The chant that I heard on the phone that morning was condensed, distilled passion—and it was as blind and as futile as passion usually is. During those (fortunately short-lived) occasions when it was in full cry, it had the power to cut through the edifice of history and geography, of reason and politics. It had the power to make even the most hardened of us wonder, even if momentarily, what the hell we were doing in Kashmir, governing a people who hated us so viscerally.
The so-called martyrs’ funerals were always a game of nerves. The police and security forces had orders to remain alert, but out of sight. This was not just because on those occasions tempers naturally ran high and a confrontation would inevitably lead to another massacre—this we had learned from bitter experience. The thinking was that permitting the population to vent its feelings and shout its slogans from time to time would prevent that anger from accumulating and building into an unmanageable cliff of rage. So far, in this more than quarter-century-long conflict in Kashmir, it has paid off. Kashmiris mourned, wept, shouted their slogans, but in the end they always went back home. Gradually, over the years, as it grew into a habit, a predictable, acceptable cycle, they began to distrust and disrespect themselves, their sudden fervors and their easy capitulations. That was an unplanned benefit that accrued to us.
Nevertheless, to allow half a million, sometimes even a million, people to take to the streets in any situation, let alone during an insurgency, is a serious gamble.
—
The following morning, once the streets had been secured, we returned to the city. I drove straight to Ahdoos to find that Tilo and Naga had checked out. Naga didn’t return to Srinagar for a while. I was told he was on leave.
A few weeks later, I received an invitation for their wedding. I went of course, how could I not? I felt responsible for the travesty. For driving Tilo into the arms of a man I felt sure had been less than honest with her. I didn’t think she would have been made privy to the relationship between her soon-to-be husband and the Intelligence Bureau. She would have thought she was marrying a campaigning journalist, seeker of justice, scourge of the establishment that had killed the man she loved. The deception made me angry, but of course I couldn’t be the one to disabuse her of that notion.
—
The reception was on the moonlit lawns of Naga’s parents’ big white Art Deco house in Diplomatic Enclave. It was a small, exquisite affair, very unlike the overblown extravaganzas that have become so popular these days. There were white flowers everywhere, lilies, roses, cascading strings of jasmine, arranged in the most artful ways by Naga’s mother and older sister, neither of whom looked, or even pretended to look, happy. The driveway and the flower beds were lined with clay lamps. Japanese lanterns hung from trees. Fairy lights were threaded through the branches. Old-world bearers in liveried costumes with brass buttons, red-and-gold cummerbunds and starched white turbans rushed about with trays of food and drink. A posse of mop-haired dogs smelling of perfume and cigarette smoke ran amok among the guests, like a small army of yapping, motorized floor swabs.
On a raised platform covered with white sheets, a band of musicians from Barmer, in white dhotis and kurtas and bright, printed turbans, transported us to the Rajasthan desert. Muslim folk musicians were an odd choice for a wedding of this kind. But my friend Naga was eclectic and had discovered them on a trip he’d made to the desert. They were outstanding performers. Their raw, haunting music opened up the city sky and shook the dust off the stars. The greatest of them all, Bhungar Khan, sang of the coming of the monsoon. In his wild, high, almost-female voice he transformed a song about the parched desert’s ache for rain into a song about a woman yearning for the return of her lover. My memory of Tilo’s wedding has always been imbued with that song.
—
It had been more than ten years since I had seen Tilo and shared that joint with her on her terrace. She was thinner than I remembered. Her collarbones winged out from the base of her neck. Her gossamer sari was the color of sunset. Her head was covered, but through the sheer fabric I could see the smooth shape of her skull. She was bald, or almost. Her hair just a velvet stubble. My first thought was that she had been unwell, and was recovering from chemotherapy or some other dreadful affliction that caused hair loss. But her dense, almost-bushy eyebrows and thick eyelashes put that particular theory to rest. She certainly didn’t look ill or unwell. She was barefaced and wore no make-up, no kajal, no bindi, no henna on her hands and feet. She looked like an understudy for the bride, temporarily standing in while the real one got dressed. Desolate I think is the word I’d use to describe her. She gave the impression of being utterly, unreachably alone, even at her own wedding. The insouciance was gone.
When I walked up to her, she looked straight at me, but I felt as though someone else was looking out through her eyes. I was expecting anger, but what I encountered was emptiness. It could have been my imagination, but as she held my gaze a tremor went through her. For the nine-thousandth time I noticed what a beautiful mouth she had. I was transfixed by the way it moved. I could almost see the effort it took for it to form words and a voice to attach to them:
“It’s just a haircut.”
The haircut—the shave—must have been ACP Pinky Sodhi’s idea. A policewoman’s therapy for what she saw as treason—sleeping with the enemy, her brother’s killers. Pinky Sodhi liked to keep things simple.
I had never seen Naga look so disconcerted, so anxious. He held Tilo’s hand right through the evening. Musa’s ghost was wedged between them. I could almost see him—short, compact, with that chipped-tooth smile and that quiet air of his. It was as though the three of them were getting married.
That’s probably how it turned out in the end.
—
Naga’s mother was at the center of a clot of elegant ladies whose perfume I could smell from across the lawn. Auntie Meera was from a royal family, one of the minor principalities in Madhya Pradesh. She was a teenage widow, whose royal husband had developed an aggressive lung tumor and died three months after she married him. Unsure of what to do with her, her parents sent her to a finishing school in England, where she met Naga’s father at a party in London. There could not have been a better position for a queen without a queendom than being the wife of a suave Foreign Service officer. She modeled herself into a perfect hostess—a modern Indian Maharani with a plummy British accent, acquired from a childhood governess and perfected at finishing school. She wore chiffon saris and pearls and always kept her head covered with her pallu, as Rajput royalty should. She was trying to put a brave face on the trauma that her new daughter-in-law’s shocking complexion had visited upon her. She herself was the color of alabaster. Her husband, though Tamilian, was Brahmin and only a shade darker than her. As I walked past I heard her little granddaughter, her daughter’s daughter, ask:
“Nani, is she a nigger?”
“Of course not, darling, don’t be silly. And, darling, we don’t use words like nigger any more. It’s a bad word. We say negro.”
“Negro.”
“Good girl.”
Auntie Meera, mortified, turned to her friends with a brave smile and said of the new member of her family, “But she has a beautiful neck, don’t you think?” The friends all agreed enthusiastically.
“But, Nani, she looks like a servants.”
The little girl was admonished and sent off on a pretend errand.
—
The other guests, Naga’s old college friends—acolytes more than friends—none of whom had ever met Tilo, were bunched together on the lawn, already gossiping, trained by now in Naga’s distinctive brand of cruel humor. One of them raised a toast.
“To Garibaldi.” (That was Abhishek, who worked for his father’s company, which sourced and sold sewage pipes.)
They laughed loudly, like men trying to be boys.
“Tried talking to her? She doesn’t talk.”
“Tried smiling? She doesn’t smile.”
“Where the hell
did he find her?”
—
I’d had my last drink and was moving towards the gate when Naga’s father, Ambassador Shivashankar Hariharan, called out to me. “Baba!”
He belonged to another era. He pronounced Baba the way an Englishman would—barber. (His own name he pronounced Shiver.) He never lost an opportunity to let people know that he was a Balliol man.
“Uncle Shiva, sir.”
Retirement is rarely kind to powerful men. I could see he had aged suddenly. He looked gaunt and a little too small for his suit. He had a cigar clenched between his perfect, pearly dentures. Fat veins pushed through the pale skin on his temples. His neck was too thin for his collar. Pale rings of cataract had laid siege to his dark irises. He shook my hand with more affection than he had ever shown me in the past. He had a thin, reedy voice.
“Running away, are you? Leaving us to our own devices on this happy occasion?”
That was the only reference he made to his son’s latest escapade.
“Where’s your beautiful wife? Where’re you posted these days?”
When I told him his face suddenly hardened. The change that came over him was almost frightening.
“Get them by the balls, Barber. Hearts and minds will follow.”
Kashmir did this to us.
—
After that I dropped out of their lives. Between then and now, I met her only once, and quite by chance. I was with R.C.—R. C. Sharma—and another colleague. We were taking a walk in Lodhi Gardens, discussing some vexing office politics. I saw her from a distance. She was in a tracksuit, running full pelt, with a dog by her side. I couldn’t tell if it was hers or just a Lodhi Garden stray that had decided to run with her. I think she saw us too, because she slowed her run to a walk. When we came face-to-face, she was soaked in sweat and still out of breath. I don’t know what got into me. Maybe it was embarrassment at being seen with R.C. Or the usual confusion that came over me when I was with her. Whatever it was, it made me say something stupid—something I’d say to the wife of a colleague I happened to bump into somewhere—chummy, cocktail-party banter.
“Hello! Where’s the hubby?”
I could have killed myself just after those words came out.
She held up the leash she was carrying in her hand (the dog was hers) and said, “The hubby? Oh sometimes he allows me to take myself for a walk.”
It sounds terrible, but it wasn’t. She said it with a smile. Her smile.
—
Four years ago, out of the clear blue sky, she rang to ask whether I was the Biplab Dasgupta (there are plenty of us, the absurdly named, in this world) who had advertised in the papers for a tenant for a second-floor apartment. I said indeed I was. She said she was working as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer and needed an office and could pay whatever the going rent was. I said I’d be more than delighted. A couple of days later, my doorbell rang and there she was. Much older of course, but in some essential way unchanged—as peculiar as ever. She wore a purple sari and a black-and-white-checked blouse, a shirt actually, with a collar and long sleeves rolled halfway up her forearms. Her hair was dead white and cropped close to her head, short enough for it to look spiky. She looked either much younger or much older than her years. I couldn’t decide which.
I was on deputation to the Ministry of Defense at the time, and was living downstairs (in what is now the watermelon). It was a Saturday, Chitra and the girls were out. I was alone at home.
Instinct told me to be more formal than friendly, not to reminisce about the past. So I took her up straightaway, to have a look at the apartment. I showed her around the two rooms—a tiny bedroom and a larger workroom. It was an improvement on her Nizamuddin storeroom for sure, but no comparison to her home of many years in Diplomatic Enclave. She barely looked around before saying she would like to move in as soon as possible.
She walked through the empty rooms and sat at the bay window, looking down at the street below. She seemed enthralled by what she saw, but somehow when I looked out at the same view I didn’t think we were seeing the same things.
She made no attempt at conversation and appeared at ease with the silence. She still wore the same plain silver ring on the middle finger of her right hand. I could see she was having some kind of conversation with herself. Suddenly she became practical.
“May I give you a check? A deposit of some sort?”
I said I was in no hurry, that I would draw up an agreement in the next few days.
She asked if she could smoke. I said of course she could, this was her space now and she could do what she pleased in it. She took out a cigarette and lit it, cupping the flame in her palms like a man.
“Given up beedis?” I asked.
Her smile made the lights come on in the room.
I left her to finish her cigarette, and checked the lights, the fans, the water connections in the kitchen and bathroom. As she stood up to leave, she said, as though she was continuing a conversation we’d been having, “There’s so much data, but no one really wants to know anything, don’t you think?”
I had no idea what she meant. Then she was gone. Then too, her absence filled the apartment, like it does now.
She moved in a day or two later. She had almost no furniture. She did not tell me at the time that she had left Naga and that she intended not just to work, but to actually live upstairs. The rent was deposited straight into my account on the first of every month without fail.
Her arrival in my life, her presence upstairs, unlocked something inside me.
It worries me that I use the past tense.
—
Even a casual glance around the room—at the photographs (numbered, captioned) pinned up on the noticeboards, the little towers of documents stacked neatly on the floor and in labeled cartons and box files, the yellow Post-its stuck on bookshelves, cupboards, doors—tells me that there’s something unsafe here, something best left untouched, turned over to Naga perhaps, or even the police. But can I bring myself to do that? Must I, should I, can I resist this invitation to intimacy, this opportunity to share these confidences?
At the far end of the room there’s a long, thick plank of wood supported on two metal stands that serves as a table. It’s piled with papers, old videotapes, a stack of DVDs. Pinned to the noticeboards, together with the photographs, are notes and sketches. Next to an old desktop computer is a tray full of labels, visiting cards, brochures and letterheads—probably the graphic design work with which she earned (earns, for God’s sake!) her living—the only things in the room that look reassuringly normal. There are printouts of what appear to be several versions of a shampoo label, in various typefaces:
Naturelle Ultra Doux Nourishing Conditioner
With Walnut Oil and Peach Leaf
Naturelle Ultra Doux has combined the nourishing and relaxing virtues of walnut oil and the soothing qualities of peach leaf in a rich detangling cream that melts instantly in your hair.
Results: Very easy to comb. Your hair regains its irresistible softness, without heaviness. Deeply nourished, your hair is perfectly flowing and smooth.
A DEIGHTFUL EXPERIENCE.
“Delightful” is missing an “l” in all the versions. Trust her, at this stage of her life, to be designing misspelled shampoo labels.
What about a shampoo for rapidly disappearing hair?
On the wall just above the computer there are two smallish, framed photographs. One is a picture of a child, maybe four or five years old. Her eyes are closed and her body is wrapped in a shroud. Blood from a wound on her temple has seeped through the white cloth, a rose-shaped stain. She’s laid out on the snow. A pair of hands pillows her head, lifting it slightly. Along the top edge of the photograph is a row of feet, clad in all manner of winter shoes. It occurs to me that the child could be Musa’s daughter. What an odd photograph to choose to frame and hang on your wall.
The other photograph is less distressing. It’s been taken on the porch of a houseboat
. One of the smaller, shabbier ones. You can see the lake dotted with a few shikaras in the background and the mountains beyond. It’s a picture of an unusually short, bearded young man in a worn, brown Kashmiri pheran. His big head is disproportionate to the size of the rest of his body. He has a bunch of tiny wild flowers tucked behind each ear. He’s laughing, his green eyes sparkle and his teeth are crooked. Something about the unguardedness, the sheer abandon of his smile, makes him look like a child. Crouching in the bowl of his large hands are two tiny kittens, one has a smoky gray coat streaked with black, and the other is a harlequin, with a black eyepatch. He’s holding them out, as though he’s offering them to the photographer to touch or stroke. The kittens are peering over the barricade of his thick fingers, their liquid eyes alert and apprehensive.
Who could he be? I have no idea.
I pick up a fat green file from a pile of files on the table and open it at a random page. Two photographs are glued on to a sheet of paper. In the first one, a blurred, out-of-focus cyclist rides past a barred metal doorway set in a six- or seven-foot-high pink boundary wall, the entrance to what looks like a public men’s toilet. It is located in a crowded neighborhood and is surrounded by one- and two-storeyed brick buildings with balconies. There’s an advertisement for “Roxy Photocopier” painted directly on to the wall in large green letters. The second photograph has been taken inside the toilet. The weathered pink walls are streaked with moss and moisture and have rusty pipes running along them, horizontally as well as vertically. There is a grimy white sink on the wall, and a row of three uncovered manholes in the concrete floor. Metal covers with handles, like the lids of enormous saucepans, lie next to them. An old, broken window frame and a plank of wood are propped up on one wall. They are the most unexceptional photographs I have ever seen. Who has taken them? Why would anybody take pictures like that? And why would anybody file them away so carefully?