Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (10 page)

In the midst of this chaos, my eldest uncle came from my father’s village to visit us. ‘The water in the spring at the goddess’s sanctum has turned black,’ he whispered. This was considered to be ominous. Legend had it that whenever any catastrophe befell our community, the spring waters turned black.

That it was indeed a catastrophe became clear on the night of January 19, 1990.

PART TWO

‘K
ashmiriyon ki ragon mein Mujahideen aur ghaziyon ka khoon hai …
’ (In the veins of Kashmiris flows the blood of the Mujahideen and the destructors of the infidels …)

Her face quivers as she shouts at the top of her voice, and her dupatta keeps slipping down. But her lipstick remains intact. It is her moment, undoubtedly. With every drop of bile coming from Benazir Bhutto’s mouth, the mammoth crowd’s cheers grow noisier until they turn into a stormy sea. And her voice runs like a tide over it. Her rabidness is a Godzilla.

‘
Har eik gaanv se eik hi aawaz buland hogi: Azadi! Har eik masjid se eik hi aawaz buland hogi: Azadi! Har eik school se baccha-baccha kahega: Azadi, Azadi, Azadi!
’

(From every village will rise a cry: Azadi! From every mosque will rise a cry: Azadi! From every school, every child will let out the cry: Azadi, Azadi, Azadi!)

It is 1990, seventeen years before Benazir’s ghazis would end up devouring her.

In one giant leap, it hops over from Islamabad to Kashmir. And it manifests itself in the house of a Pandit in Budgam district. Bhushan Lal Raina lives with his mother in Budgam’s Ompora area and works at the Soura Medical Institute. The developments in Srinagar have scared him and he wants to escape to Jammu. A day before he is to leave, armed men barge into his house. Raina’s old mother begs them to spare her son. ‘He is about to get married; kill me if you want, but spare him,’ she implores. But the ghazis won’t listen. One of them pierces Raina’s skull with an iron rod. Then they drag him out, strip him, and nail him to a tree.

Throughout 1990, Pandits are picked up selectively and put to death. They are killed because Kashmir needs to be cleansed of them. And if the one chosen is not to be found, a proxy suffices. It is all about numbers. It is all about how many are killed. It is known that if one among them is killed, a thousand will flee.

But we were fools. Though we knew something was afoot, we refused to believe that our turn would come soon
.

Not very far from where Bhushan Lal Raina was killed in front of his mother, Mohan Lal leaves his home as usual one evening. He is a simple man and does odd jobs to sustain his family. Among the three Hindu families of his village, his house is just a structure of bricks, and every winter, its tin roof caves in after heavy snowfall. He often ventures out in the evening; he likes to sit outside the house of another Pandit family who are well off and own several orchards. There is a large garden in front of the house, in which the lady of the house dries chillies and patties of special Kashmiri spices.

That winter evening in 1990, the lady sits alone in her house, waiting for her husband to return. Mohan Lal sits outside. He has a habit of repeatedly looking at his watch and asking passers-by what time it is. Two men clad in pherans throw a cursory glance at him and enter the house.

‘Where is your husband?’ one of them asks the lady inside.

‘He is not here; he will come tomorrow,’ she replies. She senses that the men do not mean well. She lies to them about her husband’s arrival.

The men look at each other and leave without saying another word. They come out and find Mohan Lal still there. One of them whips out a gun and shoots him dead. Mohan Lal falls down with his mouth open, one hand clenching his wristwatch.

The guns are never silenced after the September of 1989. Every day, news pours in of attacks on military convoys or bunkers. Srinagar city turns into a war zone. Armed men exchange fire with paramilitary forces and many civilians are caught in the crossfire.

Once the Pandits have left, novel methods are used to alert people of an impending ambush in the marketplace. The militant commander Mushtaq Zargar—he hits international headlines ten years later as one of the three men India is forced to free in exchange for the hostages of the hijacked flight IC-814—sends vegetable vendors to such places. Pushing his cart, the vendor shouts in Kashmiri:
Tamatar paav, Bae’jaan aav
(Tomatoes, one-fourth of a kilo, big brother says hello). While the soldiers from the mainland of India understand nothing, civilians take the hint and discreetly vacate the area to avoid being caught in the crossfire.

But for the Pandits, there is no such concern. For the Ghazis invoked by Benazir Bhutto, we are infidels. And we deserve to die.

In October 1989, we still didn’t know
.

On October 31, the militant commander Hamid Sheikh is critically injured in an encounter with military personnel. He is among the first groups of men to have crossed the Line of Control in 1988 to undergo arms training. By 1989–90, thousands of boys have followed his example.

By October, a few other Pandits have been killed. Retired judge Neelkanth Ganjoo is waylaid by three men on Hari Singh Street, in the heart of Srinagar, and shot at close range. His body remains there untouched for fifteen minutes. Later, the police arrives and takes his body away.

On December 6, 1989, exactly three years before the demolition of the Babri Masjid created a deep laceration in Indian society, a Kashmiri politician was unexpectedly appointed Union home minister by the central government in Delhi. Mufti Mohammed Sayeed, whose political career began with the Congress party, is someone whom the Pandits hold responsible for the 1986 Anantnag riots.

Two days after Sayeed took over, armed youths kidnapped his daughter Rubaiya from a minibus as she returned from the Lal Ded hospital, where she worked as a doctor. The militants demanded the release of five imprisoned men in exchange for Rubaiya. These five were part of the first batch of men who had crossed the Line of Control to receive arms training.

Kashmir was like a deer’s neck in a wolf’s grip.

Eight days later, five militants were released in downtown Srinagar to secure Rubaiya’s release. One of them was Hamid Sheikh. On the morning he was to be released from the Soura Medical Institute, a photographer from a local newspaper asked him to pose for a picture. He did it happily, flashing a victory sign. I couldn’t help noticing that on a table behind him there was a tin of Cinthol talcum powder. From 3 p.m. onwards, celebrations began in the Kashmir Valley. Lal Chowk was lined with JKLF flags. A throng of people assembled at Hamid Sheikh’s house in Batmaloo. Candy was showered and women sang songs traditionally sung to welcome a bridegroom. There was celebratory gunfire in many places. In Shopian, in south Kashmir, a mob came out and beat up Pandit men on the streets. Scores of women were molested to make merry. Shortly afterwards, militants issued a diktat to newsreaders to quit their jobs in radio and television so that the government information mechanism would collapse.

January 19, 1990, was a very cold day despite the sun’s weak attempts to emerge from behind dark clouds. In the afternoon, I played cricket with some boys from my neighbourhood. All of us wore thick sweaters and pherans. I would always remove my pheran and place it on the fence in the kitchen garden. After playing, I would wear it before entering the house to escape my mother’s wrath. She worried that I would catch cold. ‘The neighbours will think that I am incapable of taking care of my children,’ she would say in exasperation.

We had an early dinner that evening and, since there was no electricity, we couldn’t watch television. Father heard the evening news bulletin on the radio as usual, and just as we were going to sleep, the electricity returned.

I am in a deep slumber. I can hear strange noises. Fear grips me. All is not well. Everything is going to change. I see shadows of men slithering along our compound wall. And then they jump inside. One by one. So many of them
.

I woke up startled. But the zero-watt bulb was not on. The hundred-watt bulb was. Father was waking me up. ‘Something is happening,’ he said. I could hear it—there were people out on the streets. They were talking loudly. Some major activity was underfoot. Were they setting our locality on fire?

So, it wasn’t entirely a dream, after all? Will they jump inside now?

Then a whistling sound could be heard. It was the sound of the mosque’s loudspeaker. We heard it every day in the wee hours of the morning just before the muezzin broke into the azaan. But normally the whistle was short-lived; that night, it refused to stop. That night, the muezzin didn’t call. That night, it felt like something sinister was going to happen.

The noise outside our house had died down. But in the mosque, we could hear people’s voices. They were arguing about something.

My uncle’s family came to our side of the house. ‘What is happening?’ Uncle asked. ‘Something is happening,’ Father said. ‘They are up to something.’

It was then that a long drawl tore through the murmurs, and with the same force the loudspeaker began to hiss.

‘
Naara-e-taqbeer, Allah ho Akbar!
’

I looked at my father; his face was contorted. He knew only too well what the phrase meant. I had heard it as well, in a stirring drama telecast a few years ago on Doordarshan, an adaptation of Bhisham Sahni’s
Tamas
, a novel based on the events of the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan. It was the cry that a mob of Muslim rioters shouted as it descended upon Hindu settlements. It was a war cry.

Within a few minutes, battle cries flew at us from every direction. They rushed towards us like poison darts.

Hum kya chaaaahte: Azadiiii!
Eiy zalimon, eiy kafiron, Kashmir humara chhod do
.

What do we want—Freedom!
O tyrants, O infidels, leave our Kashmir.

Then the slogans ceased for a while. From another mosque came the sound of recorded songs eulogizing the Mujahideen resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The whole audio cassette played through, and then the slogans returned. We were still wondering what would happen next when a slogan we heard left us in no doubt. I remember Ma began to tremble like a leaf when we heard it.

‘
Assi gacchi panu’nuy Pakistan, batav rostuy, batenein saan
.’

The crowd wanted to turn Kashmir into Pakistan, without the Pandit men, but with their women.

They’ll come and finish us. It is just a matter of minutes now, we think
.

Ma rushed to the kitchen and returned with a long knife. It was her father’s. ‘If they come, I will kill her,’ she looked at my sister. ‘And then I will kill myself. And you see what you two need to do.’

Father looked at her in disbelief. But he didn’t utter a word.

We are very scared. We do not know what to do. Where would we run away to? Would Ma have to kill herself? What about my sister?

My life flashed in front of me, like a silent film. I remembered my childhood with my sister. How I played with her and how she always liked to play ‘teacher-teacher’, making me learn the spellings of ‘difficult’ words.