Scattered Souls

by Shahnaz Bashir

  Shaheed Mushtaq Ahmad Najar

  Muhammad Sultan was a talented carpenter before he fell from a roof while working and permanently injured his left arm. And just when the injured arm had begun to heal he, against the doctor’s advice, went back to work again. The internal soft-tissue injury worsened to a haematoma. After a failed surgery, his arm was declared unfit for carpentry or any manual work.

  He was a master of khatamband, a lattice designer. Before cutting wood for use, he would smell it to gauge its quality. He specialized in mixing the classical and the modern styles, producing something that both old and young Kashmiris liked. No one in the entire village could rival his truss work. He was an expert on doors and windows—the thick part of work in carpentry. With each drag on the hookah, he came up with a new idea.

  Carpentry was not only work or a source of livelihood for him, but an art form too. Art through which he expressed himself. Once at work, he would passionately sink into it. Sometimes he worked through the night. He would even work on Fridays, against custom, when all the carpenters and masons took the day off. He never actually cared for money until it really began to bother him. He was more of a dissolute artist than a time-bound carpenter. ‘His hands are worth their weight in gold,’ that is what almost all his customers would say after marvelling at his work. It was because of his talent that people tolerated his truancies and wild habits.

  But Sultan had a shortcoming too: he was not a diligent worker. He took projects on a whim. He would hardly ever take partners or apprentices. He liked to work alone. Sometimes he would disappear for days, and later compensate for his absence by working overtime. His second romance, after carpentry, was accompanying the local militants around the village. He’d help them with anything, fetch them cigarettes and lavish money on them.

  The situation with his arm depressed him. It became impossible to work, to hold tools in his left hand. Then he started taking projects on a contract basis, employing other carpenters and directing them. But their designs and work neither impressed nor satisfied his customers. Though his employees took all his directions, they never really followed them to the letter. They even cheated him of his share of the commission. Eventually, his financial situation deteriorated.

  His fate grew worse—his eldest daughter was returned by her in-laws for the sixth time in four years of marriage, for not fulfilling the demands of dowry. The last time she had returned with a swollen wrist and her sniveling, sick, one-year-old baby girl. Her husband, the driver of a bus, had wrung her wrist in an argument and thrown her out of his house. But at her father’s house, the eldest daughter behaved as though she was just on a visit. She even waffled to her sisters about her in-laws, praising them as if they were good people and as though nothing had happened. She talked about the ‘generosity’ of her in-laws’ neighbours. She described her brother-in-law, his tastes in food. These details bored and irritated her sisters.

  Sultan was struggling with his two other daughters at home. His middle daughter was in her late thirties, a spinster, a nearly illiterate girl, who, after her father’s injury, had been supporting the household with her skills at needlework. She worked well into the night, tortured her eyes, strained and overburdened herself and gained weight and premature wrinkles on her face. She was the most beautiful among her sisters, but there was an unattended fuzz of hair over her upper lip that made her look ugly now. Lately, she had been running short of work and had taken to secretly begging at the shrine of Makhdoom Sahib on Fridays. She would slip on a long, dirty, black burka and leave home saying that she was visiting the shrine to pray to God. But Muhammad Sultan had begun to suspect that her veiled expeditions were for another reason altogether—that she was out hustling to earn some money. He was furious but tried not to show it, especially as he never wanted to follow her to confirm his suspicions.

  His youngest daughter had left school at the secondary level when Sultan’s wife died of a colon haemorrhage. Since her mother’s death, she had looked after the whole household. Her presence in the house was a very quiet one; sometimes her own father couldn’t feel her around. She almost didn’t exist for him. She was just like the family cow she fed, washed, milked and cleaned. Whenever she cried, she didn’t make a sound, just leaked tears which quietly streamed down her cheeks like melting pearls. She had been born just before Mushtaq, Muhammad Sultan’s only son, who died in his adolescence.

  Mushtaq had distanced himself from school and books and instead followed a group of local militants like his father had. One day, Mushtaq stayed behind with an armed group in a hideout—a posh house in Nishat. In the middle of the night, the hideout was raided and he was the only one who could not escape. He was killed in the kitchen.

  The next morning, Muhammad Sultan managed to go to the house and see his dead son. After looking at the bullet-riddled body lying face down on the kitchen floor, he fainted. When he regained consciousness, he found that Mushtaq was being placed on a bier. The funeral was attended by the militants. Wearing masks, they merged with the funeral procession and later directed the graveyard management committee to get a quality memorial headstone chiselled for their friend. They wanted to have the headstone inscribed with an Urdu epitaph, with the title Shaheed before the boy’s full name, which would signify that he had died for the cause of Kashmir’s freedom. ‘The outfit will be proud to bear all the expenses’, the area commander had assured the graveyard management committee.

  A few days after the burial, a shiny black granite tombstone was erected at the grave with a beautifully calligraphed Urdu epitaph in sparkling golden paint.

  It was some months after his son’s death that Muhammad Sultan suffered the accident in which he damaged his left arm. Soon after the accident, his elder daughter was returned and the middle one lost her work. All possible sources of income disappeared. Vexed, he berated himself between sips of endless cups of salty nuun tea and puffs from filterless cigarettes.

  He had often heard people mention how Sataar Wagay, one of his neighbours, whose son the Army had tortured to death and dumped in the river, managed to get an ex gratia compensation of one lakh rupees sanctioned by the government. In the beginning, when not burdened by his own tragedies, Muhammad Sultan hated Sataar Wagay for accepting compensation. He even called him a traitor for selling his son’s sacrifice to the government. But then Muhammad Sultan became confused when Rahman Parray, another neighbour, who had even been an active member of a separatist organization, distorted the facts surrounding his younger brother’s killing by the Army and accepted compensation of one lakh rupees.

  Who was right, Wagay or Parray, or himself? Baffled, Muhammad Sultan remained indecisive until his own conditions forced him to think about applying for compensation. Initially he hated himself for even thinking about asking the government for money. He wrestled with himself day and night.

  He was already heavily in debt. Every morning the local grocer would come to the house and threaten to take away Sultan’s cow to settle his account. He even owed the neighbourhood baker and barber. He had stopped passing their shops and now took longer routes, back and side paths, whenever he had to leave the village. But when his baby granddaughter was diagnosed with acute pneumonia, he gave up. Finally, he threw off the guise of commitment to the cause of freedom, ignored his guilt, and applied for compensation. He tried as much as possible to hide this from Gul Baghwaan, one of his close childhood friends, who had vehemently rejected an offer of compensation after his son was killed in a firing incident.

  Now, the only hurdle that came between Muhammad Sultan and his compensation was the word Shaheed, conspicuously engraved on his son’s gravestone. If discovered, the word could ruin his chances of compensation.

  The graveyard is a plateau studded with stones and clumps of hemp and irises. It is away from the village houses and nestled on the edge of a vast expanse of paddy fields. As Muhammad Sultan sees the irises in the cloud-dimmed evening, the first stray thought that crosses his mind is how much better it
would be to replace the cacti at his home with irises.

  He waits for the darkness to grow thicker. He stands beside the grave of his son, folded his hands on his chest and begins to mumble fateha, prayer for the dead. With the growing darkness of the dusk comes a drizzle. Soon the voice of the muezzin from a nearby mosque floats into the air and mingles with the hissing rain. The wet mud sticks to the soles of his shoes, exposing patches of ochre under the upper layer of earth.

  A few minutes later, when the rain stops, he holds the blunt chisel with his trembling left hand against the word Shaheed. He repeatedly strikes. The sounds of metal clanking and the hammer’s whumping travel through the earth and reach down to Mushtaq Ahmad Najar. On one strike the pointed end of the chisel slips, misses the mark and scrapes off the name Mushtaq instead.

  The Ex-militant

  It had long been true, and prisoners knew this better than anyone, that the poorer you were the more likely you were to end up in jail. This was not just because the poor committed more crimes. In fact, they did. The rich did not have to commit crimes to get what they wanted; the laws were on their side. But when the rich did commit crimes, they often were not prosecuted, and if they were they could get out on bail, hire clever lawyers, get better treatment from judges. Somehow, the jails ended up full of poor black people.

  —Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

  Only yesterday I was no different than them, yet I was saved. I am explaining to you the way of life of a people who say every sort of wicked thing about me because I sacrificed their friendship to gain my own soul. I left the dark paths of their duplicity and turned my eyes toward the light where there is salvation, truth, and justice. They have exiled me now from their society, yet I am content. Mankind only exiles the one whose large spirit rebels against injustice and tyranny. He who does not prefer exile to servility is not free in the true and necessary sense of freedom.

  —Khalil Gibran

  Let’s begin; but first let’s make sure that you aren’t disturbed by this surprise interview.

  Izhar sahab, you are asking me if you disturbed me. You or people like you cannot disturb me. And especially when you say you are doing a story on ex-militants. I must confess, you are not like most of my neighbours who despise me. You are not like the government officials who go inquiring about me in the neighbourhood, then come to me with skeptical eyes and creased brows. You are not like Aslam, the one from the power department, who is yet to be sure whether or not he should give me a permanent electricity connection. And you certainly are not like Nazir of the water department or like the authorities from gas or ration or revenue, or even like the members of the Mohalla committee here.

  Stigma. Every month I have to show up in the Raj Bagh police station. Earlier it was every week. It is impossible to get registered for certain important things now. Passport and all other big registrations could only be had in dreams. Even TV cable operators are inquisitive about me.

  But you are different. Not only because we have known each other for some time now—from the day we had a long conversation in my autorickshaw while I was taking you to Lal Chowk—but because you are a writer. And so, you still have that human element alive inside you.

  Continue. I won’t cut the thread.

  Why you want to write my story, I don’t know. But it is interesting, in the first place, to note that you are going to write about an inconspicuous person like me; however, useless I may seem to myself now.

  First of all, please put that notepad aside and take that cup to your lips; the tea is already getting cold. Yes, I know you hesitate because you look at my daughter Insha with such worry and mercy.

  What happened to her?

  Don’t worry. She will be all right as soon as our Truis Peer, the local chemist, comes with some injections for fast relief … It is just a small cup of tea. Please don’t hesitate.

  Three days have passed and yet Insha’s fever is adamant. Truis Peer promised to come and check on her, but hasn’t. Twice I paced up and down to his shop but … If he doesn’t heed the emergency I’ll pull my autorickshaw up and rush her to the hospital.

  Infection? I don’t understand what the root cause of her fever is—maybe I don’t want to know. But my immediate concern is the fever itself. She is stable, but the fever must go.

  Stress. Maybe Insha is missing her old school and doesn’t like the government school. But harbouring this doubt only wrenches me from within. It reminds me of my helplessness …

  Destiny. It’s actually my own fault, or perhaps that of my stars. I don’t know. I couldn’t have afforded a patch of land in a better place, not after our joint family split and scattered around old Raj Bagh. But maybe I could have chosen Mehjoor Nagar instead. It’s noisy, over-populated, cheaper, forlorn and threatened by occasional floods, but it is still better than this place.

  Since it’s on the riverbank, it’s bad here in summer. The public utility lands, where I once played football and later practised with my Kalashnikov, have been usurped by construction mafia. Everything old and beautiful is slowly vanishing. Local land brokers sold plots to migrants from places like Haft Chinar, Fateh Kadal, Karfali Mohalla, Baba Dam, Barbarshah, Shaheed Gunj and as far as Tral and Pulwama. All those who couldn’t expand in the congested downtown of Srinagar are buying the land at cheaper rates here. The brokers even threw attractive baits to the revenue officials and got an abysmal, metre-wide sewage canal dug around the one-roomed shanties of the area, such as mine. The canal comes to an end at my small house and yawns at it. I have barely tackled the diverse neighbours and the way they throw their garbage into the drain. I hardly find eggshells, orange rind, chicken entrails, bloodied cotton, insulin syringes or discarded condoms here, as I do at Hyderpora or Nishat or at posh Raj Bagh, when I drop passengers at these places … please don’t look at me with those intrigued eyes. I do observe these things whenever I come across garbage dumps in certain places. My ridiculous habit, if that’s what you want to call it.

  How do you manage here?

  We have adjusted our olfactory senses to the stink of the overflowing sewage. But it becomes unbearably difficult in the evening when mosquitoes begin to throng the gutter. I stick strips of newspaper over the windows to keep these bloodsucking creatures away. After Insha fell sick, I hung a net around her bedding, stuffed its hem under her mattress. Yet in the middle of the night, a bumbling gnat still managed to feast on her toe and leave her sleepless, restless. I sweep off stiff, dry, upturned carcasses of them into a plastic dustpan, studying their banded thoraxes.

  More than the open garbage piles, the main attraction for the mosquitoes is the wild daisy that has spread all over the place. It offers them daytime shelter and also covers the pools of gutter spillage.

  There is still no sign of Peer’s arrival. Her forehead feels warmer. If Peer doesn’t arrive in the next ten minutes I must rush my girl to the hospital. And then you’ll have to bear with me. I understand. Either Peer is busy at this late hour with the regular hypertension patients or he must be engaged in gossip with some ill housewives. He might be at the village school where he teaches, or he might be at the shrine of Dastageer Sahib at Khanyar, checking on his accounts. He is one of the shareholders of the daily nazraana, the propitiation people pay for their sins. But I hope he does not nag me for having made my girl ‘a spectacle for three days and done nothing’. First of all he’d call me by my caste, not by my name. Then he would tell me, in front of his patients, ‘What are you waiting for? You want her to die? Go and admit her into the hospital. Rush!’ And then he would glance around at his patients, expect an approving look from them.

  ‘Ghulam Mohiuddeen! Don’t wait for me to return. If you want to go out, lock the main door and keep the key under the shoe!’ my wife hollers from the kitchen. Did you hear that? Of course you did. You cannot hide that smirk. The water flowing from the tap, the plop of the drip, the clanging of plates, pots and spoons, the hissing of the pressure cooker—everything has
abruptly stopped, signalling her departure. It is her time to go around in the neighbourhood, pay a visit to the sick or just confirm the neighbours’ well-being.

  Ghulam Mohiuddeen! I hate my name. I become angry with my late father for giving me an elderly name such as this. Why on earth couldn’t he think of a younger-sounding one? Maybe Fayaz, like Fayaz Shah, my companion from the outfit I had worked for. He was older than me by years, but younger in name.

  Even Fayaz’s father, an engineer, had a name that sounded young: Farooq. Right from the start, Fayaz has been a question mark, a sickle, hovering over my head. He holds an important position in the story I’m going to tell you.

  Can you tell me how it all began?

  The ’90s were a very frenetic time. You know all of it but let me summarise it again to connect it to what I want to tell you. Thousands of Kashmiris had begun marching on every street, road and bazaar in endless processions. Men, women, children, old, young—everyone. Everyone chanted the same slogan:

  Hum kya chahtay?

  Azaadi!

  (What do we want?

  Freedom!)

  There were vowing green headbands on almost every forehead. The flags people waved, the placards they flailed—all had the same message: Freedom. Elderly women would kiss the brows of the boys leaving their homes to cross the mountains into Pakistan. Toffees and petals were showered on them, something that happens to bridegrooms leaving to meet their brides.

  Back home, militants would strut around like soldiers, with Kalashnikovs slung across their shoulders, wearing multi-pocket ammunition jackets. I was so stung with passion that I too would imagine myself walking like that, and being seen walking like that.