Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (2 page)

There are no more forty-page letters. All that remains of those days is a plastic bag containing bracelets, photographs with lipstick marks on their backs, and my old copy of
Lust for Life
. There is also an old issue of the
Daily Excelsior
newspaper that every Kashmiri Pandit subscribed to in Jammu because it informed them of who of the community had died in exile. I hardly ever open it. But, sometimes, when I’m angry at the TV shows where our murderers speak about our return, I do. On its front page is a picture of Ravi’s mutilated face. The blood from his nose—the result of a blow from the butt of a Kalashnikov—has dried up. His forehead still looks beautiful and clear, and so does his moustache that I had wanted to imitate when I was young.

It is then that the voices come back to me. The loud clapping. The jeering. The chants reaching a crescendo. The hiss of the loudspeaker. The noise beats hard on my chest, like a drumbeat gone berserk. My head feels like an inferno, and a cold sweat traverses down my back.

Hum kya chaaaahte—Azadiiiii!

What do we want—Freeeedom!

Once I was with a few non-Kashmiri friends, and one of them was enacting a scene he had witnessed in video footage shot early in 1990 in Kashmir: a mammoth crowd in Lal Chowk, shouting, ‘Indian dogs go back!’ and ‘
Hum kya chahte—Azadi!
’. It made all of them laugh. To me, it brought back memories of the kicks I had braved in school while I sang the National Anthem. But in gatherings like these, my friends shouted for Azadi just for fun. For them it was just a joke—the sight of a crowd clenching fists, demanding freedom in a funny accent. Before I had improved mine, my friends would make fun of me as well.

‘Look at our friend here, he doesn’t live in
Bharat
, he lives in
Barat
.’

‘Tonight, he will go to his
gar
, not
ghar
.’

I would laugh with them, making fun, in turn, of some of them for their inability to use the
nukta
, the small dot that makes
jahaaj
what it is:
jahaaz
.

But this word, Azadi, it frightens me. Images of those days return to haunt me. People out on the roads. People peering out of their windows. People on the rooftops of buses. In shikaras. And in mosques.

‘Hum
kya chaaaahte—Azadiiiii!
’

I no longer sing the National Anthem. A few years ago, a child beggar at a traffic signal pinned the national flag onto my shirt. I threw it away in the waste bin of a café near my house.

It was the day I realized I could no longer remember my mother’s voice.

When she could still speak, Ma would go for walks in the neighbourhood park in Delhi, wearing her North Star sneakers. Father would watch her close the door quietly behind her and, after she was gone, he would call after her, knowing very well that she could no longer hear him.

‘For God’s sake, don’t repeat your home story in front of everyone!’

The home story was a statement that Ma had got into the habit of telling anyone who would listen. It didn’t matter to her whether they cared or not. It had become a part of herself, entrenched like a precious stone in the mosaic of her identity.

By the time her voice had failed her in 2004, I noticed that she had started repeating this statement much too often. But now, when I no longer remember her voice, I realize how much that statement meant to Ma. It was the only thing that reminded her of who she was, more than the occasional glances she would steal at the mirror when no one else was looking.

‘
Our home in Kashmir had twenty-two rooms
.’

I remember the day when I realized I had no memory of her voice. That morning I had been reading the newspapers like I did everyday. I would read a report or two, and Ma would point out advertisements of houses for sale. There were many of them.

‘Book now, pay later.’

‘Wooden flooring.’

‘Uninterrupted power supply.’

‘Ten minutes drive from the airport.’

The last one was my mother’s favourite. When she could still speak, she would pick up the papers while I was brushing my teeth or shaving, and she would show them to me and say, ‘See, this one is close to the airport.’

Ma never got to fly in her life. But she thought proximity to the airport was important to her son.

That morning I sat beside Ma’s bed with the papers perched on my lap. I looked at the advertisements for the apartments, then at Ma. Her eyes were open, though hazy with tears that would stream down their corners. Her gaze was fixed at the ceiling above her. The thought crossed my mind that she was counting something; perhaps she was calculating our days and years in exile.

I don’t know what happened to me then, I just got up and ran out. I tried to remember how she would comment after sifting through the descriptions of her dream houses. I tried hard. I tried to remember what she would say after discovering flakes of tobacco in the pocket of my white shirt, which she insisted on washing with her own hands. I tried to repeat her voice in my head when she would wake up at midnight after I came home from work or after meeting friends, to serve me piping hot food, curious about how my day had gone. None of it came back to me. No matter how hard I tried, I drew a blank. The words were there, but the texture, tone and contours of her voice had gone missing. They were lost to me forever.

I could not even remember what she sounded like when she chanted what had become her personal anthem for more than a decade:
Our home in Kashmir had twenty-two rooms
.

I remember pressing my foot over a cockroach in desperation as it tried to crawl away.

We don’t know for certain where my ancestors originally came from. But in all probability they travelled from the plains of Punjab to settle in the Kashmir Valley, in the lap of the Himalayas, roughly three thousand years ago. They took the same route to enter Kashmir as their future generations took many times to escape from there, mostly due to religious persecution.

The land where they settled had been a lake. The valley had emerged out of this body of water due to a geological event, most probably an earthquake. My ancestors made it home gradually, building a legend around their settlement. They said that the vast lake that Kashmir had been before they settled there was inhabited by a demon called Jalodbhava. He had been granted immortality so long as he remained underwater. It was then that one of our gods drained the lake, sending Jalodbhava into hiding over a hill. Ultimately, our patron goddess assumed the form of a bird and dropped a pebble from her beak that, before landing, turned into a big rock, killing the demon instantly.

The land was abundant with nature’s bounty, but geographically isolated. Perhaps under the spell of nature’s magnificence, my ancestors took to the pursuit of knowledge. It is thus that Kashmir became the primeval home of the Brahmins, or
Brahmans
—those who are
conscious
.

We developed our own philosophy, our own way of life. We held that the world is real, as opposed to the other Hindu philosophy of the world being
maya
, an illusion. For us, everything in this world was a manifestation of this consciousness. We rejected the otherness of god. We evolved a way of life that was distinct from the bell-ringing, hymn-reciting popular religion. We believed that the world was essentially a creative expression of Shiva, or consciousness. Thus everyone could become Shiva, irrespective of caste or gender.

Kashmir is so beautiful, my grandfather used to say, even the gods are jealous of it. Not only of its beauty, but also of its contribution to art and scholarship. Arthur Anthony MacDonnell, the great professor of Sanskrit at Oxford University, once remarked, ‘History is the one weak spot in Indian literature. It is, in fact, non-existent.’ But the twelfth-century Kashmiri Pandit scholar, Kalhana, putting aside the Hindu question of existence being ‘dream and delusion’, penned the magnum opus,
Rajatarangini
(River of Kings), which is counted among the world’s most extraordinary historical works.

In the tenth century, the great Kashmiri Pandit scholar Abhinavagupta wrote thirty-five works, including
Tantraloka
, a treatise on Kashmiri Shaivism, and
Abhinavabharti
, a splendid commentary on the
Natyasastra
, the seed of the Indian performing arts. The eleventh century Kashmiri Pandit poet Kshemendra wrote
Brhatkathamanjari
, a collection of stories representing the lost tradition of
brhatkatha
(big story). From the same text, another Pandit scholar, Somadeva, prepared the famous
Kathasaritsagara
(Oceans of the Streams of Stories).

The eleventh century Pandit poet Bilhana had a secret affair with a king’s daughter. When it was discovered, he was thrown into prison and ordered to be executed by beheading. Even while facing the prospect of execution, he wrote poetry. It was in the darkness of prison that he wrote his
Chaurapanchasika
(The Collection of Fifty Verses by a Love Thief).

Many centuries earlier, Kashmiri scholars made immense contributions to Buddhism, which came to Kashmir with the emperor Asoka who extended his rule over Kashmir around 250 BC. It was in Kashmir that Buddhist scriptures were written in Sanskrit for the first time. The revered monk Gunavarman, who belonged to a royal family of Kashmir from the fifth century AD, refused the throne when it was offered to him upon the king’s death as he had no interest in wordly matters, wishing only to spread the teachings of the Buddha. He travelled to Ceylon, Java and China as well, propagating Buddhism. It was Kumarajiva, a Buddhist monk, whose father was a Kashmiri Pandit, who translated the Buddhist
Lotus Sutra
into Chinese in 406 AD. Guru Padmasambhava, or Rinpoche, who is also referred to as the Second Buddha, spent time in Kashmir, drinking from its knowledge reservoir. A Pandit scholar, Ratnavaja, was assigned the task of rebuilding the circular terrace of the Bsam-yas monastery in central Tibet, which was burnt down in the later part of the tenth century. In the early eleventh century, a female Pandit scholar called Lakshmi travelled to Tibet and taught
Anuttarayoga Tantra
.

It was in the fifth century in Tibet that a Pandit scholar was given the honorary title of
Bhatta
—which means someone who is learned. This name stuck. For the outside world, we were Kashmiri Brahmins or Pandits. But in Kashmir, we remained
Battas
, a derivative of
Bhatta
.

But somehow the gods couldn’t make peace with us. So they would wreak upon us disease, earthquakes, floods, famines and fires. And then they gave us rulers susceptible to greed, lust and deceit. And savagery. Fourteen hundred years ago, a ruler called Mihirakula is believed to have been travelling with his army through the Pir Panjal mountain pass when an elephant slipped and fell into a ravine. The cruel king loved the cries of the falling elephant so much that he ordered a hundred elephants to be forced down the mountain.

The two golden phases in Kashmir’s history were during the reigns of Lalitaditya and Avantivarman. Lalitaditya ruled Kashmir for about four decades in the early eighth century AD. He was considered a great administrator, and among his achievements the building of the Sun temple at Martand in south Kashmir is considered the greatest. It stands even today in spite of being ravaged by invaders, and is considered one of the most important archaeological sites in India. Of the temple, the British explorer Francis Younghusband wrote:

The temple is built on the most sublime site occupied by any building in the world—finer far than the site of Parthenon, or of the Taj, or of St. Peters. It is second only to the Egyptians in massiveness and strength and to the Greeks in elegance and grace.

Avantivarman ruled Kashmir for about three decades from 855 AD. Under his rule, the people of Kashmir prospered. He built magnificent temples and Buddhist monasteries and offered patronage to learned scholars.

From the fourteenth century onwards, Islam made inroads into Kashmir. Initially, it fused with local practices and evolved into a way of life rather than a strict, monotheistic religion. There is nothing that reflects this melding more than a
vaakh
by Lal Ded, Kashmir’s revered poetess-saint: