An ambulance was called and he was sent to a hospital. At the hospital
after some basic test they discharged him as they couldn’t find anything wrong
with him. A few days later his parents came from Delhi and took his back with
him. I thought they should have come for him earlier. He wasn’t meant to be
there.
A year passed. One hot afternoon, I found Jumoo at our door ringing
the bell. He had a big smile on his face, his usual smile, a smile that seemed
like a conscious attempt at hiding uneven teeth. Expecting that he be denied entry,
he had brought along a gift: a girlie magazine and a Nagraaj comic. It seems
his breakdown had made everyone sympathetic to him. None of my roommates raised
an objection to his presence.
After the usual catching up, some casual ‘Hi and Hellos’,
some ‘Haa-Hees’ and after savoring his gifts, everyone went back to whatever
they were doing. Jumoo on his part went back
to his usual mode, sitting silently in a corner, trying to stay out of everyone’s
path, but still hanging around, like an apparition. It was just like old times.
I went back to computer, writing a program for ‘Snakes and
Ladder’. An hour later he quietly sat next to me and asked if I would like to
hear the story of the day he went mad. I kept typing on the keyboard while he told his story:
“After migration my family moved to Delhi where Kashmiris
were living in a camp near … It wasn’t much of a camp…there was a hall where
a lot of families put up… each camping in a particular corner, the households separated
by pardhas… people fought all the time among themselves over things like right
to window, right to turn on-off light switches, right to a better spot under the ceiling fan, right
to use toilet first…one time a man abused my mother in front of me…I wanted to
kill him…I fell in love with a girl…I put a hole in a pardha to peep at her secretly,
sleeping, changing…you know…there there was no privacy…it drove me mad…I would beat-off
in toilet and my mother would be outside knocking asking if my stomach is
alright (laughs)…I am mad…no I am really mad. Why do you think I act like
this? Why I look like this? Look at my face…my parents took me to Dr. Razdan in Jummoo.
Are you related to him? He gave me some pills…I stopped taking them some years
ago… we never had much money…your house was big… a few years ago we moved to a
migrant apartment at Dwarka…My father had a private job in Kashmir, in Delhi he
took job as a lab technician in a private school. …I studied in that school…I
was never good at studies…then I came here…to the college…you didn’t help…I
moved in with those Biharis…no one else would live with me…hostel fees was too
much…But those guys turned out to be benchods…they would steal money from me…one
of them would beat me up with a belt… sometimes just for fun…you know the guy…I
hear you had a run in with him not long ago…still it was all good…then the
results came…I failed…I didn’t send the news home…still my parents said they were
coming to see me…that day I was really worried about the idea of them staying
with me with these Biharis…that day Biharis were really giving me a headache…when
they heard that my parents were coming they said they would throw me out…I thought they were
kidding me…but then they really locked me out…so that day I just walked around
the city all day…thinking what shall happen of me…I had no money in pocket…when
evening came I didn’t know what to do…where to sleep…I was sure my roommates were
not going to let me in…so I thought maybe I will sleep in the college…it was
the best place…so I started walking to college… on way to the college I saw a
truck on the road heading my way…a thought occurred to me: This truck cannot harm me. If God exists, this
truck will stop if I were to come in front of it, or it will just pass right through
me, I am air, I don’t exist…so I walked in front of the truck…the truck stopped…the truck did stop…but the
driver started abusing me, I ran and ran (laughs aloud)…I ran towards college…it was night by the time I reached…there were no guards…nobody stopped
me…all the rooms were locked so I headed for the roof…the roof was also locked…I
was tired…so I slept on the stairs to the roof…in the morning some girls caught
me sleeping on the stairs and started screaming…I was caught…when the people
came…I didn’t know how to explain my situation, so I pretended I had gone mad. Imagine a mad man pretending to be mad. I
pretended I couldn’t see or hear them. I couldn’t understand them. You should have seen their face…they carried me
down the stairs like I was some king…I was taken to a hospital in an ambulance…at the
hospital, a lady doctor asked me question…I continued acting…responding with
umm-umm-aa to her queries…kidar darad ho raha hai…I even sang to her in Kashmiri (laughs). She concluded I had
lost my mind…I was only acting…it was a classic performance of a mad guy…like in movies…classic Sanjeev Kumar…you know…I should have won a medal for it…let’s go out to have tandoori chicken…how come you are always busy? Are you even listening?”
A year later, Jumoo waylaid me in college. At the same place
where we had first met. From his back pocket he took out an album of
photographs, it was a family album and all the photographs were of him posing with
a car, a Santro that his father had recently purchased. He was carrying the
album in his pocket and showing it to anyone and everyone walking that way.
That was the last performance of Jumoo that I unwillingly witnessed.
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.
Moti Lal Saqi (1936-1999)
a screen grab from an old docu on Kashmir made in 1980s.
-0- I would go home to my village, This city has stolen my rest… My head on a stone in the willow-grove, I’d sleep and sleep till end of day. The shade of chinar in these mine eyes, I’d drain the spring and cool myself … ~ Saqi writing in Jammu. Tr. by Neerja Mattoo-0-
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, .
