The mountains around Dachigam were comparatively quiet. Still, in addition to the paramilitary pickets permanently stationed there, each time His Excellency visited, Area Domination Patrols would go in a day ahead to secure the hills that looked down on to the route his armored convoy took, and Mine Proof Armored Vehicles would check the road for landmines. The park was permanently closed to local people. To secure the guest house, more than a hundred men were stationed on the roof, in watchtowers around the property and in concentric circles a kilometer deep into the forest. Not many folks in India would believe the lengths to which we had to go in Kashmir just to get our boss a little fresh fish.
I was up late that night finalizing my daily report for His Excellency’s morning briefing. The volume on my old Sony player was turned low. Rasoolan Bai was singing a Chaiti, “Yahin thaiyan motiya hiraee gaeli Rama.” Kesar Bai was undoubtedly our most accomplished female Hindustani vocalist, but Rasoolan was surely our most erotic. She had a deep, gravelly, masculine voice, quite unlike the high-pitched, virginal, permanently adolescent voice that has come to dominate our collective imagination through Bollywood soundtracks. (My father, a scholar of Hindustani classical music, thought Rasoolan was profane. It remained one of our many unresolved differences.) I could picture the string of pearls she sang about being broken in the urgency of lovemaking, her voice languorously following the beads as they skittered around the bedroom floor. (Ah yes, there was a time when a Muslim courtesan could so hauntingly invoke a Hindu deity.)
There had been serious trouble in the city that morning. The government had announced elections in a few months’ time. They would be the first in almost nine years. The militants had announced a boycott. It was pretty clear then (unlike now when the queues at the voting booths are unmanageable) that people were not going to come out and vote without some serious persuasion on our part. The “free” press would be there in all its glorious idiocy, so we would have to be careful. Our Ace of Spades was to be the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon, the Muslim Brotherhood, our counter-insurgency force, an opportunistic militant group that had surrendered as a group—lock, stock and barrel. Gradually its ranks were expanded by other disaggregated individuals who began to surrender (“cylinder” as Kashmiris called it) in droves. We had regrouped and rearmed them, and returned them to the fray. The Ikhwanis were rough men, mostly extortionists and petty criminals who had joined the militancy when they saw profit in that endeavor, and were the first to cylinder when the going got rough. They had the kind of access to local intelligence that we could never hope for, and once they had been turned around, they had the advantage of an ambiguous provenance that allowed them to carry out operations that were outside the mandate of our regular forces. At first they had proved to be an invaluable asset, but then had become increasingly hard to control. The most feared of them all, the Prince of Darkness himself, was a man known locally as Papa, who had once been nothing more than a factory watchman. In his illustrious career as an Ikhwan he had killed scores of people. (I think the number now stands at one hundred and three.) The terror he evoked did, at first, weigh the balance in our favor, but by ’96 he had begun to outlive his usefulness and we were considering reining him in. (He’s in prison now.) In March that year, without instructions from us, Papa had bumped off the well-known editor of an Urdu daily—an irresponsible Urdu daily, I have to say. (Irresponsible, virulently anti-India dailies that exaggerated body counts and got their facts wrong had their uses too—they undermined the local media in general and made it easier for us to tar them all with the same brush. To tell you the truth, we even funded some of them.) In May Papa had enclosed a community graveyard in Pulwama, claiming it was his ancestral property. Then he killed a much-loved village schoolteacher in a border village and threw his body into a no man’s land that had been mined with IEDs. So the body couldn’t be approached, there could be no funeral prayers, and the dead man’s students had to watch the corpse of their teacher being picked at by kites and vultures.
Impressed by Papa’s gains, other Ikhwanis had begun to follow his example.
That morning a group of them had stopped an old Kashmiri couple at a security barrier in downtown Srinagar. When the man refused to hand over his wallet they abducted him and drove away. People gathered and chased them all the way to the camp the Ikhwanis shared with the Border Security Force. The old man was thrown out of the Gypsy just outside the camp. Once they were inside they—how should I put it—they completely lost their marbles. They lobbed a grenade over the walls and then fired into the crowd with a machine gun. A boy was killed and a dozen or so people injured, half of them seriously. The Ikhwanis then went to the police station, threatened the police and prevented them from lodging a report. In the afternoon they ambushed the boy’s funeral procession and made off with the coffin. Which meant there was no body, and therefore there could be no murder charge. By evening public protests had turned violent. Three police stations were burned down. The security forces fired at the crowds and killed fourteen more people. Curfew was declared in all the larger towns—Sopore, Baramulla and Srinagar of course.
When I heard the phone ring and His Excellency’s aide-de-camp answer it, I assumed the trouble had got out of hand and they were calling to ask for fresh orders. That did not turn out to be the case.
The caller said he was speaking from the Joint Interrogation Center, the JIC, which functioned out of the Shiraz Cinema.
It isn’t what it sounds like. We hadn’t shut down a functioning cinema hall and turned it into an interrogation center. The Shiraz had been shut down years ago by an outfit called the Allah Tigers. It ordered the closing of all cinema halls, liquor shops and bars as being un-Islamic and “vehicles of India’s cultural aggression.” The proclamation was signed by an Air Marshal Noor Khan. The Tigers plastered the city with threatening posters and put bombs in bars. When the Air Marshal was finally captured he turned out to be a barely literate peasant from a remote mountain village who had probably never set eyes on an airplane. I was a junior member of a team of interrogators (it was before my Srinagar posting) who visited him and several other senior militants in prison in the hope of turning them around. He answered our questions with slogans, which he shouted out as though he was addressing a mass rally: Jis Kashmir ko khoon se seencha, woh Kashmir hamara hai! The Kashmir we have irrigated with our blood, that Kashmir is ours! Or the war cry of the Allah Tigers: La Sharakeya wa La Garabeya, Islamia, Islamia!—roughly: Neither East nor West, Islam is best!
The Air Marshal was a brave man and I almost envied him his clear-hearted, simple-minded fervor. He remained impenitent, even after a stint in Cargo. He’s out now, after serving a long sentence. We still keep an eye on him and others like him. He seems to have stayed out of trouble. He earns a meager living selling stamps outside a district court in Srinagar. I’m told he is not in his right mind, although I cannot confirm that. Cargo could be a pretty rough place.
—
The ADC who answered the phone told me that the caller had given his name as Major Amrik Singh and had asked for me not just by designation but, unusually, also by name—Biplab Dasgupta, Deputy Station Head, India Bravo (radio code in Kashmir for the Intelligence Bureau).
I knew the fellow, not personally—I’d never set eyes on him—but by reputation. He was known as Amrik Singh “Spotter”—for his uncanny ability to spot the snake in the grass, the militant hidden among a crowd of civilians. (He’s famous now, by the way. Posthumously. He killed himself recently—shot his wife, his three young sons and put a bullet through his own head. I can’t say I’m sorry. Shame about the wife and children though.) Major Amrik Singh was a bad apple. No, let me rephrase that—he was a putrid apple, and was, at the time of that midnight phone call, at the center of a pretty putrid storm. A couple of months after I arrived in Srinagar, which was in January of 1995, Amrik Singh had, on orders quite likely, apprehended a well-known lawyer and human rights activist, Jalib Qadri, at a checkpoint. Qadri was a nuisance, a brash,
abrasive man who did not know the meaning of nuance. The night he was arrested, he was due to leave for Delhi from where he was going to Oslo to depose at an international human rights conference. His arrest was only meant to prevent that silly circus from taking place. Amrik Singh apprehended Qadri publicly, in the presence of Qadri’s wife, but the arrest was not formally registered, which was not unusual. There was an outcry about Qadri’s “abduction,” a much bigger one than we expected, so after a few days we thought it prudent to release the man. But he was nowhere to be found. A great hue and cry arose. We set up a search committee and tried to calm nerves. A few days later Jalib Qadri’s body showed up in a sack floating down the Jhelum. It was in a terrible condition—skull smashed in, eyes gouged out, and so on. Even by Kashmir’s standards, this was somewhat excessive. The level of public anger went off the charts—naturally—so the local police were permitted to file a case. A high-level committee was set up to look into the whole thing. Witnesses to the abduction, people who saw Qadri in Amrik Singh’s custody in an army camp, people who witnessed the altercation between the two that sent Amrik Singh into a rage, actually came forward to give written statements, which was rare. Even Amrik Singh’s accomplices, Ikhwanis most of them, were willing to turn approvers and testify against him in court. But then one by one their bodies began to turn up. In fields, in forests, by the side of the road…he killed them all. The army and the administration had to at least pretend to do something, although they couldn’t really act against him. He knew too much and he made it clear that if he went down he would take as many people as he could down with him. He was cornered, and dangerous. It was decided the best thing to do would be to get him out of the country and find him asylum somewhere. Which is eventually what happened. But it couldn’t be done at once. Not while the spotlight was on him. There had to be a cooling-off period. As a first step he was taken off field operations and given a desk job. In the Shiraz JIC, out of trouble’s way. Or so we thought.
So this was the man who was calling me. I can’t say I was longing to speak to him. A pestilence like that is best kept quarantined.
When I answered the phone he sounded excited. He spoke so fast it took me a while to realize he was speaking English and not Punjabi. He said they had captured an A-Category Terrorist, a Commander Gulrez, a dreaded Hizb-ul-Mujahideen commander, in a massive cordon-and-search operation on a houseboat.
This was Kashmir; the Separatists spoke in slogans and our men spoke in press releases; their cordon-and-search operations were always “massive,” everybody they picked up was always “dreaded,” seldom less than “A-category,” and the recoveries they made from those they captured were always “war-like.” It wasn’t surprising, because each of those adjectives had a corresponding incentive—a cash reward, an honorable mention in their service dossier, a medal for bravery or a promotion. So, as you can imagine, that piece of information didn’t exactly get my pulse going.
He said that the terrorist had been killed while trying to escape. That didn’t do much for me either. It happened several times a day on a good day—or a bad day, depending on your perspective. So why was I being called in the middle of the night about something so routine? And what did his zealousness have to do with my department or with me?
A “ladies” had been captured along with Commander Gulrez, he said. She wasn’t Kashmiri.
Now that was unusual. Unheard of, actually.
The “ladies” had been handed over to ACP Pinky, for interrogation.
We all knew Assistant Commandant Pinky Sodhi of the peach complexion and the long black braid worn coiled under her cap. Her twin brother, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was a senior police officer who had been shot down by militants in Sopore when he was out on his morning jog. (Foolish thing for a senior officer to do, even one who prided himself on, or, as it turned out, deluded himself about, being “loved” by the locals.) ACP Pinky had been given a job in the CRPF—Central Reserve Police Force—on compassionate grounds, as compensation to the family for the death of her brother. Nobody had ever seen her out of uniform. For all her stunning looks, she was a brutal interrogator who often exceeded her brief because she was exorcizing demons of her own. She wasn’t in the Amrik Singh league, but still—God help any Kashmiri who fell into her hands. As for those who didn’t fall into her hands—many of them were busy writing love poems to her and even proposing marriage. Such was ACP Pinky’s fatal charm.
The “ladies” whom they had arrested, I was told, had refused to divulge her name. Since the captured “ladies” wasn’t a Kashmiri, I imagined ACP Pinky had exercised some restraint and had not unleashed herself completely. Had she, then neither Ladies nor Gents would have been able to withhold information. Anyway, I was getting impatient. I still could not fathom what any of it had to do with me.
Finally Amrik Singh came to the point: during the interrogation, my name had come up. The woman had asked for a message to be passed on to me. He said he couldn’t understand the message, but she said I’d understand. He read it, or rather spelled it, aloud over the phone:
G-A-R-S-O-N H-O-B-A-R-T
Rasoolan’s voice, still searching for her scattered pearls, filled my head: Kahan vaeka dhoondhoon re? Dhoondhat dhoondhat baura gaeli Rama…
—
Garson Hobart must have sounded like a secret code for a militant strike, or an acknowledgment of receipt for a weapons consignment. The mad brute on the other end of the phone was waiting for an explanation from me. I couldn’t think of how to even begin.
Could Commander Gulrez have something to do with Musa? Was he Musa? I had tried to get in touch with him several times after moving to Srinagar. I wanted to offer my condolences to him for what had happened to his family. I had never succeeded, which in those days usually meant only one thing. He was underground.
Who else could Tilo have been with? Had they killed Musa in front of her? Oh God.
—
I told Amrik Singh as curtly as I could that I would call him back.
—
My first instinct was to put as great a distance as possible between the woman I loved and myself. Does that make me a coward? If it does, at least I’m a candid one.
Even if I did want to go to her, it wasn’t possible. I was in the middle of a jungle in the middle of the night. Moving out would have meant sirens, alarms, at least four jeeps and an armored vehicle. It would have meant taking along sixteen men at the very least. That was the minimum protocol. That kind of circus would not have helped Tilo. Or me. And it would have compromised His Excellency’s security in ways that could have led to unthinkable consequences. It could have been a trap to draw me out. After all, Musa knew about Garson Hobart. It was paranoid thinking, but in those days there wasn’t much daylight between caution and paranoia.
I was out of options. I dialed Ahdoos Hotel and asked for Naga. Fortunately he was there. He offered to go to the Shiraz immediately. The more concerned and helpful he sounded, the more annoyed I became. I could literally hear him growing into the role I was offering him, seizing with both hands the opportunity to do what he loved most—grandstand. His eagerness reassured and infuriated me at the same time.
I called Amrik Singh and told him to expect a journalist called Nagaraj Hariharan. Our man. I said that if they had nothing on the woman, they were to release her immediately and hand her over to him.
—
A few hours later Naga called to say Tilo was in the room next to his at Ahdoos. I suggested he put her on the morning flight to Delhi.
“She’s not freight, Das-Goose,” he said. “She says she’s going for this Commander Gulrez’s funeral. Whoever the hell that is.”
Das-Goose. He hadn’t called me that since college. In college, in his ultra-radical days, he would mockingly call me (for some reason always in a German accent) “Biplab Das-Goose-da”—his version of Biplab Dasgupta. The Revolutionary Brother Goose.
I never forgave my parents for naming me Biplab, after my paternal grandfather. Time
s had changed. By the time I was born the British were gone, we were a free country. How could they name a baby “Revolution”? How was anybody supposed to go through life with a name like that? At one point I did consider changing my name legally, to something a little more peaceful like Siddhartha or Gautam or something. I dropped the idea because I knew that with friends like Naga, the story would clatter behind me like a tin can tied to a cat’s tail. So there I was—here I am—a Biplab, in the innermost chamber of the secret heart of the establishment that calls itself the Government of India.
“Was it Musa?” I asked Naga.
“She won’t say. But who else could it have been?”
—
By Monday morning the weekend body count had risen to nineteen; the fourteen demonstrators killed in the firing, the boy the Ikhwanis had shot, Musa or Commander Gulrez or whatever the hell he called himself, and three bodies of militants killed in a shoot-out in Ganderbal. Hundreds of thousands of mourners had gathered to carry those nineteen coffins (which included an empty one for the boy whose body had been stolen) on their shoulders to the Martyrs’ Graveyard.
The Governor’s office called to say that it would not be advisable for us to attempt to return to the city until the following day. In the afternoon my secretary called:
“Sir, sun lijiye, please listen, sir…”
Sitting on the verandah of the Dachigam Forest Guest House, over birdsong and the sounds of crickets, I heard the reverberating boom of a hundred thousand or more voices raised together calling for freedom: Azadi! Azadi! Azadi! On and on and on. Even on the phone it was unnerving. Quite unlike hearing the Air Marshal shouting slogans in his prison cell. It was as though the city was breathing through a single pair of lungs, swelling like a throat with that urgent, keening cry. I had seen my share of demonstrations by then, and heard more than my share of slogan-shouting in other parts of the country. This was different, this Kashmiri chant. It was more than a political demand. It was an anthem, a hymn, a prayer. The irony was—is—that if you put four Kashmiris in a room and ask them to specify what exactly they mean by Azadi, what exactly are its ideological and geographic contours, they would probably end up slitting each other’s throats. And yet it would be a mistake to chalk this down to confusion. Their problem is not confusion, not really. It’s more like a terrible clarity that exists outside the language of modern geopolitics. All the protagonists on all sides of the conflict, especially us, exploited this fault line mercilessly. It made for a perfect war—a war that can never be won or lost, a war without end.