Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (5 page)

I ran through one corridor and entered another. At one end in semi-darkness, I saw Tariq, his head bent over something. I slowed down. He didn’t notice me. It was then that he tore off something from what lay on his lap and brought it towards his face.

‘Tariq!’ I called out.

He was startled. The page fell from his hands. He got up and just ran away. I prayed that it wouldn’t be what I thought it was. I was paralysed, unable to move. After what must have been a minute, I finally walked towards the page. I didn’t have to pick it up. The goddess’s musical instrument—the Veena—was clearly visible. I kept staring at it, transfixed. It was when the school bell rang that my trance broke. I lifted the page, carefully folded it, and put it in the pocket of my shorts.

I didn’t tell anyone about this incident. Tariq avoided me for many days. Afterwards, when he spoke to me, I tried to avoid thinking of that day. He never mentioned it either. We got back to our respective roles in the playground.

But I don’t remember us putting our arms around each other ever again.

Sometimes, glimpses of Kashmir are shown on the Discovery Channel. One day Father spotted the Dal Lake, and he almost shouted, pointing it out to my niece: ‘Look, this is where
nadru
comes from!’ He had forgotten that the lotus stem we sometimes bought in Delhi might have been grown in the polluted Yamuna waters, for all we knew. But I didn’t say anything.

My parents shifted to Delhi from Jammu in 1998, a year after getting my sister married. Three weeks before they shifted, Ma paid me her first visit in Delhi. I went to receive her at the interstate bus terminus; she refused to travel by train, which she found filthy. In the autorickshaw, on our ride home, she had a good look at me and her eyes moistened. I was working for a television news channel at that time and kept long hours, often skipping meals. I had lost weight and this made her unhappy.

‘You have grown so thin,’ she said.

‘Girls here like slim boys,’ I quipped.

But Ma was not one to appreciate humour. ‘I hope some Punjabi girl has not cast her spell on you,’ she said with genuine worry.

She spent three days in Delhi, and I took her around to show her the sights. I also bought her kulfi, which she relished. I knew that, unlike my father, for whom a proper meal had to include rice, Ma relished hot, crispy tandoori rotis. So we ate at a small, clean restaurant where she had two rotis with a bowl of dal and cauliflower.

One Monday morning, three weeks after Ma’s visit—Monday was my day off and they knew it—my parents landed up at the doorstep of my one-room flat. I was surprised to see them and shocked to see the number of items they had brought along with them. I was not even sure so many things would fit into my room. But in two hours, Ma had set up a kitchen. From the Kashmir Valley, we had been forced to shift to Jammu. And now, from Jammu, my parents had come to Delhi.

The day after, when I returned from work close to midnight, I saw Father pacing in the balcony. There were no cell phones then, and he didn’t have my office numbers. ‘That is why I had been dissuading you from shifting here,’ I said before he could complain. Father remained silent.

‘Eat your food,’ Ma said. She had cooked some of my favourite Kashmiri delicacies.

It took my parents months to come to terms with my gruelling work schedule. Sometimes, when I returned home visibly tired, Ma would ask: ‘So, how much do you earn?’ After I told her, she would say, ‘Sit at home, I’ll give you a thousand more than that!’ Gradually, they became used to it. So much so that if I got home early, they would ask if all was well.

Wherever we went, moving from one flat to another, Father forged friendships with vegetable vendors, owners of daily utility stores, and with electricians and plumbers. Wherever we lived, few knew me by my name. They only referred to me as Pandita sahab’s son.

Every few months my parents would go to Jammu to catch up with relatives who had settled there after the exodus of 1990. After Ma permanently took to her bed, in 2004, they were unable to return. So, our only contact with the family is on the phone or when relatives come to Delhi for short visits. When they come from Jammu, my relatives bring with them souvenirs from home: collard greens, raw walnuts, or sesame bagels made by Kashmiri bakers who have now set up shop in Jammu. Sometimes Father forgets that he is not even in Jammu now, that he is even further away from home. So he sometimes refers to Jammu as ‘Shahar’, or city—Shahar was always meant to refer to Srinagar. That is a habit my father’s generation has: calling Srinagar ‘Shahar’—the city that is home. And when I gently remind Father of his mistake, he smiles an embarrassed smile. But for days afterwards, he goes silent. For days, he does not read the newspapers. For days, he does not watch Doordarshan Kashmir and hum along with Rashid Hafiz. I can only imagine what images the mere mention of Shahar evokes in him.

Shahar was our home. Shahar was our
shahrag
—our jugular. Shahar was us.

In Shahar though, by the age children learned the alphabet, they realized that there was an irreversible bitterness between Kashmir and India, and that the minority Pandits were often at the receiving end of the wrath this bitterness evoked. We were the punching bags. But we assimilated noiselessly, and whenever one of us became a victim of selective targetting, the rest of us would lie low, hoping for things to normalize.

But Shahar was also about friendships, bonding, compassion, and what the elders called ‘lihaaz’, which, in simple terms, means consideration. But in the Kashmiri context, it was many things. It was throwing away a cigarette if one spotted an elder approaching. It was offering a seat in the bus to a woman from one’s locality. It was taking a heavy bag from an old man’s hand and carrying it till his house.

Sometimes during a summer sunset, when the sky turned crimson, serene old men taking leisurely puffs from their hookahs would look at it and then sigh and say, ‘There has been
khoonrizi
—bloodshed—somewhere.’

On Eid-ul-Zuha, we would go to our neighbours’ homes to wish them happiness. One of my father’s Muslim friends lived nearby, and when Father would be out on long official tours, he would stop by, knocking gently at our door, refusing to come inside, and asking if we needed anything. My sister sometimes taught his children, and on Eid-ul-Zuha I would slip out and visit his house to watch their family sacrifice sheep. A piece of lamb’s meat would later be sent to us, uncooked, because some families avoided eating at each other’s house for religious considerations. Though, by the time of my father’s generation, these considerations had almost been dissolved. Our neighbours wished us on Shivratri, and we would offer them walnuts soaked in sweet milk and water.

We hardly knew of life beyond Kashmir. I remember a cousin had gone to Meerut to study agricultural science. On returning, he would tell us how common murders were there, and I remember how a hush fell when he recounted how a man had been called out of his home late in the night and then stabbed. In the Valley, the biggest crime we had heard about was how in a fight sometimes a man would pull out his kangri from underneath his pheran and hurl it at his opponent. When somebody fought or used foul language, he would be immediately dubbed a ‘
Haaen’z
’—a member of the boatman community, known for their crude language and whose wives apparently fought bitterly.

But this lihaaz, this peaceful coexistence, would be threatened every now and then. It was as if the minority Pandits were to be blamed for everything that went wrong. It could be anything, as our experience would tell us.

In 1986, major anti-Pandit riots broke out in Anantnag in southern Kashmir in retaliation to rumours that Muslims had been killed in the Hindu-majority region of Jammu. Some believed the riots were a conspiracy by one political party to bring down another party’s government. Whatever the reasons, the Pandits became the target. Houses were looted and burnt down, men beaten up, women raped and dozens of temples destroyed. A massive statue of the goddess Durga was brought down in the ancient Lok Bhawan temple.

A few years earlier, in our locality, a few Pandit families had tried to construct a small temple out of wooden planks. Although there was a temple nearby, during the harsh winters the snow would make it difficult to walk on the road, so some families thought of building a temple closer to their homes. But as soon as the planks were assembled and the idols placed on a small, wooden platform, some Muslim men gathered and began to hurl abuses. One of them brought the whole structure down with a kick. There was no protest. We had learnt to live that way. Whenever things went sour, we would just lower our heads and walk away. Or stay at home, till things got better. I remember visiting the site a few hours later when some of the Pandit families were carrying away their desecrated gods. I was heartbroken at the sight of a broken idol of Hanuman. For us children, he was like Superman. We would sing his praises in the form of the
Hanuman Chalisa
.

I returned home and hid myself in a patch of our garden, and lay there, face down. I must have stayed like that for a few hours till Totha came looking for me. Totha was Tathya’s younger brother, and he lived alone in a small room in his brother’s house.

Totha turned me over onto my back and I held him tight. ‘They broke the temple,’ I said. He was silent for a while. And then he spoke. ‘You know, Swami Vivekananda—his photo is in our
thokur kuth
—he came to the Kshir Bhawani temple many years ago and spent a few days alone there. While performing a yagna, he had a vision of the goddess. “Mother,” he addressed her, “I am so disturbed; everywhere I see temples being destroyed by Muslim invaders.” That is when the goddess spoke to him. “It doesn’t matter if they enter my temple and desecrate my idol. It should not matter to you. Tell me, do you protect me, or do I protect you?’”

Totha then held my hand and led me to his small room. From the pocket of his Nehru jacket, he pulled out a stick. ‘I got this for you,’ he said.

‘What, you got me a stick!’ I cried.

He smiled. ‘Bite into it.’

I did as instructed and was overjoyed. I had never tasted sugar cane before. Totha was like that—full of surprises. God knows where he had got that sugar cane from, since it was not grown in the Valley.

The dose of sugar calmed me down, and I soon forgot about the incident. But I think it changed me a little, and I became conscious of my identity as a Kashmiri Pandit. A few weeks later, my paternal grandfather came to visit us for a few days. He was quite old now and spent most of his time in prayer. Even when we children created bedlam while playing around him, he would not even raise an eyebrow. One day I stopped playing and sat next to him while he recited his prayers. I waited patiently, and as soon as he finished and opened his eyes, I asked him what prayer he was reciting.

‘
Durgasaptashati,
’ he replied.

‘Is it the same one that is supposed to have so much energy that some people lose their mental balance while reciting it?’

‘Yes, that is the one.’

‘So how come you can recite it and nothing happens to you?’

He laughed and said, ‘I don’t know, son. Maybe one has to prepare oneself for it. It has taken me years to ready myself.’

‘So teach me how to recite it, won’t you?’

‘No, son, you are young right now. It requires a lot of patience, a lot of discipline. You don’t even bathe everyday. When you grow up, I’ll teach you.’

I threw a tantrum. I insisted that until my grandfather taught me how to recite the mantra, I wouldn’t eat. Nobody took me seriously at first. But when I did not eat the whole day, Father got angry and stormed into my room.

‘Don’t be a fool; come and eat.’

I was quite afraid of him, but that day I held my ground. In the evening, Ma said Grandfather wanted to see me.

‘Okay, I will teach you a portion of it,’ he said. And he did. I practised it for days and learnt it by heart.

My faith in what Grandfather taught me that day has never wavered. I’ve tested that mantra in the most adverse moments of my life. And it has never failed me.