‘Are you going to write a poem about your father?’ I would ask her.
‘Chef Kirpal,’ she would respond, ‘poetry is not cooking. Poets do not get to choose. It is the poem that chooses the poet.’
Then you will go to Kashmir
in no hurry
and hear not a single fire
The blessed women
will paint
saffron on your skin
and you will build a house there,
and weave a basket for pomegranates,
and glaze pots in fire
The jagged mountains
will no longer weep
slow muddy tears
or tremble behind
dwarf trees anymore.
Sit. There on encrusted ice
– they will ask you –
Look how it gleams, feel it moving.
Dust the nozzles
of fountains in Shalimar Bagh
in the ruined Nishat Bagh
– they will ask you –
Plant paisley
in one or two cemeteries
where shade bites
the sun. The women
will lead you to damp green
shrines of Noor-u-din. There
you will locate one or two eggs in nests
and mounds of cricket balls
and lost men, too, and
schoolchildren.
Bright smiles
will mark them from the rest, just like
the tattoo on your skin
marked you. In autumn –
you will write long letters
addressed to your old self –
a profusion of dots and dashes . . .
Old photographs, defeats, loves, recipes
you will move the entire attic
to an unfinished room
and hire
a strong houseboat and help.
Yes, your old forgotten self –
the stranger will paddle you
to the shadows of never
pruned
plane trees. There – in autumn in Kashmir
the two of you would meet. By the roots
and barks and
Technicolor leaves
and millions of dead.
Don’t just sit there. Smell them.
On the second day of my arrival – the eighth of December – when I woke up in the hotel room I read in the paper that just after eleven o’clock the previous night General Kumar had killed himself. He had eaten dinner with Rubiya, and after saying goodnight to her he returned to his room. The servant served tea, and the General took his medication; half an hour later he shot himself. He used the defeated Pakistani general’s pistol from the glass cabinet, and fired only once through his left jaw to do the job.
The paper made no mention of Rubiya’s wedding plans or the postponement of the wedding. The front-page editorial talked about his sickness, the battle with disease, and praised the Hero of Kargil and the Hero of Siachen Glacier for exceptional leadership and vision.
He took over the Governorship of Kashmir, the editorial said, when the State was going through a particularly difficult time.
General Sahib was cremated on the slopes of the hill overlooking the river, not far from the ruins of the Mughal fort. Thin layers of ice on the banks of the river turned orange, reflecting the flames. A three-minute silence was observed before Rubiya offered her father’s body to nothingness. The battles stopped on distant mountains and transistor radios stopped and vehicles stopped on the roads and cooking and eating stopped. People paused, interrupted whatever they were doing.
During those three minutes I heard restrained sobbing coming from the Kashmiri houses. Then agni, the burst of flames. The shadow of rising smoke flickered on the hard ground. The December chill disappeared temporarily. A can of Coke fell from an old woman’s hand and rolled towards the black boots of troops in ceremonial dress.
The military band was part of the ceremony. Men in kilts played mournful bagpipes and snared the drums. Troops from
1 Sikh
gave a twenty-one gun salute. Two or three dogs kept running by the ice, absolutely oblivious of the flag of our country, flying at half-mast. And all those who stood there, the officers and jawans and their wives, they had no idea about the battles the General was really fighting. They spoke in clichés, and they stared accusingly at Rubiya as if she had caused her father’s death. There are decent boys in our own country, their faces said, Why don’t you marry one of our own? Colonel Chowdhry and Patsy Chowdhry were absent, but so many others were there. Bina was there, holding a paisley hanky, weeping profusely. For nothing.
‘General Sahib,
good man dee lal-tain
,’ I raised my voice. ‘General Sahib, Emperor of Kulfi.’
‘What are you saying, sir?’ asked the young officer standing next to me.
‘Nothing. Gibberish. Bakwas.’
Three days later I met Rubiya in the Mughal garden. I had arranged to meet her at three in the afternoon, but I got delayed.
She was looking at the children playing in snow as I walked in. The children had on two or three layers of heavy woolens and they were making balls of ice. There was snow on the ground, on trees, on ruined walls and fountains. Everything sparkled.
At first I saw only her back. Then I climbed up the stairs and saw her from the pavilion. She was looking at the children as if she wanted to tell them that the world was not what they had thought it was. I did not feel like disturbing her.
When she turned towards me the first thing she said was, ‘Chef Kirpal, you smell of rum.’
She looked younger than her age, and very sad.
She told me that her fiancé, Shahid, and his parents had been denied visas at the border, so she was heading to Pakistan on the evening bus.
But I am really here to tell you about Irem, Chef Kirpal. Irem and her daughter are back in Pakistan now. After many years the Pakistani authorities have allowed them to return home.
I don’t know why at that time I did not tell her about my cancer. Or the fact that my feet were very cold.
Instead I found myself talking about a cooking show on television, but as soon as I did that I was worried for her, and I wanted to urge her to stay. I worried Rubiya would not be safe in Pakistan, just like Irem was not safe in India.
‘Before you go,’ I asked her, ‘is it possible to apologize for my behavior?’
‘Why?’
‘Because I waited for very long to write to you about Irem.’
‘You have done nothing wrong,’ she said. ‘You are the nicest person I have come across.’
‘No, I am not nice,’ I said.
‘Please, what are you trying to say?’
‘Something has been bothering me, Rubiya. This thing happened on the way. I took the bus. The driver was very rash on the winding road. You know the way they drive. He was off the road most of the time and almost ran into an army convoy. Soon afterwards the bus collided with a pack of sheep, badly wounding an animal. The animal was squirming in great pain. It was dying. The gujjar shepherds yelled at the driver from the road, and began knocking. But all the passengers inside wanted the driver to hurry up. No one cared about the animal. I, too, wanted the bus-wallah to hurry. We all had something
important
to get to, and there we were aimed in a great rush, and no one thought of slowing down. No, Rubiya. I am not very nice. I am more like my countrymen. That makes me more, not less, ashamed of them.’
‘Chef Kirpal,’ she said, ‘I sense you have some other thing to tell me.’
‘There is one question that has been growing inside me for the last fourteen years. May I ask?’
She nodded.
‘It is a question that has acquired the weight of a glacier,’ I said. ‘And I don’t say it lightly. When I try to ask the question, I feel paralyzed. Words freeze in my mouth. Rubiya, do you understand me?’
She wanted me to continue.
‘Please, this is really a question for Irem. But I must ask you because you know a lot of things about her. If Irem were walking here with us today, I would have asked her the same question.’
Irem was pregnant, I said. There were visible signs. It took me a while to open my eyes, but the signs were there. I saw them. She was pregnant. The court martial took place in the Badami Bagh camp. She told the presiding officer that I was not guilty. She had not even charged me. The legal officer had charged me. She withdrew the false charges. The court martial presiding officer cleared me. But the question remained. Someone did that thing. Who? Why? The press published the story that in a way closed the case. The papers reported that the ‘prison guard’ would enter her room every night and take advantage of her. The ‘prison guard’ was a Muslim, the papers said. Irem received a letter from him after the court martial, the papers said. ‘If she promises not to take me to the court, I am willing to marry her,’ the guard had written. I wanted to believe this. But I could not. If she knew it was the guard who did it, then why did she not charge him earlier, during my court martial? She knew that I did not do it, and when the court saw me as guilty she withdrew all the charges. But she refrained from naming the real culprit. To be honest, when I pleaded not guilty, I suspected the General himself, and a few other officers, were guilty. But I did not say a word. I was not sure.
Rubiya and I were walking in the garden when it started to snow. Dry symmetrical crystals started falling on her black coat. Slowly, then fast. The children were far away from us, happy, playing in the snow. At first we did not seem to mind. But soon took shelter in a tea stall by the gates of the garden.
‘Two cups,’ I ordered.
‘I am paying,’ she said.
‘No, I am older. I am paying.’
Smoke of hookah mixed with bakerkhani, the Kashmiri pastry, inside the tea stall. Smell of freshly baked bread filled the air. Not far from us two old men were breaking the bread, and sipping kehva tea. Outside, snow was falling slowly on military vehicles. On tombstones. On Sufi shrines. On ruined wooden houses. Big flakes, tens and thousands, swirled in the air. Tens and thousands settled on grass no longer green. Flakes were accumulating on Kashmir the way people in Delhi accumulate on trains. She took off her long coat. Shook her hair. Snow fell down.
I continued: In the beginning I only suspected, but then something happened that made me absolutely sure. That day, a few weeks after the court martial, when the house was being rearranged Irem had shown up with a green bag. I do not know how she got out of the prison or how she entered the Raj Bhavan complex. Pretending to be a worker in the kitchen perhaps. Taking advantage of the lax security. Security is not always tight. I saw her enter. I saw everything from the kitchen window. There were vegetables in the bag and she dug her hand in the bag and pulled out a vegetable, then put it back in the bag. She repeated this kind of movement several times as if unable to make up her mind. I saw everything through the window. She had chosen the precise moment when most soldiers step down the hill to the barracks for lunch. And she was going to throw a
vegetable
in the General’s room. General Sahib was inside, resting, and you Rubiya were outside, playing. She knew this. The thing in her hand looked like a vegetable, but it was not a vegetable, as I discovered later. It was a grenade. Made in Pakistan. But she did not throw the grenade. She changed her mind. I saw her struggle. Her hand touched her heart and she turned and then turned back as if she was looking at the house for one last time and disappeared behind the plane trees. I ran out of the kitchen after she had long disappeared. She had
forgotten
the bag by the verandah and I brought the bag into the kitchen and one by one I placed the things on the table and it was then I found the grenade. It was clear: she had meant to kill the General, and I understood why, but I never understood one thing. Why did she change her mind? Was it because she saw you, Rubiya, playing nearby? And she could not imagine making that child an orphan?
Rubiya did not say anything.
I threw the grenade into the river. I never reported the incident. Then resigned from the army. Rubiya, do you know where the bag is? I threw it away with the vegetables in the river. And the moment I threw it away I knew what to do next.
Rubiya’s elbows were on the table and her head between her hands.
‘Chef Kirpal,’ she said.
I remained quiet because I knew now she would tell me something on her own. There was water from melted snow on her brow and I felt like wiping it but I knew it might interrupt what she was about to say, so I did nothing. Her long jacket, dangling from the peg on the wall, had snow on it, as did the tips of her shoes. I had wiped my shoes clean, but my glasses were covered with little melted drops.
The tea-wallah was yelling at his assistant.
‘Sahib, Memsahib, kehva!’ The owner brought us the cups himself. There were strands of saffron floating on top.