Extract

Rahul Pandita was fourteen years old in 1990 when he was forced to leave his home in Srinagar along with his family, who were Kashmiri Pandits: the Hindu minority within a Muslim-majority Kashmir that was becoming increasingly agitated with the cries of ‘Azadi’ from India. Our Moon Has Blood Clots is the unspoken chapter in the story of Kashmir, in which it was purged of the Kashmiri Pandit community in a violent ethnic cleansing backed by Islamist militants. Hundreds of people were tortured and killed, and about 350,000 Kashmiri Pandits were forced to leave their homes and spend the rest of their lives in exile in their own country.

Jammu, early 90s (My mother has developed a serious ailment in her back due to hardships faced in exile).

Ma had grown thinner and her cheeks were sunken in and I suddenly realized that she had aged a great deal in the last few months. The specialist in Ludhiana had advised that she be administered a series of injections under anaesthesia. Each injection cost a few thousand rupees. Father had carried some cash in anticipation, and Ma had already been given one injection. They were to return for another in a month.

The question was – where would the money for the next injection come from? My uncles offered money, but it was not a question of just one more injection. Over the next few months, many more injections would need to be administered.

It was then that Father thought of the middlemen from Kashmir who had begun to make the rounds of Pandit settlements in Jammu. Some of our erstwhile neighbours had realized that we were in an acute financial crisis and that this was the right time to buy our properties at a fraction of what they were really worth. The houses of Pandits who had lived in posh colonies were much in demand. Many in Kashmir wanted to shift their relatives, who stayed in villages or congested parts of the city, to better houses, to better lives. You would be sitting in your home when a man would suddenly arrive at your doorstep. ‘Asalam Walekum,’ he would greet you while removing his shoes at your doorstep. Once inside, he would embrace you tightly. He would not come empty-handed. He always carried symbols of our past lives with him – a bunch of lotus stems, or a carton of apples, or a packet of saffron. He sat cross-legged beside you, running his eyes over the room – over the kitchen created by making a boundary of bricks and empty canisters, over the calendar depicting your saints, over your clothes hanging from a peg on the wall, and over to your son, sweating profusely in one corner and studying from a Resnick and Halliday’s physics textbook. He would nod sympathetically, accepting a cup of kahwa, and begin his litany of woes. ‘You people are lucky,’ he would say. ‘You live in such poor conditions, but at least you can breathe freely. We have been destroyed by this Azadi brigade, by these imbeciles who Pakistan – may it burn in the worst fires of hell! – gave guns to. We cannot even say anything against them there, because if we do, we will be shot outside our homes. Or somebody will throw a hand grenade at us.’ He would then sigh and a silence would descend upon the room, broken only by his slurps.

‘Accha, tell me, how is Janki Nath? What is his son doing? Engineering! Oh, Allah bless him!’ He would patiently finish his kahwa while you sat wondering what had brought him to your doorstep. It was then that he came to the point.

‘Pandit ji,’ he would begin. ‘You must be wondering why I am here. I remember the good old days when we lived together. Whatever education we have, it is thanks to the scholarship of your community. Tuhund’ie paezaar mal chhu – it is nothing but the dirt of your slippers. Anyway…’ He would pause again.

‘I pray to Allah that before I close my eyes, I may see you back in Srinagar. But right now, it is so difficult. Tell me, what is your son doing? Oh, it’s his most crucial board exam this year! Pandit ji, do you have enough money to send him to study engineering, like Janki Nath’s son? I can see that you don’t have it. This is why I am here.’

And then he would ask the crucial question: Tohi’e ma chhu kharchawun? Do you wish to spend?

This was a well-thought-of euphemism he had invented to relieve you of the feeling of parting with your home. ‘Do you wish to spend?’ meant ‘Do you want to sell your home?’

‘You have had no source of income for months now,’ he would continue. ‘This is all I can offer you for your house. I know it is worth much more, but these are difficult times even for us.’

If you relented, he would pull out a wad of cash.

‘Here, take this advance. Oh no, what are you saying? Receipt? You should have hit me with your shoe instead. No receipt is required. I will come later to get the papers signed.’

He would also forcibly leave a hundred-rupee note in your son’s hands and leave. A few days later, a neighbour would come around and ask, ‘Oh, Jan Mohammed was here as well?’

‘His son has become the divisional commander of Hizbul Mujahideen,’ the neighbour would inform you.

Most of us did not have a choice. By 1992, the locks of most Pandit houses had been broken. Many houses were burnt down. In Barbarshah in old Srinagar, they say, Nand Lal’s house smouldered for six weeks. It was made entirely of deodar wood. The owner of Dr Shivji’s X-ray clinic, Kashmir’s first, was told his house in Nawab Bazaar took fifteen days to burn down completely. At places where Pandit houses could not be burnt down due to their proximity to Muslim houses, a novel method was employed to damage the house. A few men would slip into a Pandit house and cut down the wooden beam supporting the tin roof. As a result, it would cave in during the next snowfall. Then the tin sheets would be sold and so would the costly wood. Within a few months, the house would be destroyed.

A few weeks after my parents’ trip to Ludhiana, my uncle came to our room, accompanied by a middleman. ‘He is offering to buy our house,’ Uncle said.

He put a number in front of us. ‘This is ridiculously low,’ Father said. ‘This is much less than what I have spent on it in the last few years alone.’

‘I know,’ the man said. ‘But you have no idea what has become of your house. After you left, miscreants ransacked it completely. They took away even your sanitary fittings and water ran through your house for months. A few walls have already collapsed. It is in a very poor state now.’

Nobody said a word. From her bed, Ma finally spoke.

‘How does it look from outside?’

‘The plaster has broken off completely, but your evergreens are growing well. They are touching your first-floor balcony now.’

And so, home is lost to us permanently. Ma is taken to Ludhiana and the injections are administered. It takes her months to recover.

 

***

Sometime ago, in September 2012, I meet an old Pandit scholar in Srinagar who never left Kashmir. He was abducted by militants three times but always returned unscathed. We are in his study where he sits surrounded by books. On the wall on the left are pictures of Swami Vivekananda, Swami Vididhar – a revered saint of Kashmir – and Albert Einstein. He tells me about an incident that occurred in 1995. He was cycling back home from a temple when he was stopped by a Muslim professor he knew. ‘What are you doing here? Go to Bae’bdaem, some very rare books stolen from Pandit houses have been put on sale there,’ he told him. The scholar cycled furiously to Bae’bdaem and found that in a shed, a boatman had put thousands of books and rare manuscripts on sale for twenty rupees per kilo. The shed swarmed with foreign scholars from Europe. The boatman spotted him. ‘You look like a Pandit, are you?’ he asked. ‘Then your rate is different; it is thirty rupees.’

The scholar placed a hundred-rupee note in the boatman’s hand. ‘I will give you a hundred rupees for each book and this is the advance,’ he told him. The scholar picked up whatever he could, including a fifteenth-century Sanskrit commentary on the verses of Lal Ded and Maheswarnanda’s Maharathamanjari.

 

***

Kashmir Valley, 2007

(In 2007, I return to my home in Kashmir valley for the first time since the exodus of 1990)

I am now standing at one end of my street, my locality. On my left, Rehman the milkman’s shop is closed. Is he alive, or has the monster of violence consumed him as well? It is 3 p.m. and there is nobody outside. I walk ahead. Suhail and Zubair follow me. My house should be somewhere here. Yes, yes, it is. On my left. I turn. It is in front of me. The huge blue gate is still there. The name Aabshar – waterfall – is still painted on a small board. The apple tree used to be visible from the street. Wait... where is it? It is not there. Is this my house?

A man walks up to me. ‘Are you looking for someone?’ he asks.

I look at him. ‘I used to live here long ago,’ I mutter.

‘Oh!’ he says; his face softens. He takes a step forward and hugs me. ‘I stay in that house,’ he points to a house. ‘My name is Gazanfar Ali; I am an advocate.’

‘It belonged to the Razdans?’ I ask.

‘Yes.’

Then I am standing right in front of my house.

‘This is your home as well. Come inside, have some tea.’

I want to go inside my house, my home, my only home.

‘Who lives here now?’ I ask him.

‘I don’t know much about them; the man stays with his wife and her parents. He won’t be there, but his father-in-law is always at home,’ he says. ‘The Razdans came here a few years ago. Mr Razdan had requested me to search for a small velvet purse that had belonged to his father. Luckily I found it and handed it over to him.’

I look at Zubair and Suhail. They watch this silently as if from the sidelines of a film set. ‘Stop by at my place once you’ve visited your home,’ Ali says.

We enter through the gate.

The lawn is just like we had left it, except that the grass has worn away. The small fence still runs around it, but it is broken at many places. The apple tree is no longer there. It was probably cut down.

‘Will you knock at the door?’ I ask Suhail. Two gentle knocks.

A man appears at the door. Wanyu, he says. Tell me? I don’t know what to say to him. Zubair clears his throat. ‘Actually, he used to live here long ago,’ he looks at me.

The man stares at me; he doesn’t know how to process this information. ‘Come inside,’ he gives up finally. I steal a glance towards the top right-hand side of the door. The fish-shaped doorbell is still there. But it is not functional now. I can see the wire protruding from its belly. I still haven’t looked towards my right, towards what used to be our kitchen garden, beyond which used to be Ravi’s kitchen garden, and then his home.

I am led inside, to our living room. An elderly woman – she is the man’s wife – is lying on a carpet. She gets up, embarrassed, adjusting her head scarf. She looks at her husband. She is smiling a particular smile, which in Kashmir one does when one cannot ask a question but nevertheless expects an answer. ‘They used to live here,’ he tells her. Suddenly I realize Zubair and Suhail are not with me. Where are they? ‘One minute, please, I’ll just go and see where my friends are!’ I say as I leave the room. It is probably a good thing to do, as it will give them some time to discuss me. I open the front door. I find Zubair and Suhail outside. Suhail’s back is towards me, but I understand. He is weeping helplessly, at the thought of a man knocking at his own door, finding someone else opening it, and then seeking permission to enter his own house. I hold his hands; we embrace. It takes him a few minutes to compose himself. I lead them inside.

We sit on chairs. The woman is looking at me. I don’t know why, but I think she is hard of hearing. I JUST CAME TO TAKE A LOOK. IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE WE LIVED HERE. WE LIVE IN DELHI NOW. WE HAVE OUR OWN HOUSE. WE ARE SETTLED THERE (Yes, settled!) I JUST WANT TO CLICK A FEW PICTURES AND SHOW THEM TO MY PARENTS. THEY HAVEN’T BEEN ABLE TO RETURN SINCE 1990.

Her smile changes. It’s a different smile now. It is devoid of that question mark. It’s a smile of relief. YES, DON’T WORRY, I KNOW HOW IT FEELS – THE THOUGHT OF SOMEONE COMING AND CLAIMING YOUR HOUSE. IT IS YOUR HOUSE NOW. I HAVE JUST COME TO PLACE IT IN MY MEMORY.

Tea arrives. We drink it silently. There are a few questions about what I do and where I live. But my mind is elsewhere. I remember there used to be a cupboard behind where I sit now, with glass doors. We used to call it the ‘showpiece almari’. It held small decorative items – six small clay statues of a military band, photo frames, a dancing girl who gyrated gracefully when nudged, a wire cycle, a big star filled with blue gel. None of it is there now.

‘The house was in very bad condition,’ the man says. ‘When we shifted the walls were crumbling; we had to spend a lot of money on renovation.’

Sir, quote a price and I will buy it from you right away. Bad condition! Do you, sir, even realize what it means for me to be sitting in this house? This house built with my father’s Provident Fund savings and my mother’s bridal jewellery; this house where my mother sat on her haunches and mopped the long, red-cemented corridor each morning; the house we left forever to become refugees and court suffering and homelessness.

Every memory comes back to me. The boys who had assembled on the street below on that cold evening in 1990, distributing our houses among themselves; that taxi ride to Jammu and that man showing us his fist and wishing us death; truck after truck of refugees under that tarpaulin, that woman’s blank eyes; the heat and other horrors of those one-room dwellings; mother’s tears and that young man holding the remains of a wedding feast on a plate outside our room; the humiliation of a door-less toilet; the ignominy of suffering landlords.

And you, sir, say this house was in bad condition! Do you know the comfort of lying under quilts in the room adjacent to where we are sitting now? Do you know the touch of the breeze that flows by when you are reading in the room upstairs, watching the apple-laden tree swaying gently? Or the joy of watching those blooming roses in the lawn? Or enjoying the sun on the rear balcony?

And sir, the house was in bad condition because those who looted our belongings also ripped off the taps and the water seeped in everywhere.

The tea is finished. Can we go upstairs, please? I climb the stairs. Can we go into that room? The shelf where we used to keep our books – there are no books. The shelf is filled with onions and garlic. Oh, how it breaks my heart! From the window I look out onto the kitchen garden. There is no kitchen garden – there is no mountain mint, there are no rose shrubs. Ravi’s house stands silently. A motorcycle is parked in the front, just like his used to be. But it belongs to the new occupants of the house. I feel like opening the window and whistling the way Ma used to when she wanted to speak to her brother, or mother. I imagine Ravi will peep out from the window and sing that ditty to me teasingly – Vicky ko bhar do dickey mein, apna kaam karega.

I click pictures furiously. The BSF camp is no longer behind the house. Their campus is now a forest of unkempt grass and wild bushes; some houses have been built there as well. The rear wooden balcony has collapsed. I am still thinking about our books. What happened to them? Were they sold to a scrap dealer, or were their bindings ripped off and their pages torn into shreds in some frenzy?

The man is getting a bit restless now. He is done showing me around what happens to be his house now. I still want to go to the attic and check if something is left of my huge collection of comics and Enid Blyton series, many of which I won by collecting lucky coupons from packs of Double Yum chewing gum. There is also the ‘best deodar wood’ that Father had procured just before we had to leave. For years he lamented over how that wood had been left back home.

I step out. I climb down the wooden stairs and hold the baluster for a moment. I want to retain the memory of its feel. I sit on my veranda and tie my shoelaces. The water works board stating our connection number is still there: 44732. A piece of driftwood a cousin had lovingly mounted on the wall is there as well. The looters would have thought nothing of it. I shake hands with the man. I look at the spot where the apple tree used to be. I remember how Dedda used to sit there, or how Totha would take me there and try and keep me busy playing with pebbles. I’m reminded of one Sunday evening when a cousin and I were watching television and lightning struck suddenly. It struck a tree near the mosque and then passed through our antenna and we watched in fear as burning debris fell into the BSF camp. Ma was so angry that we had switched on the television set in that dreadful storm, against her advice. For days, we couldn’t watch television since the antenna could not be replaced immediately.

‘There used to be an apple tree there,’ I point with my finger.

‘Oh, we got it cut; it was occupying too much space.’

Ghulam Hasan Sofi’s voice rings in my ears –

B’e thavnus chaetit’h tabardaaran

Yaaro wun baalyaaro wun

Chh’e kamyu karenai taavei’z pun?

I was split apart by the woodcutter

My friend, my beloved, tell me:

who has cast a spell on you?

 

* Courtesy the author and Random House India, 2013.

** Rahul Pandita is the author of Hello, Bastar: The Untold Story of India’s Maoist Movement, and the co-author of the critically acclaimed The Absent State. He has extensively reported from war zones, including Iraq and Sri Lanka, and Kashmir and Bastar in India. In 2010, he received the International Red Cross Award for conflict reporting.