Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (17 page)

The Jammu of the early nineties was in the grip of criminal elements. Each area had its don, and some of them had links with arms and drug smugglers. Every day, the newspapers would report a stabbing or a shootout. Some unruly elements thought that since the Pandit community was in distress, their girls would be freely available for exploitation. Out of sheer desperation, and to escape the hell of their daily lives, a few girls made that compromise. They eloped with young men who promised them a better life. But in most cases, such offers to elope were resisted. After all, we had escaped from the Valley to protect our lives, and more than our lives, our dignity.

Since it was a relatively new colony, Bhagwati Nagar had limited transport facilities. A Matador minibus would come every half hour or so and it was much coveted. Since I would leave for school early in the morning, I would catch it daily, sitting on the ‘friend’ seat, next to the driver’s.

After a few weeks, I noticed that the driver had begun to behave very sweetly towards me, even letting me ride for free. I thought we had forged a kind of friendship and that was why he made this gesture. But soon, I would be proved wrong. One fine day it became clear what he had wanted all along. He had in fact set his eyes on a Kashmiri girl from our neighbourhood. Her family came from a village in Kashmir and they were trying to retain their dignity in a small rented room. The girl went to my school. The driver had decorated his minibus with stickers carrying mushy messages. On the back, he had put a sticker that had an image of an arrow piercing through a heart, underneath which was written:
Love for sale, 100% discount
.

The driver wanted to convey his love to the girl. He had bought a greeting card for the purpose. Now he wanted me to write a nice mushy message inside the card.
Kavita-type
, he said. Then he put his hand in his shirt pocket and fished out a red sketch pen. ‘Here, write with this,’ he said. He grinned and I could see his tobacco-stained teeth.

The bait that he would take no fare from me from then onwards proved too tempting. I took the sketch pen from him, and after thinking for a few seconds, I wrote:

Mountains can fly, rivers can dry,
You can forget me, but never can I

‘
Ab iska matlab bhi samjha do, praava
.’ Now tell me what this means, brother. I told him. His face broke into another grin. He took the card and kept it carefully in the glove box. Of course, when the conductor came, he waved him away.

In the evening, as I was walking back home, I saw that girl’s father approaching from the other end of our street. He walked slowly, a wet towel on his head. He looked at me and smiled. ‘Namaskar,’ I greeted him. ‘
Orzu, durkoth
.’ He wished me well-being and strong knees. ‘How is your father?’ he asked and without waiting for my reply, he continued, ‘You know, the landlord is troubling us too much. Every day he comes and takes oil from us, or sugar, or rice. This would never have been a problem in Shahar. But here, you know what hard times have befallen us.’

‘Anyway, I’m just worried about—,’ he mentioned his daughter. ‘Keep an eye on her, will you?’

The greeting card flashed in front of my eyes. And my writing in red sketch pen. And the mushy poem I had scrawled.

Mountains can fly, rivers can dry,
You can forget me, but never can I

I mumbled something and fled. I reached home, but the image of the girl’s father did not leave me. I tried hard to forget about him. I went to the rooftop to look at a girl in the neighbourhood. I tried watching TV. I tried reading
A Tale of Two Cities
. But the image of that man did not leave me. I dreamt of him that night.

The next morning, I woke up, got ready quickly, and picked up my school bag. I walked slowly towards the main road. I stood at one spot, waiting for the Matador to arrive. After a while, I saw the red-and-yellow board of the Matador. The driver stopped right in front of me. That was another privilege extended to me. I got in and sat on the friend seat. He shook hands with me, another privilege.

In the morning he always lit incense and played bhajans by Chanchal. There was also a fresh garland of marigold flowers in front of a deity’s picture. The Matador moved forward. I had made up my mind.

‘
Praava, O card deeyiein
’ I asked him in broken Dogri to hand over the card. His face lit up. He must have thought I had come up with another killer line.

I took the card and opened it up, as if expecting it to be blank inside. But there were the lines, in thick red. ‘Here, the pen.’ The driver held it in his hand.

And then I did it. While I was at it, and it took me two seconds perhaps, I kept looking at his face. At first he didn’t notice, his eyes were on the road. But the sound of the paper tearing made him look at it and he braked abruptly. He let out a barrage of expletives. He hit me hard on the back of my head. I hit him back, just like he had, on the back of his head. I was shaking with anger. I don’t know where I got the courage from, but I just got it. Afterwards, I don’t remember how many blows landed on my body. My spectacles fell off, but luckily they did not break. I was thrown out of the Matador.

While hitting me, the driver had scratched my face badly. And the back of my head was hurting. But I was smiling. In spite of the pain, I felt very light. There was a buoyancy in my step. Most importantly, the images of the girl’s father dissolved. His checkered towel disappeared. His eyes, a film of pain over them, were no longer visible to me. All I could hear was his voice echo in my head—Take care of her, will you?

Yes, I will keep an eye on her.
Mountains can fly, rivers can dry
, but she will always remain a dream for that illiterate driver. I walked fast. The barber had just opened his shop, and he was sweeping last night’s hair off the broken floor. I entered, picked up a comb nonchalantly, and ran it through my hair. Then I turned sideways and checked my profile. I looked at my cheap shoes. For months, I had hated them, wishing that their soles would come off so that I could ask Father to buy me another pair. But now, standing at the barber’s, I looked at them and at the cheap jeans I wore. They looked so appropriate, so rebellious.

I ran to the baker. He was just throwing his first cooked bread back in the oven as an offering. I bought myself a naan, and sat there at the baker’s counter, eating it slowly.

I went to school, but I had lost interest in my studies. I felt stifled at the sight of my classmates’ hopping from one class to another, discussing a theorem or some law of Physics. That whole season, I stuck to reading Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s
Srikanta
. I sought solace from the story of his travel to Burma and imagined myself in a ship that had set sail for some distant land. I wanted to fall in love with older women, like Srikanta had.

Forging friendships with some rowdy boys who were at the bottom of the class, I would sit with them at one lonely end of the canal where nobody went and the water gushed out like white foam from a small outlet. Relatives of those who had died would perform religious rites for the deceased there. Often, the coconuts used in such rites would float towards us and we would pick them up and eat them. Through those boys, I also got rare access to the first floor of Raja tea stall, next to my school. It was reserved for the boys who were only into beating up other boys from rival gangs. We would sit there, drinking tea, and taking puffs from a lone Gold Flake cigarette, listening to Kishore Kumar songs.

I had become a rebel. And I was aware of this change in me. In my neighbourhood, I had made some friends. There were the three Suri brothers, who were very kind. I visited their family and without any bitterness, I joked about their ‘Dogra’ traits, while they made fun of my Kashmiri ways.

One evening, I went to their house. The eldest Suri son had just returned from the old city. ‘Don’t venture out,’ he warned me. He said there was a lot of anger on the streets and Dogra mobs were beating up Pandits in several places. That morning, two Pandit boys had entered the premises of the Ranbir Singh boys high school in the old city. They were carrying a crude bomb that exploded in the hands of one of them. He died instantly, while his accomplice’s hand was severed. The accomplice was arrested by the police. The news had spread like wildfire and the locals thought the bomb was meant to kill the schoolboys. So, as the word spread, Pandits were beaten up across the city. The eldest Suri son said he had seen placards hanging around the necks of dogs that read, ‘I am a Kashmiri Pandit’.

It came to be known later that the two boys had intended to target a group of jailed Kashmiri terrorists who had been brought from the prison to write a board exam.

Not everyone had their fathers to guide them if they strayed, as, luckily, I had. There was a lot of anger among the residents of the refugee camps. Most of them were non-salaried families, especially from the villages. Back home, they had owned big houses, and apple and walnut and almond orchards. But now that was all gone. They were solely dependent on government dole.

It was a pathetic existence. Many fell ill with diseases that were hitherto unknown to the community. In the first year alone, many elderly people died of sunstroke, and snake and scorpion bites. Children became infected with fungal diseases, and scabies became rampant in the unhygienic camps. Doctors reported hundreds of cases of stress-induced diabetes. Heart disease and hypertension made their way in our lives. Many fell into depression. There were severe privacy issues as well. Young couples were forced to live in small enclosures with their parents. This first led to an erosion in sexual abilities and then to a reduced birthrate. Medical surveys conducted around that time said that the Kashmiri Pandits in exile had aged by ten to fifteen years. Many in the camp spoke of revenge.

In one camp lived a woman whose young son was killed by his friends in Baramulla. They had taken him to a shop where a few of them caught hold of him while one of them downed the shutter on him. But he was physically very strong and put up a brave fight. He even managed to snatch their only Kalashnikov rifle. But he had no understanding of its functioning and could not unlock it. Meanwhile his assailants overpowered him and one of them fired at him. He was badly injured whereupon they pounced on him, gouged out his eyes and cut out his tongue.

The boy’s mother refused to believe that her son was no more. So, every afternoon she would cook food for him and keep it on a parapet outside her tent. I saw her one day while she was cooking food for her dead son. She spoke to a neighbour while she lovingly placed the food on the parapet. ‘He won’t eat if the rice is not crispy,’ I heard her saying.

In 1991, a family from Shopian came to live in the Muthi refugee camp. Pyare Lal Tickoo had been a cloth merchant associated with the local traders’ union. The Tickoos lived in Shopian’s Batpora locality, home to 112 Pandit families. After the nightmare of January 19, many Pandit families left their homes, fearing for their lives. By April, sixty families had left. By May, another thirty left. Only twelve families, including the Tickoos, decided to stay back.

On June 16, Pyare Lal Tickoo’s son, Rajinder, left home for Shopian hospital where he had been training in the accounts department. On his way back home later that afternoon, Rajinder went to a friend’s shop near the town’s main bus stand. It was here that a group of militants who had been following him from the hospital shot at him. Rajinder was hit by four bullets and he died on the spot.

Someone ran to his house and informed the senior Tickoo about his son’s death. The father ran to the bus stand and spotted his son lying alone in a pool of blood. There was a bullet near his corpse. Pyare Lal Tickoo picked it up. It read—Made in China. The body was taken to the hospital where a postmortem was conducted. Once it was over, Pyare Lal Tickoo carried his son’s body in his arms. In the refugee camp, he would recall later—

‘When I had my son’s body in my arms, I held it close to my heart. I was reminded of Raja Harishchandra’s predicament at losing his son.’

There was no priest available for Rajinder’s last rites. They cremated him quickly. Nobody among their Muslim neighbours came to offer their condolences.