Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (4 page)

In Father’s village, many things could be obtained through the barter system. The family grew paddy and kept some cows as well. Often, fishermen, plying their shikaras along the small river that flowed past the house, would give fish in exchange for rice. Food was easy to come by in villages. But in the city, it was harder. After finishing school, Father had to stay with his aunt in Srinagar to attend college. It was difficult to feed an extra person. Often, my father said, he would buy a sesame bagel from the baker, moisten it with water and eat it for lunch.

In those days the results of the Board Exams would be declared on the radio. The day Father’s higher secondary exam results were to be declared, he sat glued to it. But they wouldn’t announce his name. Distraught, he thought he had failed. But it turned out to be a mistake. Afterwards, at his father’s insistence, my father joined government service and worked with the irrigation department.

It was in the city that my parents met and later got married. Around that time, there was tension in the Valley. Riots had broken out over an episode of a Pandit girl marrying a Muslim boy. The Pandits had risen in a rare gesture and launched an agitation. On the day my parents got married, curfew had been declared in some parts of the Valley.

After the wedding ceremony, the newly-wed couple arrived at my father’s village in a tonga. It had rained earlier, and there was muddy slush all around, and heaps of dried straw had to be put on the road to enable the bride from the city to walk without getting her shoes soiled. For years my mother would taunt Father about that particular evening.

Ma was hard-working. She would often carry dirty utensils in sub-zero temperatures to wash them under a tap in a corner of the street in Habba Kadal where she lived with her parents before marriage. She was also known to have climbed up on the tin roof of their house wearing her brother’s Duckback gumboots to shovel down the snow lest the roof collapsed under its weight—a feat that only the most courageous men could achieve. It was this spirit that led her to start working right after completing her education, choosing not to be a housewife. She served in the state health department.

One of my earliest memories is of her wearing a red sweater with a floral pattern. It was much later that I came to know it was a gift from my father, who had ordered it from Amritsar through a visiting cousin. For years, I think, the image of India for an ordinary Kashmiri was restricted to Punjab—to Amritsar and Ludhiana. Kashmiris went to Delhi, or Bombay, or Calcutta, but any non-Kashmiri was a Punjabi for them.

For many years after their marriage, my parents served in far-flung villages where people were so innocent that some of them believed that the Hindu nationalist party, the Jan Sangh, was a demon that pounced upon hapless people were they to be found alone in the fields. Sometimes Father and Ma would come to the city and watch movies at the Palladium cinema—old films with soulful Mukesh and Rafi songs. One of my mother’s favourites was a song from
Awaara
, where Nargis wished that the moon would turn its face away from them for a moment so that she could love Raj Kapoor. I often found her humming this song to herself at home.

I was born at a time when double-decker buses had just been introduced on certain routes and I vaguely remember that a ride from Lal Chowk to our locality would cost twenty-five paisa. My sister had been born six years earlier. The clock tower in the main square in Srinagar intrigued me since it looked so ancient and never kept the correct time. It stood like an old patriarch in the middle of the city. It was next to this clock tower that Jawaharlal Nehru had climbed atop a table, along with Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, and had spoken about India’s commitment to Kashmir and its people.

In the early eighties, I remember visits to the ancient Shankaracharya temple built on a hill overlooking Srinagar city. The temple was named after the Hindu philosopher-saint Adi Shankaracharya, who is believed to have visited the temple in the ninth century. We also visited the shrine of Kashmir’s patron goddess Sharika inside the Hari Parbat Fort. On Basant Panchami, we would go for day-long excursions to the Ramchandra temple in Srinagar.

My mother’s sister lived near the cantonment area, and my uncle was a movie buff. Hoping to catch a glimpse of some film stars, my uncle would seat me on the crossbar of his bicycle and ride to the Oberoi hotel, where most film stars stayed. He was so fond of movies that he would often sit all night long in front of the television, keeping the volume low, smoking Panama cigarettes and noting down the cast with a pencil on a wall next to him. I was amazed by his skill in recognizing old film actresses: Nimmi, Suraiya, Geeta Bali, Bina Rai, Nalini Jaywant. It was the time when the actress Tabassum would appear on television with a rose in her hair, hosting a film-based programme. I also remember watching the singer Hemant Kumar on her show, a shawl placed neatly on his left shoulder, his head tilted towards the right as he sang one soulful song after another. Besides these outings and the Sunday evening feature film on television, the only source of entertainment was listening to stories from our grandparents. And then there were family gatherings and festivals.

Being Shaivites—followers of Lord Shiva—the most important among our festivals was Shivratri, which would be celebrated over a period of one week or so. It falls in either February or March, during the severe cold. Preparations would begin a month earlier. The whole house would be thoroughly cleaned and the larder replenished. Two days before the festival, Father and I would visit Habba Kadal to buy pooja paraphernalia from Kanth Joo, a toothless man who ran a small shop as ancient and mysterious as its owner. From there, we would go to the Muslim potter who sold us earthen pots, and the Shivling for rituals. Then we would make our way to the bridge—one of the eight built across the Jhelum—and bargain with the fishermen for the best rates.

We would return home, Father and I, while I held his hand and a bag of roasted chestnuts. At home, Father would clean the fish in a basin and scrape off the scales under a tap beside the kitchen garden, while I watched in fascination as he cut open its guts and sliced the fish into pieces. We children would wait for the fish bladders to be extricated so that we could jump on them, making them produce a noise while bursting. I would then help Father make garlands and little round thrones for Shiva and his bride Parvati from dried straw.

On the evening of the festival, an area in the kitchen would be cleared to conduct the ‘marriage rituals’. The seat of prominence would be given to Parvati, represented by an earthen pitcher. It would be filled with water, and the choicest walnuts and sugar cones. Its neck would be decorated with marigold and bhelpatra strings, vermillion mixed with clarified butter, and silver foil. The rituals lasted till midnight. As children we would struggle to remain awake till the ‘marriage’ was solemnized. The next day, scores of lamb, fish and vegetable dishes would be prepared, and the elders would give money to the children to buy anything we wanted. During the day, the men gambled at cards while the children played
juph-taakh
, a game played with cowries. They symbolized fertility and playing with them was an old practice because of the dwindling population due to religious persecution and high infant mortality rates. The cowries were procured from Bombay by a Pandit family that had settled hundreds of years ago in Bajalta near Jammu. From there, the shells would be transported to the Valley on mules.

On the final evening of the festival, the ‘bride’ and the ‘groom’ would be bid farewell. Taken to the river, they would be immersed in its waters. Upon returning, the custom was for the farewell party to knock on the main door of the house. A family member would enquire who was at the door, and one of the members of the farewell party would respond, ‘I’ve brought with me money, food, prosperity, and happiness.’ It was then that the door would be opened and the farewell party welcomed back. Then walnuts from the pitcher, sweetened with milk and sugar, would be eaten along with rotis made of rice flour cooked on a slow fire.

Sometimes it snowed during Shivratri, and we would make snowmen in our garden. We had an unwavering belief in our gods and in our festivals. During Afghan rule in Kashmir, the Governor, Jabbar Khan, upon hearing that it invariably snowed on Shivratri, ordered that it be celebrated in June–July. But even on that night, due to some unusual atmospheric cooling, snowflakes fell, silencing the vicious.

Vidyam deehe Saraswati
… O Goddess of Learning, grant me knowledge. Under the apple tree that stood in our garden, like a sage doing penance, Grandfather made me recite this hymn after him. He told me how, when I was an infant, he had dipped a wooden nib in honey and written on my tongue one syllable that would guide my life: Om. It was the key to all secrets, he said, that I ever wished to have unravelled. It was an antidote to all poisons that would try to ride on my breath. It would keep rabid dogs away from me and, likewise,
Rahchok
, the Will-o’-the-wisp—the one with a bowl of fire placed on his head who misled people towards doom when the earth was covered with snow. Its recital would bar bad thoughts from polluting my mind; it would keep me from harm’s way, no matter what shape or form it took.

One room in our house was dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge. Its wooden shelves were lined with books, some of them covered with brown paper.
The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda. Arabian Nights
. Kalhana’s
Rajatarangini
. Gandhi’s
The Story of My Experiments with Truth
. Tagore’s
Gitanjali
. Phanishwar Nath Renu’s
Jaloos
. The collected stories of Premchand and Saadat Hasan Manto. These would be brought out on a particular day in spring, and worshipped. The night before, Ma would fill a brass plate with grains of rice over which she placed a pen, a portrait of the goddess, some milk in a small bowl, and a bunch of narcissus flowers. The next morning we were required to first look at this offering—that was how we welcomed the coming of the new year, praying that we acquired a few more droplets from the ocean of knowledge.
Vidyam deehe Saraswati
.

Apart from these old customs, there was a thumb rule that guided our lives. You could say it was a story the moral of which was left unsaid, deliberately, I think. It was too evident, too stark for even a dimwit to miss. The story went like this: Two boys got into a verbal duel in downtown Srinagar. It turned into a fistfight and, in no time, the two lay on the road, with one boy overpowering the other. As he lay over him, the stronger boy’s sacred thread which identified him as a Pandit, became visible.

‘Bloody hell, you are a Pandit!’ shouted one boy. In a moment, the tables turned and it was the other boy who won the fight. The fact that his opponent was a Pandit gave the other boy strength. Nobody was expected to lose to a Kashmiri Pandit in a physical fight.

No one knew exactly when this apocryphal fight had occurred. I had heard this story many times from men who belonged to my grandfather’s generation and from those of my father’s generation as well. It had probably trickled down, this piece of wisdom, from generation to generation.

I didn’t read much into the story as a child, but I remember creating quite a scene after hearing my parents discuss my thread-wearing ceremony.

‘Why, son?’ my grandfather pulled me onto his lap. ‘All of us have done it. My father, me, your father, and now you. This is what distinguishes us, and makes us who we are: Brahmins,’ he tried to reason it out with me. My groans grew louder and I flailed my arms.

‘All right, tell me why you don’t want us to put the
janeu
around your shoulder?’ he finally asked.

I remained silent for a while. And then I said it.

‘Because, then Tariq will know that I’m a Pandit and he will overpower me.’

I don’t quite remember how Grandfather reacted to what I said. Perhaps he laughed as he always did at my childish remarks.

Tariq was my friend in school. A photo of the class of 1984 I once possessed showed him next to me, his arm over my shoulder. It was the same year that the school magazine had a portrait of the goddess Saraswati on its front page.

On the afternoon of the day the magazine was distributed among the students, some of us were playing cricket on the school grounds. In the classroom, Tariq and I were inseparable, thick as thieves, as our English teacher said. But on the playground we were arch-enemies—he was Javed Miandad, the famous Pakistani batsman, while I was Kapil Dev, the great Indian fast bowler. With a tennis ball and a bat made of a broken wooden plank, we would put up the fight of our lives. Most days, Tariq’s side won, but that day it was my turn. On the last ball, bowled by Tariq himself, I hit a sixer. My team won the match.

Later, on my way back to the classroom, I saw a group of my classmates standing in a circle.

‘India won the match,’ I shouted. They would be crestfallen, I knew, since all of them supported Tariq’s team, which called itself ‘Pakistan’. They would all hurl abuses when the national anthem was sung during the school assembly and kicked those of us who sang it. One of them looked at me, and then all of them ran away suddenly, throwing a bunch of papers on to the floor. I thought my victory had embarrassed them. But what were the papers they had left behind? I picked one up, and recoiled in disgust—the paper was covered with snot. I threw it away. It was then that my eyes fell on another, partially crumpled paper. A shiver ran through my body. It was a page torn from the school magazine—it was the portrait of the goddess Saraswati. It was covered with snot too. My heart sank and my stomach felt as if someone had punched me. I was very scared. I thought the goddess would punish me for my friends’ behaviour.
Vidyam deehe Saraswati
. No more. I raced out towards the grounds to report the incident to Tariq.