The upshot of my prying, I should admit, is that I have changed my mind about Kashmir. It might sound a little cheap and convenient for me to be saying this now, I know—I must sound like those army generals who wage war all their lives and then suddenly become pious, anti-nuke peaceniks when they retire. The only difference between them and me is that I’m going to keep my newly formed opinion to myself. It’s not easy though. If I wanted to, and if I played my cards right, I could probably parlay it into some serious capital. I could create a political storm if I “came out,” so to speak, because I see from the news that Kashmir, after a few years of deceptive calm, has exploded once again.
From what I can tell, it’s no longer the case that security forces are attacking people. It seems to be the other way around now. People—ordinary people, not militants—are attacking the forces. Kids on the streets with stones in their hands are facing down soldiers with guns; villagers armed with sticks and shovels are sweeping down mountainsides and overwhelming army camps. If the soldiers fire at them and kill a few, the protests just swell some more. The paramilitary are using pellet guns that end up blinding people—which is better than killing them, I suppose. Although in PR terms it’s worse. The world is inured to the sight of piled-up corpses. But not to the sight of hundreds of living people who have been blinded. Pardon my crudeness, but you can imagine the visual appeal of that. But even that doesn’t seem to be working. Boys who’ve lost one eye are back on the street, prepared to risk the other. What do you do with that kind of fury?
I have no doubt that we can—and will—beat them down once more. But where will it all end? War. Or Nuclear War. Those seem to be the most realistic answers to that question. Every evening as I watch the news I marvel at the ignorance and idiocy on display. And to think that all my life I have been a part of it. It’s all I can do to stop myself writing something for the papers. I won’t, because I’d lay myself open to ridicule—the sacked, drunk, conscientious objector. That sort of thing.
Of course I know about Musa now—in the sense that I know he didn’t die when we thought he did. He’s been around all these years, and of course, needless to say, my tenant has known that all along. All it took was an extended power cut for me to find the things she had stored in the freezer.
So imagine my pleasure one night, when the key turned in my door and Musa walked in and was more shocked to see me than I was to see him. The first few minutes of the encounter were fraught. He made to leave, but I managed to persuade him to stay and at least have a cup of coffee. It was good to see him. We had last met as very young men. Boys, really. Now I had almost no hair and his was silver. When I told him that I was no longer with the Bureau he relaxed. We ended up spending that night and most of the next day together. We talked a lot—when I look back on that meeting, I’m a little unnerved by the skill with which he drew me out. It was a combination of quiet solicitousness and the sort of curiosity that is flattering rather than inquisitive. Perhaps because of my eagerness to reassure him that I was no longer the “enemy,” I ended up doing most of the talking. I was astonished at how intimately he seemed to know the workings of the Bureau. He talked of some officers as though they were personal friends. It was almost like exchanging notes with a colleague. But it was done so coolly, almost nonchalantly, most of it just casual chatter that bordered on gossip, that I only realized what had happened after he was gone. We didn’t really talk politics. And we didn’t talk about Tilo. He offered to cook me lunch with whatever ingredients I had in the kitchen. Of course I knew that what he really wanted was to take a look at my freezer. All there was in there now was a kilo of good mutton. I told him that the stuff in the apartment, including his many passports and other personal belongings, was packed and ready to be removed whenever Tilo wanted to take it.
We circled around the subject of Kashmir, but only in abstract ways.
“You may be right after all,” I said to him in the kitchen. “You may be right, but you’ll never win.”
“I think the opposite,” he smiled, stirring the pot from which a wonderful aroma of rogan josh arose. “We may turn out to be wrong, but we have already won.”
I left it at that. I don’t think he was aware of the extent to which the Government of India would go to hold on to that little patch of land. It could turn into a bloodbath that would make the 1990s look like a school play. On the other hand, maybe I had no idea how suicidal Kashmiris were prepared to be—to become. Either way, the stakes were higher than they had ever been. Or maybe we had different notions about what “winning” means.
The meal was delectable. Musa was a relaxed, accomplished cook. He asked about Naga. “I haven’t seen him on TV of late. Is he OK?”
Oddly, the only person I have been seeing occasionally in my new life as a recluse is Naga. He has resigned from his paper and seems happier than I remember him ever being. Maybe, ironically, we’re both liberated by Tilo’s conclusive and categorical disappearance from our lives and the world we know. I told Musa that Naga and I were planning—it was still nothing more than a plan—to start a sort of yesteryear music channel, on the radio or maybe a podcast. Naga would do the Western music, rock ’n’ roll, blues, jazz, and I’d do world music. I have an interesting, and I believe excellent, collection of Afghan, Iranian and Syrian folk music. After I said it, I felt shallow and superficial. But Musa seemed genuinely interested and we had a nice little chat about music.
The next morning he organized a small Tempo from the market and two men loaded it up with the cartons and the rest of Tilo’s things. He seemed to know where she was, but didn’t say, so I didn’t ask. There was one question, though, that I did need to ask him before he left, something I desperately needed to know before another thirty years went by. It would have troubled me for the rest of my life if I didn’t. I had to ask. There was no subtle way of doing it. It wasn’t easy, but finally I came out with it.
“Did you kill Amrik Singh?”
“No.” He looked at me with his green-tea-colored eyes. “I didn’t.”
He said nothing for a moment, but I could tell from his gaze that he was assessing me, wondering if he should say more or not. I told him I’d seen the asylum applications and the boarding passes of flights to the US with a name that matched one of his fake passports. I had come across a receipt from a car-hire company in Clovis. The dates matched too, so I knew that he had something to do with that whole episode, but I didn’t know what.
“I’m just curious,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if you did. He deserved to die.”
“I didn’t kill him. He killed himself. But we made him kill himself.”
I had no idea what the hell that was supposed to mean.
“I didn’t go to the US looking for him. I was already there on some other work when I saw the news in the papers that he had been arrested for assaulting his wife. His residential address became public. I had been looking for him for years. I had some unfinished business with him. Many of us did. So I went to Clovis, made some inquiries and finally found him at a truck-washing garage and workshop where he would go to have his truck serviced. He was a completely different person from the murderer we knew, the killer of Jalib Qadri and many others. He did not have that infrastructure of impunity within which he operated in Kashmir. He was scared and broke. I almost felt sorry for him. I assured him that I was not going to harm him, and that I was only there to tell him that we would not allow him to forget the things that he had done.”
Musa and I were having this conversation out on the street. I had come down to see him off.
“Other Kashmiris had also read the news. So they began to arrive in Clovis to see how the Butcher of Kashmir lived now. Some were journalists, some were writers, photographers, lawyers…some were just ordinary people. They turned up at his workplace, at his home, at the supermarket, across the street, at his children’s school. Every day. He was forced to look at us. Forced to remember. It must have driven him crazy. Eventually it made him self-destruc
t. So…to answer your question…no, I did not kill him.”
What Musa said next, standing against the backdrop of the school gates with the painting of the ogre nurse giving a baby a polio vaccine, was like…like an ice-injection. More so because it was said in that casual, genial way he had, with a friendly, almost-happy smile, as though he was only joking.
“One day Kashmir will make India self-destruct in the same way. You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You’re not destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying. Khuda Hafiz, Garson bhai.”
With that he left. I never saw him again.
—
What if he’s right? We’ve seen great countries fall into ruin virtually overnight. What if we’re next in line? That thought fills me with a kind of epochal sadness.
If this little back street is anything to go by, perhaps the unraveling has already begun. Everything has suddenly fallen quiet. All the construction has stopped. The laborers have disappeared. Where are the whores and the homosexuals and the dogs with fancy coats? I miss them. How could it all disappear so quickly?
I mustn’t keep standing here, like some nostalgic old fool.
Things will get better. They must.
On my way back in I managed to avoid my voluptuous and voluble tenant Ankita on the stairs as I returned to my empty apartment that will forever be haunted by the ghosts of the cardboard cartons that have gone, and all the stories they contained.
And the absence of the woman who, in my own weak, wavering way, I will never stop loving.
What will become of me? I’m a little like Amrik Singh myself—old, bloated, scared, and deprived of what Musa so eloquently called “the infrastructure of impunity” that I have operated within all my life. What if I self-destruct too?
I could—unless music rescues me.
I should get in touch with Naga. I should work on that podcast idea.
But first I need a drink.
12
GUIH KYOM
It was Musa’s third night in Jannat Guest House. He had arrived a few days ago like a deliveryman, with a Tempo full of cardboard cartons. Everybody was delighted to see the animation on Ustaniji’s face when she set eyes on him. The cartons were stacked against the wall in Tilo’s room, crowding up the space she shared with Ahlam Baji. Tilo had told Musa as much as she knew about everyone in Jannat Guest House. On that last night she lay next to him on her bed, showing off her prowess in Urdu. She had written out a poem she’d learned from Dr. Azad Bhartiya in one of her notebooks:
Mar gayee bulbul qafas mein
Keh gayee sayyaad se
Apni sunehri gaand mein
Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar*
“That sounds like the anthem of a suicide bomber,” Musa said.
Tilo told him about Dr. Azad Bhartiya and how the poem had been his response to police questioning in Jantar Mantar (on the morning after the said night, the concerned night, the aforementioned night, the night hereinafter referred to as “the night”).
“When I die,” Tilo said, laughing, “I want this to be my epitaph.”
Ahlam Baji muttered a few insults and turned over in her grave.
Musa glanced at the page in the notebook that faced the one in which Tilo had written the poem.
It said:
How
to
tell
a
shattered
story?
By
slowly
becoming
everybody.
No.
By slowly becoming everything.
That was something to think about, he thought.
It made him turn to his love of many years, the woman whose strangeness had become so dear to him, and hold her close.
Something about Tilo’s new home reminded Musa of the story of Mumtaz Afzal Malik, the young taxi driver whom Amrik Singh had killed, whose body had been recovered from a field and delivered to his family with earth in his clenched fists and mustard flowers growing through his fingers. That story had always stayed with Musa—perhaps because of the way hope and grief were woven together in it, so tightly, so inextricably.
He would leave for Kashmir the next morning, to return to a new phase in an old war from which, this time, he would not return. He would die the way he wanted to, with his Asal boot on. He would be buried the way he wanted to be—a faceless man in a nameless grave. The younger men who would take his place would be harder, narrower and less forgiving. They would be more likely to win any war they fought, because they belonged to a generation that had known nothing but war.
Tilo would receive a message from Khadija—a photograph of a young, smiling Musa and Gul-kak. On the back, Khadija would write Commanders Gulrez and Gulrez are together now. Tilo would grieve deeply at Musa’s passing, but would not be undone by her grief because she was able to write to him regularly and visit him often enough through the crack in the door that the battered angels in the graveyard held open (illegally) for her.
Their wings did not smell like the bottom of a chicken coop.
On their last night together, Tilo and Musa slept with their arms wrapped around each other, as though they had only just met.
—
Anjum was restless that night and unable to sleep. She pottered around the graveyard inspecting her property. She stopped for a moment at Bombay Silk’s grave and said a prayer and told Miss Udaya Jebeen, who was perched on her hip, the story of how she had first set eyes on Bombay Silk while she was buying bangles from the bangle-seller at Chitli Qabar and had followed her all the way down the street to Gali Dakotan. She bent down and picked up one of Roshan Lal’s flowers from Begum Renata Mumtaz Madam’s grave and put it on Comrade Maase’s grave. That little act of redistribution made her feel much better. She looked back at Jannat Guest House with a sense of contentment and accomplishment. On impulse, she decided to take Miss Udaya Jebeen out on a brief midnight ramble to familiarize her with her surroundings and see the city lights.
She walked past the mortuary, through the hospital car park on to the main road. There wasn’t much traffic at that hour. Still, to be safe, they stayed on the pavement, threading their way through parked cycle rickshaws and sleeping people. They passed a slim, naked man with a sprig of barbed wire in his beard. He raised a hand in greeting, and hurried off as though he was late for the office. When Miss Udaya Jebeen said, “Mummy, soo-soo!” Anjum sat her down under a street light. With her eyes fixed on her mother she peed, and then lifted her bottom to marvel at the night sky and the stars and the one-thousand-year-old city reflected in the puddle she had made. Anjum gathered her up and kissed her and took her home.
By the time they got back, the lights were all out and everybody was asleep. Everybody, that is, except for Guih Kyom the dung beetle. He was wide awake and on duty, lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens fell. But even he knew that things would turn out all right in the end. They would, because they had to.
Because Miss Jebeen, Miss Udaya Jebeen, was come.
* * *
* She died in her cage, the little bird, / These words she left for her captor— / Please take the spring harvest / And shove it up your gilded arse
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wove the love and friendship that I received from those whose names I mention below into a carpet on which I thought, slept, dreamed, fled, and flew around during the many years it took me to write this book. My thanks to:
John Berger, who helped me start and waited for me to finish.
Mayank Austen Soofi and Aijaz Hussain. They know why. I don’t need to tell.
Parvaiz Bukhari. Same as above.
Shohini Ghosh, beloved madcap, who queered my pitch.
Jawed Naqvi for music, wicked poetry and a house full of lilies.
Ustad Hameed, who showed me that you can skydive, snorkel an
d hang-glide between any two notes of music.
Dayanita Singh, with whom I once went wandering, and an idea was ignited.
Munni and Shigori in Meena Bazaar for long hours spent shooting the breeze.
The Jhinjhanvis: Sabiha and Naseer-ul-Hassan, Shaheena and Muneer-ul-Hassan, for a home in Shahjahanabad.
Tarun Bhartiya, Prashant Bhushan, Mohammed Junaid, Arif Ayaz Parray, Khurram Parvez, Parvez Imroze, P. G. Rasool, Arjun Raina, Jitendra Yadav, Ashwin Desai, G. N. Saibaba, Rona Wilson, Nandini Oza, Shripad Dharmadhikary, Himanshu Thakker, Nikhil De, Anand, Dionne Bunsa, Chittaroopa Palit, Saba Naqvi and Reverend Sunil Sardar, whose insights are somewhere in the foundations of The Ministry.
Savitri and Ravikumar for our travels together and for so much else.
J. J. (Heck.) But she’s in here somewhere.
Rebecca John, Chander Uday Singh, Jawahar Raja, Rishabh Sancheti, Harsh Bora, Mr. Deshpande and Akshaya Sudame, who have kept me out of prison. (So far.)
Susanna Lea and Lisette Verhagen, World Ambassadors of Utmost Happiness. Heather Godwin and Philippa Sitters, who woman the base camp.
David Eldridge, jacket-designer extraordinaire. Two books, twenty years apart.
Iris Weinstein for perfect pages.
Ellie Smith, Sarah Coward, Arpita Basu, George Wen, Benjamin Hamilton, Maria Massey and Jennifer Kurdyla. Close readers, serious-shit copy-editors and brilliant protagonists in the transatlantic comma wars.
Pankaj Mishra, First Reader, still.
Robin Desser and Simon Prosser. Dream editors.
My wonderful publishers, Sonny Mehta, Meru Gokhale (for publishing plus comfort food), Hans Jürgen Balmes, Antoine Gallimard, Luigi Brioschi, Jorge Herralde, Dorotea Bromberg and all the others whom I have not personally met.
Suman Parihar, Mohammed Sumon, Krishna Bhoat and Ashok Kumar, who kept me afloat when it wasn’t easy.