She drew a lucky straw. She had a pretty grave with wildflowers growing around it and her mother close by.
—
Her massacre was the second in the city in two months.
Of the seventeen who died that day, seven were by-standers like Miss Jebeen and her mother (in their case, they were technically by-sitters). They had been watching from their balcony, Miss Jebeen, running a slight temperature, sitting on her mother’s lap, as thousands of mourners carried the body of Usman Abdullah, a popular university lecturer, through the streets of the city. He had been shot by what the authorities declared to be a “UG”—an unidentified gunman—even though his identity was an open secret. Although Usman Abdullah was a prominent ideologue in the struggle for Azadi, he had been threatened several times by the newly emerging hard-line faction of militants who had returned from across the Line of Control, fitted out with new weapons and harsh new ideas that he had publicly disagreed with. The assassination of Usman Abdullah was a declaration that the syncretism of Kashmir that he represented would not be tolerated. There was to be no more of that folksy, old-world stuff. No more worshipping of home-grown saints and seers at local shrines, the new militants declared, no more addle-headedness. There were to be no more sideshow saints and local God Men. There was only Allah, the one God. There was the Quran. There was Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him). There was one way of praying, one interpretation of divine law and one definition of Azadi—which was this:
Azadi ka matlab kya?
La ilaha illallah
What does freedom mean?
There is no God but Allah
There was to be no debate about this. In future, all arguments would be settled with bullets. Shias were not Muslim. And women would have to learn to dress appropriately.
Women of course.
Of course women.
Some of this made ordinary people uncomfortable. They loved their shrines—Hazratbal in particular, which housed the Holy relic, the Moi-e-Muqaddas, a hair of Prophet Mohammed. Hundreds of thousands had wept on the streets when it went missing one winter in 1963. Hundreds of thousands rejoiced when it turned up a month later (and was certified as genuine by the concerned authority). But when the Strict Ones returned from their travels, they declared that worshipping local saints and enshrining hair were heresy.
The Strict Line plunged the Valley into a dilemma. People knew that the freedom they longed for would not come without a war, and they knew the Strict Ones were by far the better warriors. They had the best training, the better weapons and, as per divine regulation, the shorter trousers and the longer beards. They had more blessings and more money from the other side of the Line of Control. Their steely, unwavering faith disciplined them, simplified them, and equipped them to take on the might of the second-biggest army in the world. The militants who called themselves “secular” were less strict, more easy-going. More stylish, more flamboyant. They wrote poetry, flirted with the nurses and the roller-skaters, and patrolled the streets with their rifles slung carelessly on their shoulders. But they did not seem to have what it took to win a war.
People loved the Less Strict Ones, but they feared and respected the Strict Ones. In the battle of attrition that took place between the two, hundreds lost their lives. Eventually the Less Strict Ones declared a ceasefire, came overground and vowed to continue their struggle as Gandhians. The Strict Ones continued the fight and over the years were hunted down man by man. For each one that was killed, another took his place.
A few months after the murder of Usman Abdullah, his assassin (the well-known UG) was captured and killed by the army. His body was handed over to his family, pockmarked with bullet-holes and cigarette burns. The Graveyard Committee, after discussing the matter at length, decided that he was a martyr too and deserved to be buried in the Martyrs’ Graveyard. They buried him at the opposite end of the cemetery, hoping perhaps that keeping Usman Abdullah and his assassin as far apart as possible would prevent them from quarreling in the afterlife.
As the war went on, in the Valley the soft line gradually hardened and the hard line further hardened. Each line begot more lines and sub-lines. The Strict Ones begot even Stricter Ones. Ordinary people managed, quite miraculously, to indulge them all, support them all, subvert them all, and go on with their old, supposedly addle-headed ways. The reign of the Moi-e-Muqaddas continued unabated. And even as they drifted on the quickening currents of Strictness, ever-larger numbers of people continued to flock to the shrines to weep and unburden their broken hearts.
—
From the safety of their balcony, Miss Jebeen and her mother watched the funeral procession approach. Like the other women and children who were crowded into the wooden balconies of the old houses all the way down the street, Miss Jebeen and Arifa too had readied a bowl of fresh rose petals to shower on the body of Usman Abdullah as it passed below them. Miss Jebeen was bundled up against the cold in two sweaters and woolen mittens. On her head she wore a little white hijab made of wool. Thousands of people chanting Azadi! Azadi! funneled into the narrow lane. Miss Jebeen and her mother chanted it too. Although Miss Jebeen, always naughty, sometimes shouted Mataji! (Mother) instead of Azadi!—because the two words sounded the same, and because she knew that when she did that, her mother would look down at her and smile and kiss her.
The procession had to pass a large bunker of the 26th Battalion of the Border Security Force that was positioned less than a hundred feet from where Arifa and Miss Jebeen sat. The snouts of machine guns protruded through the steel mesh window of a dusty booth made up of tin sheets and wooden planks. The bunker was barricaded with sandbags and concertina wire. Empty bottles of army-issue Old Monk and Triple X Rum dangled in pairs from the razor wire, clinking against each other like bells—a primitive but effective alarm system. Any tinkering with the wire would set them off. Booze bottles in the service of the Nation. They came with the added benefit of being callously insulting to devout Muslims. The soldiers in the bunker fed the stray dogs that the local population shunned (as devout Muslims were meant to), so the dogs doubled as an additional ring of security. They sat around, watching the proceedings, alert, but not alarmed. As the procession approached the bunker, the men caged inside it fused into the shadows, cold sweat trickling down their backs underneath their winter uniforms and bulletproof vests.
Suddenly, an explosion. Not a very loud one, but loud enough and close enough to generate blind panic. The soldiers came out of the bunker, took position and fired their light machine guns straight into the unarmed crowd that was wedged into the narrow street. They shot to kill. Even after people turned to flee, the bullets pursued them, lodging themselves in receding backs and heads and legs. Some frightened soldiers turned their weapons on those watching from windows and balconies, and emptied their magazines into people and railings, walls and windowpanes. Into Miss Jebeen and her mother, Arifa.
Usman Abdullah’s coffin and coffin-bearers were hit. His coffin broke open and his re-slain corpse spilled on to the street, awkwardly folded, in a snow-white shroud, doubly dead among the dead and injured.
Some Kashmiris die twice too.
The shooting stopped only when the street was empty, and when all that remained were the bodies of the dead and wounded. And shoes. Thousands of shoes.
And the deafening slogan there was nobody left to chant:
Jis Kashmir ko khoon se seencha! Woh Kashmir hamara hai!
The Kashmir we have irrigated with our blood! That Kashmir is ours!
The post-massacre protocol was quick and efficient—perfected by practice. Within an hour the dead bodies had been removed to the morgue in the Police Control Room, and the wounded to hospital. The street was hosed down, the blood directed into the open drains. Shops reopened. Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)
Later it was established that the explosion had been caused by a car driving over an empty carton of Mango Frooti on the next street. Who was to blame? Who had left the packet
of Mango Frooti (Fresh ’n’ Juicy) on the street? India or Kashmir? Or Pakistan? Who had driven over it? A tribunal was instituted to inquire into the causes of the massacre. The facts were never established. Nobody was blamed. This was Kashmir. It was Kashmir’s fault.
Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.
ALL THOSE WHO WATCHED Musa Yeswi bury his wife and daughter noticed how quiet he had been that day. He displayed no grief. He seemed withdrawn and distracted, as though he wasn’t really there. That could have been what eventually led to his arrest. Or it could have been his heartbeat. Perhaps it was too quick or too slow for an innocent civilian. At notorious checkposts soldiers sometimes put their ears to young men’s chests and listened to their heartbeats. There were rumors that some soldiers even carried stethoscopes. “This one’s heart is beating for Freedom,” they’d say, and that would be reason enough for the body that hosted the too-quick or too-slow heart to make a trip to Cargo, or Papa II, or the Shiraz Cinema—the most dreaded interrogation centers in the Valley.
Musa was not arrested at a checkpost. He was picked up from his home after the funeral. Over-quietness at the funeral of your wife and child would not have passed unnoticed in those days.
—
At first of course everybody had been quiet, fearful. The funeral procession snaked its way through the drab, slushy little city in dead silence. The only sound was the slap-slap-slap of thousands of sockless shoes on the silver-wet road that led to the Mazar-e-Shohadda. Young men carried seventeen coffins on their shoulders. Seventeen plus one, that is, for the re-murdered Usman Abdullah, who obviously could not be entered twice in the books. So, seventeen-plus-one tin coffins wove through the streets, winking back at the winter sun. To someone looking down at the city from the ring of high mountains that surrounded it, the procession would have looked like a column of brown ants carrying seventeen-plus-one sugar crystals to their anthill to feed their queen. Perhaps to a student of history and human conflict, in relative terms that’s all the little procession really amounted to: a column of ants making off with some crumbs that had fallen from the high table. As wars go, this was only a small one. Nobody paid much attention. So it went on and on. So it folded and unfolded over decades, gathering people into its unhinged embrace. Its cruelties became as natural as the changing seasons, each came with its own unique range of scent and blossom, its own cycle of loss and renewal, disruption and normalcy, uprisings and elections.
—
Of all the sugar crystals carried by the ants that winter morning, the smallest crystal of course went by the name of Miss Jebeen.
Ants that were too nervous to join the procession lined the streets, standing on slippery banks of old brown snow, their arms crossed inside the warmth of their pherans, leaving their empty sleeves to flap in the breeze. Armless people at the heart of an armed insurrection. Those who were too scared to venture out watched from their windows and balconies (although they had been made acutely aware of the perils of that too). Each of them knew that they were being tracked in the gunsights of the soldiers who had taken position across the city—on roofs, bridges, boats, mosques, water towers. They had occupied hotels, schools, shops and even some homes.
It was cold that morning; for the first time in years the lake had frozen over and the forecast predicted more snow. Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.
In the graveyard, seventeen-plus-one graves had been readied. Neat, fresh, deep. The earth from each pit piled up next to it, a dark chocolate pyramid. An advance party had brought in the bloodstained metal stretchers on which the bodies had been returned to their families after the post-mortems. They were propped up, arranged around the trunks of trees, like bloodied steel petals of some gigantic flesh-eating mountain blossom.
As the procession turned in through the gates of the graveyard, a scrum of pressmen, quivering like athletes on their starting blocks, broke rank and rushed forward. The coffins were laid down, opened, arranged in a line on the icy earth. The crowd made room for the press respectfully. It knew that without the journalists and photographers the massacre would be erased and the dead would truly die. So the bodies were offered to them, in hope and anger. A banquet of death. Mourning relatives who had backed away were asked to return into frame. Their sorrow was to be archived. In the years to come, when the war became a way of life, there would be books and films and photo exhibitions curated around the theme of Kashmir’s grief and loss.
Musa would not be in any of those pictures.
On this occasion Miss Jebeen was by far the biggest draw. The cameras closed in on her, whirring and clicking like a worried bear. From that harvest of photographs, one emerged a local classic. For years it was reproduced in papers and magazines and on the covers of human rights reports that no one ever read, with captions like Blood in the Snow, Vale of Tears and Will the Sorrow Never End?
In the mainland, for obvious reasons, the photograph of Miss Jebeen was less popular. In the supermarket of sorrow, the Bhopal Boy, victim of the Union Carbide gas leak, remained well ahead of her in the charts. Several leading photographers claimed copyright of that famous photograph of the dead boy buried neck deep in a grave of debris, his staring, opaque eyes blinded by poison gas. Those eyes told the story of what had happened on that terrible night like nothing else could. They stared out of the pages of glossy magazines all over the world. In the end it didn’t matter of course. The story flared, then faded. The battle over the copyright of the photograph continued for years, almost as ferociously as the battle for compensation for the thousands of devastated victims of the gas leak.
—
The worried bear dispersed, and revealed Miss Jebeen intact, un-mauled, fast asleep. Her summer rose still in place.
As the bodies were lowered into their graves the crowd began to murmur its prayer.
Rabbish rahlee sadree; Wa yassir lee amri
Wahlul uqdatan min lisaanee; Yafqahoo qawlee
My Lord! Relieve my mind. And ease my task for me
And loose a knot from my tongue. That they may understand my saying
The smaller, hip-high children in the separate, segregated section for women, suffocated by the rough wool of their mothers’ garments, unable to see very much, barely able to breathe, conducted their own hip-level transactions: I’ll give you six bullet casings if you give me your dud grenade.
—
A lone woman’s voice climbed into the sky, eerily high, raw pain driven through it like a pike.
Ro rahi hai yeh zameen! Ro raha hai asmaan…
Another joined in and then another:
This earth, she weeps! The heavens too…
The birds stopped their twittering for a while and listened, beady-eyed, to humansong. Street dogs slouched past checkposts unchecked, their heartbeats rock steady. Kites and griffons circled the thermals, drifting lazily back and forth across the Line of Control, just to mock the tiny clot of humans gathered down below.
When the sky was full of keening, something ignited. Young men began to leap into the air, like flames kindled from smoldering embers. Higher and higher they jumped, as though the ground beneath their feet was sprung, a trampoline. They wore their anguish like armor, their anger slung across their bodies like ammunition belts. At that moment, perhaps because they were thus armed, or because they had decided to embrace a life of death, or because they knew they were already dead, they became invincible.
The soldiers who surrounded the Mazar-e-Shohadda had clear instructions to hold their fire, no matter what. Their informers (brothers, cousins, fathers, uncles, nephews), who mingled with the crowd and shouted slogans as passionately as everybody else (and even meant them), had clear instructions to submit photographs and if possible videos of each young man who, carried on the tide of fury, had leapt into the air and turned himself into a flame.
Soon each of them would hear a knock on his door, or be taken aside at a checkpoint.
Are you so-and-so? Son of so-and-so? Employed at such-and-such?
Often the threat went no further than that—just that bland, perfunctory inquiry. In Kashmir, throwing a man’s own bio-data at him was sometimes enough to change the course of his life.
And sometimes it wasn’t.
THEY CAME FOR MUSA at their customary visiting hour—four in the morning. He was awake, sitting at his desk writing a letter. His mother was in the next room. He could hear her crying and the comforting murmurs of her sisters and relatives. Miss Jebeen’s beloved stuffed (and leaking) green hippopotamus—with a V-shaped smile and a pink patchwork heart—was in his usual place, propped up against a bolster waiting for his little mother and his usual bedtime story. (Akh daleela wann…) Musa heard the vehicle approach. From his first-floor window he saw it turn into the lane and stop outside his house. He felt nothing, neither anger nor trepidation, as he watched the soldiers get out of the armored Gypsy. His father, Showkat Yeswi (Godzilla to Musa and his friends), was awake too, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the front room. He was a building contractor who worked closely with the Military Engineering Services, supplying building materials and doing turnkey projects for them. He had sent his son to Delhi to study architecture in the hope that he would help him expand his line of business. But when the tehreek began in 1990, and Godzilla continued to work with the army, Musa shunned him altogether. Torn between filial duty and the guilt of enjoying what he saw as the spoils of collaboration, Musa found it harder and harder to live under the same roof as his father.