Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (27 page)

The assistant commissioner of Muzaffarabad, Kacho Ali Mohammed, who later became a minister in the Jammu and Kashmir government, saved the lives of many Pandits during those days. He gave shelter to a few women to save them from the clutches of the tribesmen.

Sapru and others had lost hope of reuniting with their families. Now the question was that of survival. Sapru got a job at a Muslim bakery where his task was to prepare dough. The owner gave him an old shirt to wear. But after two days he was asked to leave since the baker’s clients were objecting to an ‘infidel’ preparing dough for their bread.

Many Pandits had converted to Islam to save their lives. After losing his job, Sapru approached a man who taught Arabic at his school. In the presence of fifteen men, a maulvi converted Bishambar Nath Sapru to Ghulam Mohammed. After his conversion, he was served some rice and sweetmeats, and someone blew a bugle to welcome him into his new faith.

After four months of living in hell, Sapru and a few others planned to escape. They managed to get some warm clothing, and, posing as Kashmiri salt merchants, crossed over to Indian-administered Kashmir. It was then that he was reunited with his family.

There had been mass conversions during the tribal raid. At several places, the invaders had herded Pandits to a ground where, like their ancestors from Afghanistan who ruled Kashmir once, they slaughtered a calf, cooked it and forced the Pandits to eat it, and then read the Kalma while cutting their sacred thread.

Conservative estimates suggest that thousands were converted forcibly to Islam. Most of them were later reconverted to Hinduism through the efforts of Pandit saints like Swami Nand Lal and social reformers like Tara Chand (Kashyap Bandhu). Totha said he had seen one such ceremony in Goiteng, Kupwara, where Swami Nand Lal tied the sacred thread across the shoulders of hundreds of men. To save them from the ignominy of any future discrimination by their fellow Brahmins, the swami had asked one of his followers to cook some turmeric rice. Then, everyone was asked to eat a little from the huge plate. The remaining rice was eaten by the swami himself to demonstrate that all of them were equals.

A few in Sopore and elsewhere refused to reconvert to Hinduism. They had lost all hope. ‘What if the savages come back?’ they asked.

PART FIVE

T
he restlessness that Ravi’s father suffered affected Ma as well. Some afternoons, Father would be taking a nap and suddenly Ma would wake him up. ‘I think I will go to Jammu,’ she would say. ‘But we don’t have a reservation; we could have booked a train ticket or something,’ Father would say. ‘No, I will go in a bus.’ And she would pack a small bag and just leave. From Jammu, Father’s brother would call and complain about how Ma had refused to eat lunch, or stay overnight. ‘She just came on a flying visit; after much insisting she accepted a cup of tea,’ he would say.

In the summer of 2004, Ma began to experience unexpected falls while she went out on walks or to do the shopping. At first we thought it was the result of her old back problem. But within a few weeks, the falls became far too frequent and during one such episode she was hurt badly. She also began to complain that her voice was turning hoarse. We dismissed her fears initially, but soon even we began to notice the changes. Within weeks she developed an acute slur in her speech.

Like most Kashmiris of previous generations, my parents had very little faith in doctors in Delhi. Whenever an illness arose, the conversation inevitably veered towards the prowess of Kashmiri doctors like Ali Jan, or Naseer, or Shunglu. So father took Ma to Jammu where a family friend had arranged an out-of-turn appointment with the famous Kashmiri neurologist, Dr Sushil Razdan. He was like a demigod for many Kashmiris. From Kashmir Valley, hordes of people, now bearing the trauma of violence, visited him for treatment. After examining Ma, Dr Razdan looked at my father and said—I have bad news. Ma, he told us, was suffering from a rare neurological disorder called motor neurone disease. She would lose her voice completely, and soon she would be restricted to bed. Her muscles would weaken one by one and then she would even lose her ability to swallow food.

The news was shattering. Dr Razdan’s words began to come true within the next few months. Ma lost her power of speech. Then it became too difficult for her to walk. Ultimately, she took to her bed. She would be in acute pain at times. She also began to have severe emotional outbursts, especially prolonged episodes of crying. She couldn’t accept what had happened to her. There was not a single neurologist in the country whose advice I did not seek. When her body contorted with pain and her face turned red, Ma sometimes looked at me with hope, as if I could conjure up a miracle. This helplessness made me very angry. I felt like putting the gods through her pain—putting them into a hat, reciting some magic words and turning them into rabbits, their veins throbbing violently, like Ma’s. As saliva dripped from her mouth and she struggled hard to swallow mashed bottle gourd, I remembered the taste of the meals cooked by her.

But even though she was completely incapacitated, her mental faculties became sharper than ever. She would hear a knock at the door before Father or I did. She knew when the television was running on the inverter battery. Only she remembered death anniversaries, and it was she who would alert Father, as he reached for his Marie biscuit in the morning, that he was supposed to fast that day.

After she developed this condition, I thought it was imperative that we at least have a house of our own. So I booked a flat in a Delhi suburb and I took Father to have a look.

‘But where will so much money come from?’ he asked.

I told him that I had applied for a loan. He looked at me in disbelief. Led by the builder’s manager, we went inside the flat. Father moved from one room to another; he looked at the ceilings. I was disappointed, since he didn’t say anything.

‘Do you like it?’ I asked.

‘Yes, it is nice,’ he replied.

Two days later, I paid the booking amount to the builder. The same day, my loan was sanctioned as well. I came home and shared the news with my father.

‘Are you serious about buying this house?’ he asked. ‘How will you repay the loan? Where will so much money come from?’ I explained to him that every month a fixed amount would be deducted from my bank account. He kept silent for a while. ‘I want to see it again,’ he said, finally.

‘Why? Didn’t you see it the other day?’

‘No, I remember nothing. I never thought you would actually book it.’

I took him there again the next day. This time he checked everything thoroughly. The first thing he did, of course, was to turn on the tap. ‘Oh,’ he smiled, ‘running water.’

A few months later, we shifted house. On a wheelchair, I gave Ma a tour of the entire house. When we entered the kitchen, she was overcome with emotion. She cried a lot.

We have been in exile for more than two decades. Kashmir is a memory, an overdose of nostalgia. But beyond this, there is nothing. Many among us have moved on. For most of us, Kashmir means a calendar hanging in our parents’ bedroom, or a mutton dish cooked in the traditional way on Shivratri, or a cousin’s marriage that the elders insist must be solemnized in Jammu.

A few of my friends, who live in a Delhi suburb, try and meet on weekends, and indulge in nightlong revelries of food and drink, and the singing of Kashmiri songs. They are all top corporate executives, and live in plush apartments. Some of them are too young to remember anything of Kashmir. But for some, these songs bring a rush of memory. One among these friends calls me at times from Moscow, where he frequently goes on business trips. After deals have been clinched he gets drunk ‘outside Kremlin’, as he insists when he calls. ‘I just wanted to talk to someone in Kashmiri,’ he says. We talk about the old days, crack jokes that only a Kashmiri can understand, and sometimes, he gets emotional as a result and cries.

My friend has a young daughter who started going to school recently. He would often tell her stories about Kashmir, and how they had a home there, but it had been burnt down. A few months into school, the little girl’s teacher called her parents. ‘Your daughter seems to have a psychological problem,’ she told them. She said they had been doing a class exercise in which everyone was supposed to say a few lines about their home. When her turn came, the girl said she had no home. When pressed further, she said her family had a house but it had been burnt down. The parents apologized and explained why their daughter had said what she did. Later they made sure to tell their daughter that the flat they now lived in was indeed their home.

Over the last few years, I have often thought about exile, and about the displaced Pandit families, especially those living in big cities like Delhi. I began to worry that the story of our community would be lost in the next few decades. It was only because of the previous generation that our customs and traditions were being kept alive. It is people from my father’s generation who know how to consult an almanac and keep track of festivals and the death anniversaries of ancestors. They created mini Kashmirs wherever they settled. But after them, there will be nobody left to remember. We are losing our tradition, our links to the place where we came from. This is evident during weddings, or when someone dies. Tradition is like an embarrassing grandparent who needs to be fed and put back to bed in a back room.

My uncle died recently—the one who was a movie buff. He had been unwell for months and passed away in his sleep in his daughter’s house in Delhi. We tried hard to get hold of a priest who knew the proper Kashmiri rituals. But we couldn’t find anybody. Finally we decided to engage a local priest at the cremation ground. As my uncle was being prepared for his final journey, an old man came and whispered that the departed should lie with his head facing the east. We quickly did that. Everyone was silent. We recited whatever prayers we could and then carried him away to the cremation ground. I returned home late that night. I was devastated. At least the dead merit dignity; their farewell ought to be performed in the same manner as that of their forefathers. I remembered all those cycle rides he took me on. I remembered the family jokes around him. I remembered how he had insisted on carrying sacks of rice over his back during my sister’s wedding.

I took a bath and sat silently in my father’s
thokur kuth
, and I recited the
Durgasaptashati
. Dear Uncle, may you find eternal peace! May you never be rendered homeless again!

Over the past decade I have visited Kashmir regularly as a journalist. I have reported on damning episodes of human rights violations by security personnel; I have reported on the dreaded knock on the door in the middle of the night; I have reported on young women whose husbands have disappeared, making them ‘half widows’; I have reported on young boys for whom death has become a spectacle. But in all these years I had never gathered the courage to visit my home in Srinagar. In fact, I would even avoid travelling in that general direction. But over the last few years, the urge became more powerful, as if it were my compulsory pilgrimage to Mecca. As if some umbilical cord with memory would be severed if I did not visit.

During my reporting assignments I had met Ali Mohammed, an elderly Kashmiri driver. Over several assignments we grew fond of each other. He reminded me of Totha. Travelling with him across Kashmir and listening to his stories on long journeys were like taking a walk through Kashmir’s history. He had so many stories to share of the old times. He spoke fondly of how his Pandit teacher would box his ears because he couldn’t learn a certain lesson; or how he drove the car of the legendary Pandit doctor Jagat Mohini who ran the Ratan Rani hospital right up to her death in 2009; or how he skipped meals at his house to eat at a Pandit’s house because he liked their preparation of collard greens.

‘I wouldn’t take any nonsense from anyone,’ he said. ‘But now one has to control one’s temper. The boys have guns now, and they will show no consideration towards the wrinkles on my face.’ Ali Mohammed—most youngsters called him Chacha—lamented the loss of what we once had in Kashmir. ‘The old days are gone,’ he often said, as we sat in his car, sharing cigarettes and our love for the singer Kailash Mehra.