Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (8 page)

‘All your Pakistani heroes are shit scared of Kris Srikkanth,’ I said, on the verge of tears.

‘There you are!’ he said, and he laughed. ‘The dal-eating Indians cannot fight Pakistan.’

‘Are you a kid like him?’ my mother intervened.

‘This is war,
behnai,
’ he said and looked mockingly at me.

‘And you! You stop watching these matches,’ my mother said. ‘They mean nothing. It is just a game.’

But by then it was war indeed.

By 1986, forced blackouts were the norm in the Valley on India’s Independence Day. In some places, if India won a cricket match against Pakistan, a stone could crash through one’s windowpane and land in the bedroom. On April 18, 1986, India and Pakistan played against each other at Sharjah in the final of the Austral-Asia cup. In anticipation, I bullied Totha into buying me firecrackers from Maharaj Ganj.

On television, you could see Arab sheikhs in the VIP enclosure throw money in the air whenever a Pakistani batsman hit a boundary. But India managed to stay afloat.

The last over. My heart was pounding against my ribcage. The last ball. Pakistan needed four runs to win. Javed Miandad was on strike. Chetan Sharma was bowling. I had a matchbox in my hand. Sharma bowled a low full toss and Miandad hit it for a six. The stadium erupted. Miandad and number 11 batsman Tauseef Ahmed ran to the team pavilion, jubilant. My matchbox went limp with sweat. Every combustible item in the Sharjah ground was on fire.

A few minutes later, it was as if it were Diwali in Kashmir. I think every cracker available in Kashmir was burst in the next one hour. People streamed out of their houses and on to the streets chanting
Allah ho Akbar
. In the nippy April weather of the Valley, people drank gallons of Limca to celebrate, the way they had seen cricket stars celebrate with champagne.

And I lay huddled in a corner of my house.

Twenty-five years after that episode, in 2011, when we had been in exile for more than two decades, India registered a World Cup victory. I am grown up now, and victory or defeat in a cricket match means nothing to me. But my father had tears in his eyes when India won. He looked at me expectantly. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that though I don’t care any longer for cricket, my feelings from 1986 remain.

In
More Die of Heartbreak
, Saul Bellow calls such feelings ‘first heart’. My first heart remains with that failed yorker bowled by Chetan Sharma.

During the summer vacations, I stayed at home while my parents were at work. Ma was always visiting some village or the other. When she returned in the evenings, her handbag would be full of small tokens of gratitude given by villagers who sought treatment at her health centre. Someone would fall from a walnut tree and get hurt badly. Or someone would accidentally be hurt with an axe or some other tool. Or a child would have a fever and Ma would provide the required medicine. Or an anaemic mother would get better because of a health supplement Ma recommended. Once they got well, the villagers would return and offer her apples, or raw walnuts, or almonds, or the juiciest of chestnuts, or a small packet of saffron. As children, we ransack her handbag and treated ourselves to its contents.

But sometimes, staying inside the house for the whole day would make me cranky. One day, out of sheer boredom, I asked Ravi if I could accompany him to the university. He sensed that I was down. ‘Today, I have classes to attend. And anyway, there is not much to show you at the university. But why don’t you be ready tomorrow morning and we will go for a small outing,’ he said. I was so excited that the moment Ma returned in the evening, I told her about our plans.

I couldn’t sleep for hours after Ma had tucked me into bed. And when I finally did, I dreamt of the next day and the fun we would have.

By sunrise the next morning I was wide awake. I put on my best shirt and a pair of trousers father had bought for me from the Blue Fox garment store and I waited for Ravi to wake up.

We set out in the early afternoon on his Yamaha bike. It was a bright afternoon and in no time we left the hubbub of Lal Chowk to enter the tranquil area of the Shankaracharya temple near the foothills.

While riding on a long road, Ravi slowed down his bike and asked me to look far ahead. ‘Can you see water on the road?’ he asked. I looked intensely but couldn’t see anything. Embarrassed, I lied and said that I could.

‘That is just an illusion. There is no water there, but in the heat one imagines that there is. It is called a mirage,’ Ravi explained.

‘Oh yes, I see it clearly,’ I lied again.

Our first stop was at the Shalimar Garden. We parked the motorcycle next to photo studios where pictures of studio owners with various film stars were displayed.

Inside the garden, Ravi bought a packet of red cherries and we sat down under a tree like two old friends meeting after a long time. He told me of an Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, who had devised the law of genetics using pea plants. He spoke of other things as well, but by that time my attention was diverted by a foreigner with green hair. She had perched herself atop a tree, and below, her friend was beseeching her to climb down. But she refused, and after every minute or so, would break into uncontrollable laughter. My school friends had told me how some foreigners consumed drugs. I had no idea what they meant and what drugs really were. I had heard of how foreigners carried ‘brown sugar’. We thought sugar, if burnt in a pan, turned brown and acquired the properties of a drug. That day when I saw the green-haired woman, I thought she must have consumed brown sugar.

We thought of foreigners as either very educated and cultured—‘Englishman type’—or bohemian. We loosely termed the latter as ‘hippies’ and even had a ditty for them:

Janana yeh ajab haal dekho, hippiyon ke lambe lambe baal dekho
.

Oh dear, look at their strange ways, look at the long hair of the hippies.

From Shalimar Garden we went on to Pari Mahal and Ravi told me how it was built by the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh as his library. According to legend, the place was inhabited by fairies, and I remember asking Ravi many questions about their existence. At the entrance of the Chashm-e-Shahi gardens, Ravi treated me to an ice-cream cone.

Our next stop was Nehru Park, where we hired a shikara to take us to the middle of the Dal Lake. In chaste Kashmiri, the kind I had never heard Ravi speaking before, he bargained with the boatman. In the middle of the lake, when the waves hit the shikara making it sway a little, my heart sank. But I showed no fear. I didn’t want Ravi to think of me as a sissy.

Back on Boulevard road, we went to a small eatery and Ravi bought us hot dogs. He also asked for a bottle of Gold Spot for me and a Thums Up for himself. He always had Thums Up.

On our way home, I urged him to speed up his bike, and he did so on some stretches. I was thrilled. I held him tightly.

For days afterwards, I would boast to my friends about Mendel, Dara Shikoh and the green-haired English mem I had seen.

Eleven years after that carefree day, the nightmare about Ravi I had had a few months earlier came true.

It was in September 1986 that Totha also left us. A few weeks prior to his death, on the day of Eid, he fell in his room and lost consciousness. After that, he was never able to stand on his feet. His reckless smoking had taken a toll on his lungs. His kidneys were also damaged because of excessive blood sugar. He was shifted to a bigger room on the first floor, and his bed lay beside a glass cabinet where Ravi kept his copies of
India Today
.

Totha was shocked by his new circumstances. He barely spoke, and for hours he would stare into nothingness. We visited him every day and tried to make him as comfortable as possible.

One day my aunt entered his room and found him smoking. She called my uncle and he admonished Totha for being so callous towards his condition. They searched his belongings and found a few cigarettes underneath his pillow. They were taken away. Throughout this episode, Totha did not utter a word. He kept his eyes closed.

A day later, I crossed over the dwarf fence to see him. He smiled weakly and I asked him to place his hands on the floor and I stepped onto them. He liked to get his hands pressed like this.

After a while, he looked at me and said, ‘If I ask you to do something, will you do it?’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Go to my room. Open the wooden trunk; you will find some money inside. Bring a ten-rupee note here to me,’ he said.

I ran to his room and brought him the note.

‘Now will you go and buy me two cigarettes from the shop? You can buy yourself a chocolate as well. But, listen, just get it discreetly, will you?’

Normally, I would have sprinted to the shop and got him what he wanted. But I remembered the previous day’s episode. At the same time, I didn’t want to blatantly say ‘no’ to him. With the note crumpled in my fist I stepped outside and then just sat on a stone slab beside a poplar tree. I waited for a while and then went back to Totha.

‘Totha, no shop is open. There is some strike today,’ I lied. Totha looked at me for several seconds. And then he said a feeble ‘okay’.

‘Keep the note with you, buy yourself whatever you want. And don’t forget to share it with your sister,’ he said.

I left, but I just couldn’t bear the thought that I had lied to him. It was not that I had not lied to Totha before. Sometimes he would get me a present, and it wouldn’t work properly. A pen, for example. After a few days he would ask me if I liked it, and I would invariably say ‘yes’. But this time it was different.

I raced towards the market. I bought two Capstan cigarettes, the brand he usually smoked, and I brought them to him.

‘Totha, I found the Fancy provision store open,’ I said. He smiled. ‘Just keep watch and alert me if someone comes up,’ he said. I helped him sit up and put a cushion behind his back. He lit his cigarette while I kept watch at the head of the stairs. In between, I peeped in his room and saw him taking deep puffs. His face looked peaceful. After he had finished, I threw the butt and the burnt matchstick out the window. Totha lay back on his bed. And then he mumbled a few lines from a Kashmiri verse about the birth of Krishna. When I was much younger, he would often sing that to me as a lullaby:

Gatte kani gash aav chaane zang’e
Jai, jai jai Devaki nandan’ey

On a moonless night, light spread on your accord
Salutations, O the beloved son of Devaki

A few days later, he passed away. He was cremated where Dedda and my grandfather had been cremated. In the garden that one could see through the window of his room, I built him a shrine and decorated it with marigold flowers and Mini chewing gum, which he had often bought for me.

A few months before his death, I had asked Totha to have his picture taken. Between Ravi’s family and mine, we had many family albums. But there was not a single picture of Totha. After I had insisted for days, he agreed and had his picture taken with him wearing his trademark kurta and standing against the backdrop of the photographer’s rainbow studio curtain.