The next page explains it:
GHAFOOR’S STORY
This place is called Nawab Bazaar. See that public toilet? Where it says Roxy Photocopier? That’s where it happened. It was 2004. Must have been April. It was cold and raining heavily. We were sitting in my friend’s shop, New Electronics, right next to Rafiq Tailor Shop, drinking tea. Tariq and me. It was around eight at night. Suddenly we heard the screech of brakes. Across the road about four or five vehicles drove up and cordoned off the toilet. They were STF vehicles. STF, you know, is Special Task Force. Eight soldiers came to the shop and forced us to cross the street with them at gunpoint. When we reached the toilet they told us to go in and search it. They said an Afghan terrorist had escaped and had run into the toilet. They wanted us to go in and ask him to surrender. We didn’t want to go in because we thought that the mujahid would have a gun. The STF men put pistols to our heads. We went in. It was absolutely dark. We could see nothing. There was no person there. We came out and told them that there was nobody there. They asked us to go back in. They gave us a torch. We had never seen such a huge torch. One of them showed us how it works, switching it on and off on and off on and off. Another kept staring at us, clicking the safety catch of his gun on and off on and off on and off. They sent us back into the toilet with the torch. We flashed it around but found nobody. We called out, but nobody replied. We were completely drenched.
The STF soldiers had taken position in the next-door building. Two were on the first-floor balcony. They said they could see someone in the drain. How could that be? It was so dark, how could they see anything from so far away? I shone the torch down on the row of three manholes. I saw a man’s head. I was so afraid. I thought he had a gun, I moved away to one side. The soldiers asked me to ask him to come out. Tariq, who was standing behind me, whispered, “They’re making a film. Do what they say.” By “film” he did not mean really a “film” in that sense. He meant they were setting up the scene, to make a story.
I asked the man in the manhole to come out. He didn’t reply. I could tell he was a Kashmiri. Not an Afghan. He just stared back. He couldn’t speak. We stood around the man with the STF torch. It was still raining. The smell from the manhole was unbearable. Maybe an hour and a half went by. We did not dare to speak to each other. We switched the torch on and off. Then the man’s head fell sideways. He had died. Buried in shit.
The STF men gave us crowbars and spades. We had to break the concrete edges around the manhole to pull him out. All of us were wet, shivering, stinking. When we pulled out the body we found that his legs were tied together and weighted down with a rock.
Only later we learned what had happened earlier in the STF film.
First a few of them had come quietly in one car. They tied up the man and stuffed him into the manhole. He had been badly tortured and was about to die. When they came in they found another young man in one of the booths. They arrested him and took him away—maybe he refused to do what we agreed to do. Then they came back in their vehicles and staged the rest of the film in which there were roles for us too.
Their officer asked us to sign a paper. If we hadn’t signed they would have killed us. We signed as witnesses to an encounter in which the STF had tracked down and killed a dreaded Afghan terrorist who was cornered in a public toilet in Nawab Bazaar. It was in the news.
The man they killed was a laborer from Bandipora. The young man they arrested because he was pissing at a weird and inconvenient hour has disappeared.
And Tariq and I have lies and treachery on our conscience.
Those eyes that stared at us for one and a half hours—they were forgiving eyes, understanding eyes. We Kashmiris do not need to speak to each other any more in order to understand each other.
We do terrible things to each other, we wound and betray and kill each other, but we understand each other.
BAD STORY. Terrible actually. If it’s true, that is. How does one verify these things? People aren’t reliable. They’re forever exaggerating. Kashmiris especially. And then they begin to believe in their own exaggeration as if it’s God’s truth. I can’t imagine what Madam Tilottama is doing, collecting this pointless stuff. She should stick to her shampoo labels. Anyway, it isn’t a one-way street. The other side has its repertory of horror too. Some of those militants were maniacs. If one has to choose, then give me a Hindu fundamentalist any day over a Muslim one. It’s true we did—we do—some terrible things in Kashmir, but…I mean what the Pakistan Army did in East Pakistan—now that was a clear case of genocide. Open and shut. When the Indian Army liberated Bangladesh, the good old Kashmiris called it—still call it—the “Fall of Dhaka.” They aren’t very good at other people’s pain. But then, who is? The Baloch, who are being buggered by Pakistan, don’t care about Kashmiris. The Bangladeshis whom we liberated are hunting down Hindus. The good old communists call Stalin’s Gulag a “necessary part of revolution.” The Americans are currently lecturing the Vietnamese about human rights. What we have on our hands is a species problem. None of us is exempt. And then there’s that other business that’s become pretty big these days. People—communities, castes, races and even countries—carry their tragic histories and their misfortunes around like trophies, or like stock, to be bought and sold on the open market. Unfortunately, speaking for myself, on that count I have no stock to trade, I’m a tragedy-less man. The upper-caste, upper-class oppressor from every angle.
Cheers to that.
What else do we have here?
There’s an open carton, an old Hewlett-Packard printer cartridge carton lying open on the table. I’m relieved to see that its contents are somewhat sunnier—two yellow photo sachets, one labeled “Otter Pics” and the other “Otter Kills.” Nice. I had no idea that she had an interest in otters. It suddenly makes her less—how should I say it—less hazardous. The idea of her walking on a beach, or a riverbank, with the wind in her hair…relaxed, unguarded…looking for otters…makes me glad for her. I love otters. I think they might be my favorite creatures. I once spent a whole week watching them when we were on a family holiday, a Pacific cruise along the west coast of Canada. Even when it was stormy and the ocean was dangerously choppy, there they were, those cheeky little bastards, floating nonchalantly on their backs, looking for all the world as though they were reading the morning papers.
I tip the photos out of one of the sachets.
None of them are pictures of otters.
I should have known. I feel like the victim of a prank.
The one on the top of the pile is a photo taken on the promenade around Dal Gate in Srinagar. A swarthy Sikh soldier wearing a flak jacket and holding a rifle is on his haunches. One knee up, one knee down, posing triumphantly over the corpse of a young man. From the way his body lies, it’s clear the young man is dead. He’s propped up on his chin, which is jammed up on the one-foot-high concrete verge that runs around the lake, the rest of his body is slumped in a downward arc. His legs are splayed, one knee bent at a right angle. He’s in trousers and a beige polo shirt. He’s been shot through his throat. There’s not much blood. There are blurred silhouettes of houseboats in the background. The soldier’s head has been circled with a purple marker. Judging from the dead man’s clothes and the weapon the soldier is holding, it’s a pretty old picture. In each of the other less dramatic photographs of groups of soldiers taken in marketplaces, at checkpoints, or on a highway while they are waving down vehicles, a soldier has been singled out with the same purple marker. There’s no obvious connection between them. Some are clean-shaven, some are Sikh, some are obviously Muslim. In all but one of the photographs the setting is Kashmir. In the one that isn’t, a bored-looking soldier is sitting on a blue plastic chair in a sandbagged bunker in what looks like the middle of a desert. His helmet is on his lap and he’s holding an orange fly swatter and looking away into the distance. There’s something about his eyes, something blank and expressionless that holds your attention. His head too is circled with that purple m
arker.
Who are these men?
And then, when I spread them out on the table, I get it—they’re all the same soldier. He looks different in each photograph, except for his eyes. He’s a shape-shifter. Maybe one of our counter-intelligence boys. Why does he have a purple noose around his head?
There’s a file in the carton that says “Otter.” The first document in it looks like someone’s CV. The letterhead says Ralph M. Bauer, LCSW, Licensed Clinical Social Worker, followed by a long list of his educational qualifications. A word jumped out at me. Clovis. Ralph Bauer’s street address was East Bullard Avenue, Clovis, California.
Clovis was where Amrik Singh shot himself and his family. In their home, in a small suburban residential colony. And then I get it. Spotter. Otter. Of course. The man in the photographs is Amrik Singh “Spotter.” I never actually came face-to-face with him in Kashmir. I didn’t know what he looked like as a younger man (those were pre-Google days). These pictures of him bear almost no resemblance to the photograph of him as an older man, pudgy, clean-shaven and looking completely disoriented, that appeared in the papers after his suicide.
My veins feel as though they’re flooded with some kind of chemical, something other than blood. How did she get hold of these documents? And why? Why? What use did she have for them? What was this now? Some sort of voodoo revenge fantasy?
The first few pages in the file are a sort of questionnaire—a series of those typically corny, psychobabble types of questions: Have you ever had distressing dreams of the event? Have you been unable to have sad or loving feelings? Have you found it hard to imagine a long lifespan and fulfilling your goals? That sort of thing. Attached to the questionnaire are two written testimonies signed by Amrik Singh and his wife (hers long, his very brief), and photocopies of two thick, neatly filled-out application forms for asylum in the US, also signed by them.
I need to sit down. I need a drink. I have a bottle of Cardhu that I shouldn’t have picked up in the Duty Free on my way in from Kabul, and shouldn’t have brought up here with me. Especially not when I have promised Chitra that I will never touch another drink. Not a peg. Not a drop. Especially not when I know my job is at risk. Especially not when I know that my boss has given me this one last chance to—in his hackneyed words—“shape up or ship out.”
I’d like some ice, but there’s none. The whole freezer has turned into a block of ice and needs defrosting. The fridge is empty but the kitchen is stacked with fruit cartons. Maybe she was—is—on one of those trendy detox diets where you eat only fruit. Maybe that’s where she’s gone. To a yoga retreat or something.
Of course she hasn’t.
I’ll have to drink the Cardhu neat. It’s really cold and those damn pigeons really ought to stop fornicating on the windowsill. Why won’t they stop?
Date: April 16th, 2012
Re: Loveleen Singh née Kaur and Amrik Singh
This is a request for a Psycho-Social Evaluation of Amrik Singh and his wife, Loveleen Singh née Kaur, to determine if they were victims of persecution as a result of the abuse, police corruption and extortion they suffered in India, their native country. Do they have a genuine “well-founded fear” of being tortured or killed by their government? They are seeking asylum as they claim that Amrik Singh will be tortured or killed if he returns to India. During the course of the interview I administered a Trauma Symptom Inventory-2 (TSI-2), Mental Status Checklist, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Screening Interview, and a Davidson Trauma Scale. A lengthy history was taken during a two-hour face-to-face interview with each of them to complete a narrative of the actual events that they actually experienced in Kashmir, India.
Background:
Mr. and Mrs. Amrik Singh reside in Clovis, California. Loveleen Singh née Kaur was born in Kashmir, India, on November 19th 1972. Amrik Singh, born in Chandigarh, India, on June 9th 1964. The couple has three children, the youngest of whom was born in the US. The couple fled from India to Canada with their two older children. They entered the United States by foot on October 1st 2005. They first entered Blaine, Washington, but now live in Clovis, California, where Mr. Amrik Singh works as a truck driver. Loveleen Kaur is a home-maker. They are constantly anxious about their family’s safety.
Loveleen’s Narrative:
This is a Narrative based on a paraphrase of Loveleen’s interview.
My husband Amrik Singh was a military major posted in Srinagar, Kashmir. While he was on the post I did not live with him on the base, I lived with our son in a private accommodation, in a second-floor flat in Jawahar Nagar, Srinagar. In that colony many Sikh families and only few Muslims live. In 1995 a human rights lawyer by the name of Jalib Qadri was kidnapped and killed and my husband was blamed by the local police and we felt that Muslims were framing him. My husband did not accept bribes and he did not like Muslim terrorists. He was an honorable man. In his own words: “I will not cheat on my country and you cannot bribe me.”
My friend Manpreet was at that time a journalist in Srinagar. She found out who was framing my husband and who had killed Jalib Qadri. She and my mother went to the police station to tell them the information. The police did not listen to her because she was a woman and a relative of the accused. And because JK Police are mostly Kashmiri Muslims. The leading police investigator said, “If I want I can make you ladies burn alive here. I have that power.”
After one year police units encircled Jawahar Nagar colony where I lived without my husband to do a cordon-and-search. Then they banged on my door and came inside. They grabbed me by my hair and dragged me from the second floor to the first floor. One policeman took my son. They stole all my jewelry. All the while they kicked and beat me and said, “This is the family of Amrik Singh who killed our leader.” In the police headquarters they tied me to a wood plank and kicked and slapped and beat me. They beat me on my head with a rubber plank. They told me, “We will make you a mad vegetable for the rest of your life.” A man with metal shoes kicked and crushed my chest and stomach. Then they rolled wooden poles down my legs. Then they attached sticky things on my body and thumbs and gave me electric shocks again and again. They wanted me to give a false statement about my husband. I was kept there for two days. They kept my son in another room and said I will get him back only after I make a false statement. Finally they let me go. I saw my son then. We were both crying. I could not walk to him because my feet were hurting. A rickshaw driver picked me up and took me to my mother’s home.
No doctor would treat me because they were scared that the Muslim terrorists would kill them. Me and my husband were being watched all the time. We lived a very stressful life.
We left Kashmir after three years and lived in Jammu. In 2003 we left our country for Canada. We applied for asylum and they denied us. It was heartless. We needed help. We showed them all our evidences, still they denied us. In October 2005 we came to Seattle. My husband got a job as a truck driver and in 2006 we moved to Clovis, California. We have no protection. We don’t go anywhere, we have no outings or happy life. If we go out we don’t know if we will come home alive. All the time we feel we are watched by the terrorists. With every noise I think I am going to die. I get scared easily with loud noises. Last year, in 2011, when my husband was just verbally disciplining our children, I got so scared I thought they were here to kill us. I ran to the phone to call 911. I hurt myself badly on my head, chest and legs while I was running. I thought I was going to die even though he was only verbally disciplining the children. My heartbeat goes so fast I feel like a crazy woman. I often react dramatically to yelling and loud noises. Even though my husband was only verbally disciplining our children I called the police and I don’t know what I told them. They arrested my husband and they released him on bail. I am still unsure what happened. The news came in the papers that my husband was so and so and had served in Kashmir. They showed my husband’s picture and our house and told everyone we lived here. That news came on the internet and in Kashmir too. Again the Muslim terror
ists began to ask for my husband to be sent back. After a few days a journalist called and told us a magazine writer from India was looking for us. But we knew he wasn’t who he said he was. I saw him drive past our house. I saw him many times. I told my husband that we must leave. He said, “We don’t have money to keep moving. I don’t want to run. I want to live.” The man is always around. Other men too. All Muslim terrorists. I am constantly scared. I keep all the curtains closed and watch from behind the curtain. They stand on the street and stare at our house. Now I keep everything locked. Before I used to run a small beauty parlor from my house, doing eyebrows threading and legs waxing for ladies. Now I feel it is unsafe to let strangers come to my house.
Seventeen years have gone passed and the Kashmiri Muslim terrorists still celebrate that lawyer man’s death. In the newspapers and on internet they still blame my husband. My children are scared. They always ask, “Mom when can we enjoy our lives?” I tell them, “I’m trying, but it’s not in my hands.”