Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (13 page)

I read some of the names. Some of them were of our neighbours. ‘We must tell Kaul sa’eb about it,’ Father said. Together, we almost ran to his house.

‘I hope nobody sees us,’ Father muttered.

The previous evening, we had seen our neighbour, Mr Kaul, at the bus stop. Father and he had got talking and Mr Kaul had said he was going to stay put.

‘Pandita sa’eb, you don’t worry. The army has come now, and it will all be over in a couple of months,’ he had said.

At the Kaul residence the first thing I noticed was that the evergreen shrubs that had not been tended for weeks now. The main gate was open and we entered. We found the main door locked.

‘Maybe they are inside,’ Father said. Very hesitantly, he called out Kaul sa’eb’s name. There was no response. The Kauls had left already. We hurriedly turned back. Satish and my mother were waiting. Ma had packed whatever she could. And we left immediately.

At the blue gate, Father stopped and turned back. He looked at the house. Looking back, there was a sense of finality in his gaze. There were tears in his eyes. Ma was calm. Satish stood next to me. Nobody uttered a word. Before we moved on, Father recited something that I remember well. The howling of a dog near one’s house was believed to be a bad omen. So if it happened, the occupants uttered:
Yetti gach, yeti chhuy ghar divta
(Leave from here, O misfortune, this house is guarded by the deity of the house).

Satish went back to his house to try and salvage whatever he could. He had also decided overnight to join his family in Jammu.

As we walked to the bus stop, we found all the shops closed. There were hardly any people on the road. Although the curfew had been relaxed for a few hours that day, there was not much traffic.

We got into a minibus and reached Lal Chowk. Ma had removed the golden
atth
from her ears and her bindi that identified her as a Pandit. Father removed the red sacred thread from his wrist. At Lal Chowk, Father managed to convince an autorickshaw driver to drop us to the outskirts of the cantonment, from where we could walk to the safety of my mother’s sister’s house.

En route, we saw that the army had taken over. Jawans had built bunkers on the road and inside various buildings. By the time we reached my aunt’s house, my feet were frozen so badly I thought they might have to be amputated. I removed my wet socks and a cry escaped my lips when I put my feet up on the kangri. My sister was happy we were back. Everyone had been worried.

The news was not good. Advertisements had appeared in some Urdu newspapers. Released by various militant organizations, they asked the Pandits to leave the Valley immediately or face dire consequences.

I passed the next few weeks in a daze. There was complete uncertainty about our future. There was madness on the streets outside. Every day, someone or the other would be gunned down. Even at my aunt’s house, we were under a house arrest of sorts.

I can’t fathom why all this is happening. If the Kashmiris are demanding Azadi, why do the Pandits have to be killed? Why do we have to leave our house, where I play freely, and ride my cycle, and exchange comics with my friends? How is the burning of a temple or molesting a Pandit lady on the road going to help in the cause of Azadi?

During those nerve-wracking days, the only thing we looked forward to was the evening news bulletin on the Kashmir Doordarshan channel. Bereft of its experienced news anchors, Doordarshan had hired a bunch of inexperienced presenters to read the news. The news they offered was hardly reliable. But in those unfortunate days, they provided us with moments of laughter. At 7.30 p.m., the news would be announced and the presenter would appear on the television screen, still waiting for his cue. He would stare at the camera for a few seconds and then read the news like a stuttering duck. In between, he would stop and, sometimes in his nervousness, forget that he was live on television. He would then gesture to the cameraman or the producer, seeking directions.

We children compared these presenters to a brilliant Kashmiri comedian who in the mid eighties had kept us glued to the television with the two roles he played. In one, he played the part of a weird, autocratic king who would have to be hit with a royal hammer to bring him back to his senses after which he would ask for water in such a funny way that we would mimic him for months in school. After our exodus, we heard rumours of his death in a road accident. But I was both happy and relieved to watch him perform in a festival in Delhi a few years ago.

‘We cannot stay like this any longer,’ Father said one day. ‘We need to leave, we need to put you in a school.’

For the last few days, Father had been watching me and my sister and it had set him thinking. My sister was in college. I would take out my books every morning, but for the rest of the day I would simply flit from room to room, play cricket, or read comic books when it was too cold to venture outside.

It was quite sunny the day Father finally decided that we should move to Jammu. He had spoken to a colleague who had promised to help. He arranged a taxi to take us to Jammu, and advised us not to tell the driver that we were leaving permanently. There had been reports at various places that mobs had beaten up fleeing families and looted their belongings. In one instance a family had called a truck to load their possessions to escape to Jammu, but at the last moment a mob had descended and lynched them and then taken away every article the family possessed.

In our case it was not so difficult. We had hardly any luggage to arouse suspicion. And though Father had left our house with a sense of finality, somewhere in his heart I think he still liked to believe what many of us did at that time—that this would be over sooner or later.

The taxi arrived the following morning. All we had was a small bag and two suitcases. And my school bag. The driver was told that we were off to Jammu to attend a wedding. As he was putting our luggage in the boot of his Ambassador car, the driver looked at my school bag and smiled. ‘Pandit ji, I know you people lay a lot of emphasis on education, but at least let this kid have fun for a week.’

The driver turned his key in the ignition and we began our journey. ‘We’ll be back soon,’ Mother shouted to her sister. It was quiet in the car. Father sat in front and I sat behind with my mother and sister. Both of them had covered their heads with a dupatta.

‘We need to beat the army convoys on the highway, otherwise we will be stuck for a long time,’ the driver said. On the highway, by the shops, men stood huddled. At some places there were tyres smouldering in the frost. A little further ahead, we could see the ruins of the Martand sun temple.

We drove on silently. Eventually, we had to slow down to give way to oncoming vehicles on a narrow stretch of road. Suddenly a man appeared from nowhere. He was pushing a small wheelbarrow. He looked at us and pumped his fist in the air. He shouted: ‘
Maryu, Batav, maryu!
’ (Die, you Pandits, die!)

We were scared. The driver said nothing. He kept looking ahead as if he had not heard anything, as if the man did not exist, as if his fist did not exist, as if his voice did not exist.

As if we did not exist in his taxi.

Travelling on the highway had always been a pleasurable experience. Every winter, we would take this road to Jammu and stay there for a few days, accompanying my father on his official trips. Ma always made sure that we ate home-cooked meals. So she would carry a few utensils and a small gas-stove and homemade spices and we would check into the Dak Bungalow or a small, cosy hotel near Jewel Chowk in Jammu city.

When I was much younger, I had accompanied Father on one such trip. It proved to be difficult for him since I refused to eat anything from the hotel. Ultimately, he took me to the Jammu railway station. We stood on the platform while he cracked open peanuts from a packet he had bought, and fed me. As we watched, a train chugged into the station and I was very excited. After the train left, we stood there for a long time, Father and son, like two philosophers ruminating on life and its meaning. Afterwards, we went for a night show of an Amitabh Bachchan-starrer,
Ram Balram
, and I embarrassed him by eating popcorn from the person sitting next to me. Later, Father also bought me a cricket bat inscribed with Kapil Dev’s signature.

And now, we were leaving for good. Everything had changed and the journey was a torment. We reached the Jawahar tunnel, and I looked at Ma. She was mumbling a prayer.

Soon after crossing the tunnel, we reached Ramban, a quaint midway point on the Jammu–Srinagar highway. What we saw there left us stunned. I remember the traffic had been halted due to a minor landslide that was in the process of being cleared. In truck after truck, there were Pandit families escaping to Jammu. In the villages of south and north Kashmir, the situation was far worse than what we had experienced.

Women had been herded like cattle into the backs of trucks. Father and I got out of the taxi to stretch our legs. In one of the trucks, a woman lifted the tarpaulin sheet covering the back and peered outside. There was nothing peculiar about her except the blankness in her eyes. They were like a void that sucked you in. Years later, I saw a picture of a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz. When I saw his eyes, my mind was immediately transported to that day, and I was reminded of the look in that woman’s eyes.

We finally reached Jammu early that evening. After we had crossed the Jawahar tunnel, Father’s worries about finding suitable accommodation had taken over. The Dak Bungalow where we usually stayed would be expensive, since we didn’t know how long we were going to stay. Eventually we checked into a small, relatively cheap hotel. Ma immediately set up a kitchen on one side of the room and my sister was sent to fetch a bucket of fresh water. Until a few years ago we had not even heard of overhead tanks. It took us a while to understand that the water that came out of taps in Jammu and elsewhere was not fresh water.

On the first day I filled water in a bucket to take a bath. The first mug that I poured over myself singed me. I was reminded of how we would bathe back home in Srinagar. In the winter, Ma would wake us up before sunrise. In the bathroom there would be water steaming in the traditional copper tank. We would have a bath while she kept a set of fresh clothes on a kangri to warm them. We would then dry ourselves vigorously, wear the clothes warmed on the kangri, and snuggle back under our quilts. In summers, just for fun, I would bathe at the tap in the kitchen garden when Ma was away.

In Jammu, for me the biggest symbol of exodus turned out to be a pair of shoes. Back home, my father once saw me playing football at the polo ground with men twice my age, and he was so impressed that he bought me a pair of studded football shoes from a store called Sunchasers. But those shoes had been left behind. The ones I came to Jammu wearing were falling apart. So, Father had bought me a pair of cheap canvas shoes from Gumat market. I despised those shoes. But I understood his position. He had no money and there was total uncertainty about our future.

Our only concern during our last few days in Srinagar had been to somehow survive, to go somewhere where there would be no slogans, no loudspeakers, no fists and middle fingers raised at us, no hit lists, no Kalashnikovs, no freedom songs. So we were relieved to come out of the other end of the Jawahar tunnel.

Once we were in Jammu, other worries took over. Where were we going to live? Where would the money come from? Was everyone else safe—our friends, relatives? Suddenly, the premise that everything was going to be all right in a few months didn’t seem plausible at all—it would take much longer to return. But the thought that we might never return still did not cross our minds.

Living in the hotel beyond a few days was not possible. There were hardly any savings to dip into. Father had put all his money into the house. When we had left, he had been extending our attic. He had ordered the choicest deodar wood, and weeks before the crisis erupted the wood had arrived in planks and had been stored in the attic. The carpenter, Farooq, had been called and he had been shown designs for cupboards, a chest of drawers and a wardrobe.