Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (9 page)

After our exodus to Jammu, I searched for that photograph, hoping that it was among the few items we had managed to salvage before fleeing. But I didn’t find it. In a way we were all thankful that barring my father’s mother, no one from that generation had lived to experience the pain and difficulties of living in exile.

It was only a few years ago that I found Totha’s picture inside some documents in my father’s briefcase. It is now in my father’s prayer room, along with pictures of my other ancestors.

One summer night—it was 1988—we awoke to noises coming from the BSF camp behind our house. By the time I got up, my father and uncles were already on the rear balcony, looking in the direction of the camp. I joined them. My father asked me to remain quiet. From there, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, I saw a young man being beaten up by a few BSF soldiers. He lay on the road, and asked for water. But all he got was kick after kick. After some time, he was forced onto his feet and led into a building.

It was only the following morning when we learnt what had happened. The young man’s name was Gowhar and he lived in a locality near ours. He was a karate expert and we kids adored him. Apparently, a few days earlier, he had had a tiff with a BSF soldier and punched him. Later, as he passed by the main gate of the BSF camp, the soldier and his friends accosted him and brought him inside where he was beaten up and kept in confinement. The next evening an angry crowd gathered outside the camp demanding his release. The BSF relented and he was set free.

I was doing my homework when I learnt that Gowhar had been set free and that he had been spotted eating a bagel at a local baker’s. I rushed out to meet him and shake hands with him. He was our hero, having braved the kicks of those soldiers. But when I reached the bakery, he was not there. The baker didn’t know where he had gone. I rushed to Latif’s shop to find out if he knew about Gowhar’s whereabouts. But his shop was closed.

I had been seeing less and less of Latif. His shop was either closed or manned by one of his friends or brothers. I asked Ravi about him. But he had no clue either. They had drifted apart a little. Ravi had been busy at the university, finishing his doctoral thesis. After graduating, he had been on the lookout for a job. Some of his friends had moved out of Kashmir to join private companies. But he did not want to leave.

It was around this time that my father had a mild heart attack. My father has always been prone to stomach ailments, and on that day he was in the office when he experienced severe pain in his abdomen. He was rushed to a gastroenterologist who recommended an injection for immediate relief. The injection caused a bad reaction—severe rashes broke out on his body and his speech turned incoherent.

It was always at such adverse moments that Ma would turn into a Joan of Arc. She was normally apprehensive. She didn’t let me go for school picnics to the Aharbal waterfall for fear that someone might push me into it. During winters, when we sometimes accompanied Father on his official trips to Jammu, she would switch on her pencil torch the moment the bus entered the Jawahar tunnel, the only connection between the Kashmir Valley and the rest of India. During a storm she would close all the doors and windows and sit frightened in one corner, waiting for it to end. And if it lasted for long, she would look at Father and ask, ‘Do you think this will end?’

Father would assure her a few times, but she would keep repeating her question till it irritated father.

‘No, this is going to last till Doomsday.’

That day, she somehow gathered her nerves and accompanied Father to the
bod aspatal
(main hospital) in an autorickshaw.

The government hospital was crowded, and even in the emergency ward, it was difficult to find a doctor to attend to my father. As Ma ran from one counter to another, a young doctor appeared. There was a mark on his forehead, the result of offering namaz five times a day as is required of pious Muslims. Ma recalled later how the doctor had looked at Father and immediately started his examination. And at that moment Father had vomited. It was so severe, Ma recalls, that it even filled the doctor’s shoes. But not once did he flinch. He had continued to treat my father.

A day later, Father was back home, although it took him a couple of weeks to recover fully.

Life went on as usual. But around this time, something had begun to change. It was in the air, something you couldn’t see, but could feel and smell.

Ma returned home one evening from office and she looked disconsolate. She entered slowly and set down her handbag. She asked my sister to get her some water. Father had come home early that day.

‘Are you unwell?’ he asked her.

She didn’t speak for a moment or two. And then she narrated what she had witnessed. In the bus on her way home, a man had helped an old Pandit lady disembark from the bus. Another woman, who was a Muslim, lashed out at the man, reminding him that the woman he helped was a Pandit and that she should have instead been kicked out of the bus. What Ma witnessed that day in the bus, we considered an aberration.

Rehman, meanwhile, was acting strange at times. I remember we were getting our attic renovated and he took a dig at us.

‘Why are you wasting your money like this?’ he said as he poured milk from his can. ‘Tomorrow, if not today, this house will belong to us.’ As usual Ma dismissed his talk.

Ravi had gone on a plant-collection trip to the Lolab Valley along the Line of Control, with his department colleagues, including one of his best friends Irshad. In the forest they were waylaid by armed men who asked if there were any Hindus in their group. Ravi was the only one and the men were told that there were none. When they asked for their names, Ravi used a fake name that identified him as a Muslim. But, even then, we still didn’t realize what was to come to pass.

On July 31, 1988, two low-intensity bomb blasts rocked Srinagar. One bomb had been planted outside the central telephone exchange while the other was laid outside the golf course. These were followed by other blasts. They were considered to be the handiwork of terrorists from Punjab who sneaked into Kashmir to escape the police in their area.

An uncle returned after praying at the Shankaracharya temple. ‘I saw a group of men racing up and down the stairs,’ he said. The same thing was happening at Hari Parbat. On the bypass road, near our house, even I saw hordes of men doing physical exercises. This had never happened before. It was only later that we realized that some of these men had been among those who had crossed over the border to Pakistan to receive arms training, and this had been a part of their fitness regimen.

A bomb blast in Srinagar claimed the first Pandit casualty in March 1989. Prabhawati of Chadoora tehsil was killed in a blast on Hari Singh Street on March 14. That month, I saw Latif one day. I was standing with Father at the vegetable shop when he passed by holding a corner of a green cloth which was held on the other corners by three others. He didn’t see us. He was collecting funds, he said, for the building of a mosque.

I looked at him. He looked haggard, his skin was rugged and his beard thicker. It was then that his eyes fell on me and he smiled. He didn’t look at Father. I didn’t feel right in my heart.

The party walked on, holding their cloth.

It was from a neighbour that we heard the first rumours. He had gone to the ration shop to get sugar when he overheard a man exclaiming—‘Inshallah, next ration we will buy in Islamabad!’

It was around this time that bus conductors in Lal Chowk could be heard shouting—
Sopore, Hand’wor, Upore
. Sopore and Handwara were border towns while
Upore
means across. Across the Line of Control. It was meant as an enticement for the youth to cross over the border for arms training, to launch a jihad against India.

On a hill in the Badami Bagh cantonment, someone had painted ‘JKLF’. One could see it from a distance. It stood for Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. It was rumoured to be an organization of young men who had crossed over the border to receive arms training.

At school we heard the word ‘mujahid’ for the first time. We knew this word. We had heard it on TV, accompanied by images of men in Afghanistan firing rockets from their shoulders. But in the context of Kashmir, it seemed out of place. What were mujahids to do in Kashmir?

On June 23, 1989, pamphlets were distributed in Srinagar. It was an ultimatum to Muslim women, by an organization that called itself Hazb-i-Islami, to comply with ‘Islamic’ standards within two days or face ‘action’. Pandit women were asked to put a tilak on their foreheads for identification.

On September 2, the 300-year-old Baba Reshi shrine was gutted in a fire under mysterious circumstances. On the same morning, a wireless operator of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), was shot in our neighbourhood.

On the afternoon of September 14, I was playing cricket in the school grounds. My side won the match, and I was about to treat myself to an orange lolly with my pocket money when I felt someone’s hand on my shoulder. I turned back and saw Father standing there. He smiled.

‘Go and get your bag, we have to go home,’ he said.

I thought something terrible had happened at home. ‘Why, what happened?’ I asked.

‘Someone has been shot in Habba Kadal. The situation will turn worse. So we need to head home.’

That was when the first Pandit fell to bullets. Some armed men had entered the house of the political activist Tika Lal Taploo and shot him dead.

The next day, Father did not let me go to school. We were told that Taploo’s funeral procession was pelted with stones. But barring that, nothing more untoward happened immediately after his death. I went back to school two days later. During the Hindi class, when the Muslim boys would be away for Urdu class, the Pandit teacher got an opportunity to discuss the killing with us. ‘Times are beginning to get tough,’ she said. ‘That is why it is important for all of you to study with renewed vigour.’

In its preliminary investigation, the state police believed that Taploo’s killing did not fit the pattern emerging from the activities of Kashmiri militants.

Twelve days after Taploo’s death, the then chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, performed a small piece of classical dance along with dancer Yamini Krishnamurthy during a cultural function at the Martand temple. A few days later, he assured people that militancy would end soon.

On Eid-e-Milad-un-Nabi, on October 14, a massive crowd gathered near the Budshah chowk in the heart of Srinagar, and from there, it marched towards Eidgah to the graveyard that had been renamed the ‘martyr’s graveyard’. The onlookers cheered and showered
shireen
on the marchers as if to welcome a marriage procession. That evening, father returned home with a neighbour and they told us they had witnessed the procession. The crowd was shouting slogans that had shocked them.

Yahan kya chalega, Nizam-e-Mustafa
La sharqiya la garbiya, Islamia Islamia

What will work here? The rule of Mustafa
No eastern, no western, only Islamic, only Islamic

Zalzala aaya hai kufr ke maidaan mein,
Lo mujahid aa gaye maidaan mein

An earthquake has occurred in the realm of the infidels,
The mujahids have come out to fight

It was indeed an earthquake. It toppled everything in Kashmir in the next few weeks. Within a few days the whole scenario changed. There was another series of bomb blasts outside other symbols of ‘Indianness’—India Coffee House, Punjab National Bank, the Press Trust of India. Then the tide turned against wine shops and cinema halls.

It was only much later that we were able to connect this turmoil to world events occurring around the same time. The Russians had withdrawn from Afghanistan nine years after they swept into the country. In Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini had urged Muslims to kill the author of
The Satanic Verses
. In Israel, a Palestinian bomber struck in a bus for the first time, killing sixteen civilians. A revolution was surging across Eastern Europe; and a bloodied frenzy was about to be unleashed against the Armenian Christian community in Azerbaijan.