Half a Rupee: Stories (9 page)

They forced me to open my suitcase and went through its entire contents. I could understand their rummaging through my belongings. But when the male soldiers picked out the bras and probed them with lingering fingers, anger shot up my spine. What on earth could be hidden under a bra—grenades? Now, come on, I wouldn’t be smuggling grenades in the cups of those bras. I couldn’t contain myself when they picked up my lipsticks and began to inspect them closely. And when they started to take apart my lipstick cases, I lost it. ‘These are not bullets. They are lipsticks. Keep them. Load them if you can in your rifles! And shoot with them for all I care!’ I said.

Shameless, he bared his ugly, yellowing teeth and said, ‘Gone are those days of the double-barrelled shotguns, madam. Now we clip hundred-cartridge magazines into our rifles.’ Perhaps the woman constable
with him understood my sarcasm. She tried to explain, ‘We have to be extra-cautious on the Srinagar fights, madam. Come, come this way!’ And she invited me to step into a half-open curtained enclosure for a through body search.

I was going to Kashmir in search of my roots: to look at my beginnings. However I am not Kashmiri. I just know this much: that my father and mother had gone to Kashmir and when they came back I had already taken root in my mother’s womb. ‘On those icy cold waters of the Jhelum, in a floating houseboat, atop a delicately carved walnut wood bed, when two pious souls were giving birth to a sacred moment …’ Mom would read out in a poetic style her entries from her Kashmir journal, relishing every single syllable, every single memory that her tongue could wrap itself around. She would regale me with stories of Dad in Kashmir.

‘He just didn’t know how to ride a horse. A stool would be placed next to the horse. Your father would first climb up on the stool and then the groom would coax the horse near the stool, and then and only then would your dad be able to get astride the horse. Even then, five times out of ten, he would fall on his face.’

Dad would peep out from behind the newspaper he was reading and interject, ‘Don’t you lie, I fell off only once!’

‘Once? And what about the time when Your Highness, the Lord Pantaloon came undone!’ Mom was from Lucknow, and Dad from Kolkata.

‘Oh … now, come on … when the legs of the stool cave in, one does fall. It wasn’t my fault!’

‘Remember that one time when you found yourself atop the groom and not the horse?’

‘Now … come off it … that cranky horse just cantered away … just when I had lifted myself off the table. All right now … that’s enough.’ At this point in the conversation, Dad would turn to me, ‘Shonali, don’t you believe a single word your mother says. When I take you to Kashmir, I will show you how good a rider I am!’

‘Kashmir,’ Mom would sigh deeply. ‘Now that’s impossible! Who goes to Kashmir any more? Gone are the days when you could simply pick up your bags and head off to paradise, year after year. Strife’s in the air now. Bullets rend its quiet. Flowers no longer bloom there—death does!’

It must have been around 1981–82, or was it 1982–83? I was still studying in school. The news on the radio made my blood boil. Who the hell were these Pakistanis to misappropriate our Kashmir? As if Kashmir was my personal property, my fiefdom.

And then Mom would remember her Kashmir days again and say, ‘We had a Kashmiri servant. A young man … hardly a man, rather a boy … whenever we went to Kashmir, we would hire his services for about a month. His name was Wazir Ali. Sometimes we would stay in a house boat, sometimes at the Oberoi Hotel. At the Oberoi, we would always stay in its annexe. There was a sprawling lawn right in front with two chinar trees: tall, stout, leafy—and majestic. They had a regal
bearing—they always looked like royalty to me. An emperor and an empress, hands across their chests, surveying the waters of the Dal Lake, lording over it, and we mere mortals would be allowed only the view of the lawns. They both had pride, I tell you—Emperor Jehangir and Empress Noor Jehan …’ Mom was indeed a poet but limited herself only to diaries. I brought her back to what she had started talking about, ‘You were telling me something about Wazir Ali.’

‘Oh yes! Every evening he would take you out for a stroll in your pram. And then one day he did not return. Night fell. It was quite late. We began to worry. And then he went out to look for you.’

‘He? Who?’

‘Your father. Who else? Mr Arun Banerjee. I kept waiting—restless; worrying myself to death. He returned after what seemed like an age to me. In a taxi—you, your pram, your father and he. I mean not Wazira, but another Kashmiri. I asked your father, “Where’s Wazira?” He looked at me in a hurt sort of way. He dropped you in my arms, threw the pram in the veranda and called for the Kashmiri who had come with him. “Moorti Lal!” he shouted and then took out a fifty-rupee note and handed it to him. That Moorti Lal was an incessant talker and he started off, “Sahib, how could you entrust him with such a little kid? Thank God, he headed straight home, what if he had run away with her somewhere else …?” Your father dismissed him with a wave of his hand and the man quietly walked away.’

‘Fifty rupees! Is that all I was worth?’ I butted in, just for kicks.

‘Fifty rupees was a princely sum in those days!’

I was still curious about the story, worried where Wazira had taken me.

‘He took you to his house, to flaunt you to his grandmother. Wazira was an orphan. His parents had been trapped in a snowy avalanche—they were never found. Not even their dead bodies. Wazira had to stay many a night in the hotel on night duty. And whenever he returned home in the mornings, his grandmother would get after him, she would hurl a thousand angry questions and insults at him. He would try to pacify his grandmother by saying that he had got married and had spent the night with his wife. And that he even had a little daughter with her. And because of his grandmother’s horrible mood swings he was scared to bring her home.’

I was beginning to like Wazira, albeit just in the quiet of my heart. He had that quaintness, like the heroes in fairytales that grandma told you. His story too seemed like a fairytale to me, then. And it seems like a fairytale even now. I felt that fairytales were born in Kashmir and they trickled downwards to the plains only to avoid the icy Kashmiri winter. Sometimes it occurred to me that had Wazira really ran away with me, I would have grown up in Kashmir. But I did not cherish the idea of separating from my folks in the story.

‘Did Wazira ever come back?’ I asked.

‘Yes, he did. He begged our forgiveness and apologized
profusely. We hired him all over again but we never ever again let him take you out for a stroll.’

I found an album in the house. It was filled with old photographs, but Wazira was not to be found in a single one of them. I found photographs of mine clicked in Gulmarg, Yusmarg, Pahalgam and Chandanwadi—nothing less than illustrations from old books of fairytales.

It was only when I was reading philosophy in college that I asked Mom, ‘Shall I go visit Kashmir in these holidays?’

‘Don’t you see the news on TV? These Kashmiris have wreaked havoc …’

I was still in college when I saw it on TV—there was some cricket match being played and Kashmiri youths were shouting anti-India slogans. There were also a number of turbaned Sikh youths in the sloganeering crowd.

And then an incident happened—the terrorists abducted the daughter of a Kashmiri minister. I was about to blurt out that he must have taken her to meet his grandmother but just stopped short—Dad was furious. He was pacing up and down the room and he suddenly turned and roared, ‘They are making deals with the terrorists. They are exchanging the minister’s daughter for captured terrorists. What on earth do they think they are doing? Would they have agreed to this exchange if the kidnapped woman was an ordinary man’s daughter? Would they? You could have gone and yelled into their ears but they would not have registered a single word. All they would have done is issue statements: “These are
disturbed times”. Have they forgotten what happened during Partition? What they did to us during Partition? Treaties are being signed. Deals are being made with the terrorists!’

Mom asked, ‘Then why don’t they confront Pakistan? They are the ones that are pulling the strings of these terrorists. They are the ones who are doing this.’

I heard Dad acknowledge for the first time, ‘Our people are no less! To hold on to their power these people keep swapping sheepskins.’

I felt bad. God alone knew why—neither Mom nor Dad was from Kashmir, and yet …

Somewhere around this time, I saw a Kashmiri youth in Dad’s office one day. He was radiant, handsome. He was looking for a job. Dad asked, ‘Where are you from?’

The poor guy managed to say in a mousy voice, ‘From Kashmir, sir; but I am no rioter; I am no terrorist.’

Dad dismissed him saying, ‘Call on me again. Right now, there isn’t any vacancy.’

I knew Dad was lying. He simply did not want to entangle himself in officious, mile-long inquiries. Those days the police would keep a sharp eye on all the Kashmiris who had come down to the plains from paradise. Forget Kashmiris, if people so much as heard you say that you were a Muslim, there went your ability to get a job or even rent a place.

Once when Dad was in the hospital, recuperating, I bumped into Dr Basu, our family physician. After that the talk turned towards my marriage. I was nearly done
with my studies: it was my last year at university and I had already started working as a rookie reporter with
Hindustan Times
. When Mom asked when I planned to get married, I quipped, ‘I will! Provided he takes me to Kashmir for our honeymoon!’

‘Kashmir! No!’ Dad dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. He did not say anything more; not because he did not want to—his doctor had advised him not to exert himself. I looked at Mom and said, ‘You were the one who said that the idea of me was conceived there.’

Dad waved his hand in the air and went away. That was the end of the conversation—he died soon after.

And now, after so many years, I was off to trace my roots. My heart was bouncing like a rubber ball inside my ribcage when the plane landed in Srinagar. And the moment I stepped out of the airport, I saw what I had not seen anywhere else in India.

The first thought that came to mind was: Has the war started? Has Pakistan attacked us? There were more Indian soldiers than Kashmiris on the locked-down roads of Srinagar. Everywhere there were tanks, trucks, guns, checkposts; there was a bunker on every road, and platoons of soldiers. The bus that I boarded from the airport to the city was stopped three times. And thrice did gun-toting soldiers step on board, rifling through the passengers’ belongings, their gaze piercing us all.

‘Whose is this?’

‘What’s in this?’

Finally they stepped down. The bus trundled ahead.

By now I felt as if my breath was being stifled. When
the bus stopped for the third time, a soldier, before alighting from the bus, looked at me through rapacious eyes and barked in crude Hindi, ‘Where the hell are you off to, girl?’

I did not like the way he addressed me. I spoke in English, in a tone full of scorn, reserved in India for talking to social inferiors, ‘What do you mean where am I going?’

He grunted ‘Hoon’ and turned and stepped off. I figured he did not understand English and was too proud to admit it. But nobody else on the bus said anything.

I was looking for a regular place to stay, and I was hoping that I would find something around Dal Lake. If I had money I would have stayed at the annexe in Oberoi, I thought.

The surface of the lake was covered in layers of green mulch and the rotting roots of unwanted weeds. A few houseboats were still afloat, anchored at the shore—frayed, dilapidated, praying for a watery grave in the waters of the lake that they had always called home, rot and decay their only companions.

Time and again, tears would well up in my eyes. And, frustrated, I would wipe them away and curse myself, ‘Where on earth is your engraved walnut bed now, eh?’ My voice choked on my own tears. I did not hear my normal voice ever again after that.

Nobody was willing to put up a single girl in a lodging house or a hotel. Neither my English nor the
Hindustan Times
identity card in my purse was of any help. And seeking the help of the police or the army
would be useless. The moment you were associated with them, the locals were sure not to even look in your direction.

Khalil trotted off in his Kashmiri as he put my luggage in his auto, ‘You are alone, memsaab. Kashmiri too scared of Hindoostani fauj. They grab anybody from the street and march off …’ he paused, ‘and that person is never ever seen or heard of again … God knows in which jail that man disappears.’

All the pent-up anger inside him was finding vent—firing like the exhaust of his auto. He kept on venting. Perhaps he wanted to burn out all the diesel inside him. ‘Nobody is going to keep you in a otel—the army would get an excuse to raid the premises and will grab and take the otel-wallah away. If the otel-wallah is old, they will not take him away. But they will take away either his young son, or young son-in-law, or his young banja, batija … any of his young relation will do. They have their sight on the youth of Kashmir. They simply want to wipe the youth of Kashmir away …’

His voice was becoming increasingly raspier. Suddenly he stopped his auto at the turn of a lane and looked in my direction, ‘What do you people want, enh? What do you want from us? Why don’t you just let us be, leave us on our own? Now even our green has turned red … the grass growing on our earth has become red … enh …’

His voice became choked, like mine. I sat there with my palms covering my face. I had never ever felt so ashamed of being a Hindustani.

Khalil picked up my suitcase and entered his aunt’s
place. Khalil’s aunt, his bua, was a wise old woman, well past her middle years. ‘You put up here, sister, with my aunt,’ he said. ‘I shall come every morning and take you wherever you want to go … but you must never venture out alone again.’

He left, wiping his tears with his hands, tending to his pain. God alone knew what sort of memories he was nursing, God alone knew what old wounds had opened up again. He neither asked for money, nor talked about the rent.