Scattered Souls

by Shahnaz Bashir

  Theft

  As long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking.

  —Virginia Woolf, Orlando

  Everyone here will tell you everything about you now. That she is … that she … she …

  But no one will say: that she … that she … that she …

  Shut that door. The din of the traffic is drowning your voice, and you will tell somebody something. Is it your fault that you are what you are?

  First of all, say this: when you are flirted with and no one knows, you are everything; everything: a confidant, sincere, serene; and when somebody’s wife comes to know about it all, about the casual affair, you suddenly turn out to be a thief! You suddenly become wicked, a slut, a whore, cheap, smut, whatever.

  ‘I am going to call the police’—that is what somebody is saying now.

  ‘Does somebody see any wrinkle of fear on my face’—is what you say in response, confidently. ‘So go ahead’—is what you add under your breath, even if the girls are glaring at you.

  Somebody attends to Israel and Gaza the whole day on that little TV, but is so indifferent to the small things at home. Funny.

  Who was near the cash drawer when somebody left to watch the ruckus taking place outside?

  You wish you could say that it is the one who usually pilfers the out-of-demand blushers, lipsticks, nail paints, mascaras, pencils and perfumes. It is a hint. And you don’t even need to give a hint.

  These salesgirls, your colleagues, suddenly become honest and clean and privy to everything you did.

  You could also have had boyfriends like them. Could have spent so much stolen money on your long cellphone-heating nightly chats. And you could have lied and said that you spent it on other things.

  You sit here, suspended, heart-wrenched—perhaps waiting for the police to come—scanning the shelves full of clothes and cosmetics you would once proffer to customers. You stare out at the sun-warmed busy Residency Road through the thick glass door.

  You would always wish that one day you too would be like some of the customers you attend to. Buy cosmetics for yourself and sweaters for your husband and children. Or take some time off for yourself and enjoy a relaxed stroll through Lal Chowk. Bargain with the old fisherwoman on Amira Bridge for a kilo or two of carp minnows. Peer at the Jhelum flowing under the bridge. Follow the sweating old man who struggles to push his loaded cart up the hump of the bridge. And later wonder that who this old man was? And what made him look more alone than you? Yet more inscrutable than you. You want to wonder about the man who waves those advertisement bills for government jobs, wonder if there is any chance for people like you. For the girl whose father was an ex-militant, whose prematurely aging mother has got this and that about herself, whose brother is this and that. You must know you don’t stand a chance. As if it were your fault to be what you are.

  How useless is it to remind somebody of your favours! You were asked to wash somebody’s dirty tumblers, you didn’t refuse. Your salary was curtailed just because you weren’t keeping well for a day or two, you didn’t complain. You were delegated to peddling the out-of-demand items: expired cosmetics and defective designer jewellery, at cheap rates, you didn’t point out that it wasn’t part of your contract. You were even asked to fetch cigarettes from that paanwala across the road and bear his teasing, which you ignored. You went around, into the huddle of onlookers, knots of gossiping government employees in the teastalls, among the cynical staff of private schools; you went promoting, selling the out-moded merchandise, and you didn’t return without success. You were made to roam among pirated disc-sellers, lottery ticket vendors, ragpickers, traffic police and bunkers, and you didn’t mention it. And here you are now. A thief!

  Now you wish you died the day you were born. Or the day you were thrown out of school. Or the day your father vanished. Or the day your mother was raped. Or the day your house was dismantled on the riverside.

  Stop fiddling with those broken pieces of toothpick. Move that mannequin aside. Can anybody see the Station House Officer of the police station through the glass showcase? Can somebody see him extorting his regular share from the footpath vendors and cart pushers? Yes, everybody can. He is a call away, the SHO. Now, if somebody really thinks you’ve stolen the money, he can be called inside. But you swear you will stay right here; you won’t move an inch till the police arrive.

  You won’t trouble anyone any more. Here, somebody should take the key of the testers’ showcase. And tell Rubeena not to look on those shelves for the shampoo. Customers don’t like clueless salespersons. All shampoos are in the shampoo section.

  You can’t stand the insult. The sun is dwindling. Your mother will be waiting on the main road by now. She’ll worry. Leave for now. If somebody still suspects you of committing the theft, your address is recorded here:

  Insha Mohiuddeen

  D/o Late/Missing Mr. Ghulam Mohiuddeen

  Tengpora Bypass

  Batamaloo, Srinagar

  A Photo with Barack Obama

  I am a bastard, too. I love bastards! I am bastard begot, bastard instructed, bastard in mind, bastard in valour, in everything illegitimate.

  —William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

  Why do I pelt stones? This thought had never crossed my mind, I just instinctively knew when I had to don the armour and start the battle … Enough of arguments, after all I am a stone pelter I cannot win an argument with you, for you are learned men.

  … and what else can I do to express my resistance against oppression.

  —Imran Muhammad Gazi, I Am a Stone Pelter, Greater Kashmir, 13 February 2010

  There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents.

  —Leon R. Yankwich

  The first time Biul became indifferent to his social stigma was when a policeman called him haraamzaada, bastard, and kicked him exactly ten times in the ribs. The policeman repeated the word each time he kicked him. Then Biul was left alone, shivering in the January night on the bare, cold, chipped cement floor of a six-by-six cell in the Batamaloo police station. Flashes of the policeman’s dark hairy groin, clanking of the dangling, glinting steel buckle of his police belt, with a raised steel police logo on it, crossed his mind later. Thrice that night he asked to go to the toilet and was twice refused and forced to hold it in. He was allowed to pee only after it was ascertained that his urine had darkened his pajamas. He was kicked into the dark jail loo, reeking of stale urine. Shivering, his teeth chattered as he let his bladder go.

  He piddled endlessly and tried to study the unplastered, windowless toilet that was better than the one he had at his two-room house in suburban Tengpora. He had been booked under the Public Safety Act for being the youngest stone pelter of Batamaloo. The police had recovered a bag full of stones and brick nuggets from his possession. Throwing stones at police was the only vent to his frustration and the only way to give meaning to his life, he thought.

  After three days of detention, he was released when Dr. Imtiyaz, the psychiatrist, intervened and brought all sorts of intercessions for his release. Biul was only thirteen then, so Dr. Imtiyaz’s pleading worked.

  That was all a year ago. But now, US president Barack Obama was visiting India and stone-pelting in Kashmir would invite his attention. He could just say something about the resolution of the Kashmir issue, something the Indian State didn’t want to hear. And so, the police had begun to throw the leading stone pelters into, what they called, preventive custody. Biul didn’t know much about who Barack Obama was and what his visit meant, but he heard so much about him, saw so much about him on TV ahead of the visit, that, like many, he too began to lionize Obama in his thoughts. The big boys of the neighbourhood discussed Obama nonstop these days. Biul listened to them, rapt.

  ‘… America matters …’

  ‘Remember his first speech as the president?’

  ‘Yes, equality for all races, religions, regions, et cetera et cetera …’

  ‘He promised to withdr
aw troops from Afghanistan and Iraq …’

  ‘… Extend help to solve all political conflicts …’

  ‘… As far as Kashmir …?’

  ‘“Will bring freedom and peace,” he vowed …’

  ‘All farce. He can’t do anything. He will be the same as Bush. All farce …’

  But still:

  ‘He is a black. He understands the pain of being deprived …’

  ‘… America matters …’

  And after Biul heard that many believed Obama was basically a Muslim, his own faith in him increased.

  To avoid unnecessary attention, Sakeena, his mother, advised him to stay indoors for some time. He stayed at home all day, praying that the police wouldn’t come to take him. Each knock on the main door set his heart racing.

  Sakeena had married off her only daughter, Insha, to a villager who owned considerable land and drove his own rental Sumo. To earn bread, Sakeena had begun to stitch clothes at home and sometimes worked a spinning wheel. Her customers’ frequent visits began to scare Biul. He took each knock for a police raid.

  Biul avoided going upstairs to feed his seven white, fan-quilled pigeons. Instead, Sakeena dismantled the roosts, shifted the rectangular coop down to the small lawn and placed it behind the pomegranate bush. This way, the house did not remain so conspicuous in their small neighbourhood.

  Biul had spent most of the school year as a truant, bunking classes with his older friends. He would quietly stow the shirt he wore at home into his worn school satchel. Along the way to school, he would furtively replace his sky blue uniform shirt with this one. The days would be spent in the desolate fallows of Batamaloo’s isolated pastures, watching the cows and their heifers grazing. Sometimes he would wander into the wetlands near Gangbugh where the birds landed to peck for floating insects; he even ambled in renounced orchards, neglected places where people hardly knew him. He strolled through empty paddy fields, napped in gloomy, dense poplar grooves and willow forests. Hopping frogs would emerge from the lush green turf, cross his path and then disappear in the vast fields of mustard crops, the leaves studded with beads of iridescent dew.

  Around noon the sun would gradually penetrate through the dense trees and shrubbery and rosebushes, winking in the dewed blades of grass. In the hedgerow, running along a stream that quenched the thirst of the paddy flats of Gangbugh, he would break for a minute to watch the Bihari labourers weed or plough the fields, the dew-beaded gossamer threads on the anthills glittering and twinkling like fluorescent diamonds.

  He would stop for a while to marvel at all this. Halt abruptly to observe the anthills and their powder-soil raisings. Pluck all the dandelion balls and blow the little feathery parachutes away. He had trained himself to eat the choky rosehips that dangled from high bramble-bush fences.

  He cherished his solitary expeditions; they helped him understand himself and his existence in the world a little better. Helped him come to terms with the guilt of his being and make a bit of sense of the absurdity of his loneliness, an absurdity most difficult to express through language.

  But when there were only three months to go before the final-term exams at school, he lost his textbooks. He had spent the day as usual, exploring the fields, and later fording a stream. This was where the disaster happened. His satchel slipped and fell into the stream, floated some distance away and then clung to a tough root that leaned over the bank.

  He retrieved the bag. He didn’t worry about the soggy books or the smudged blue ink in his sodden notebooks, the wet pages sticking together. He figured he would dry them in the sun and recover some readable text, but he became uneasy about Sakeena’s reaction to the incident. Finding out that he skipped school would upset her greatly. It would be futile to explain why he did it. She had never truly understood the things he went through, being a ‘bastard’—the social ostracization he faced from his classmates and the neighbourhood boys, the extra punishments he endured at school.

  Ultimately, Biul decided not to hide the wet satchel from Sakeena and steeled himself for the consequences. When he came clean, a silence fell between them. After a while she surprised him by saying, ‘If you don’t enjoy school you shouldn’t be kept from doing what interests you.’

  Biul stared at her, mouth agape. ‘No, I must study,’ he said seriously, making up his mind then and there to slog. Sakeena didn’t say anything because she believed him. Biul fared well in the final exams.

  The only person in the neighbourhood who really sympathized with Biul was Mohsin, several years older than him. Mohsin was an apprentice to his maternal uncle, the photographer and owner of Raja Photo Studio in Tengpora. Mohsin had been orphaned at age two. His parents had been swept away by an avalanche in Ramban, the mountainous track on the Srinagar-Jammu highway. They had been on their way to Jammu to consult a neurologist for his father’s consistent migraine.

  Mohsin had been brought up by his uncle. He had scarcely gone to school. He wasn’t allowed to leave the studio or talk to the customers or socialize and mingle with the boys of the neighbourhood. He knew all about Biul, his life, and occasionally communicated with him through gestures when his uncle was not around.

  Biul had already grown indifferent to the public taunting, to the grunting of the assistant Imam of the local mosque who would always try to keep him from entering the house of God, implying that illegitimate people desecrated mosques. The mosque management committee tried to keep him from touching the Quran, and the big boys overtly nudged him or pinched his thigh during the namaaz.

  He had vowed to pay them back in the same coin. If they nudged him he would nudge back, come what may. If they called him haraamuk or zinhuuk, he would tell them about their mothers’ and sisters’ and wives’ and daughters’ illicit affairs and dirty scandals. He would make them wonder if he really were, in fact, the only illegitimate child in the neighbourhood.

  One evening, he went straight to Raja Photo Studio, looking for Mohsin. From a distance he saw that the lights in the studio were on and the glass door shut, signalling the presence of Mohsin’s uncle. He stopped, turned and scampered as far as the reed ponds near the Tengpora-Bypass crossing. And one more time, the vivid flashes of the policeman’s dark hairy groin, clanking of the dangling, glinting steel buckle of his police belt, with a raised steel police logo on it, crossed his mind. Biul tried to cry, and each time he did, no tears would come. When he was sure that no one was around, he shouted and screamed at the top of his lungs until he felt a little relieved.

  That year there were violent protests across the valley of Kashmir against an incident in Shopian, with protestors accusing the Army and police of abducting, raping and murdering two women who had gone to visit their apple orchard. The news of the incident brought back old memories to Sakeena. Biul had heard all about that terrible night from various people. The news of Shopian made him even more alert to Sakeena’s evident distress. He watched her chew the edge of her dupatta all day.

  Amidst public outcry, youths pelted stones at the police and the Army. On the main road and Bypass crossing, masked big boys clashed with the troops dressed in riot-gear. Those who were scared of participating hid behind turnoffs in the streets and watched. Later in the evening, the big boys would call the hiders ‘cowards’ and ‘fence-sitters’. Biul was one among them.

  He had more reason to fling stones than anyone else, he knew. He felt like stoning his own slander-infested existence, the forever unknown face of that trooper, whichever of the five men it had been, who had raped his mother. Gradually, he slid into the circle of big boys and the next year, the police cameras caught him in the front ranks of stone pelters at Batamaloo. In his idle wanderings, he had perfected the technique of skipping stones thrice on the surface of a pond before drowning it. Now, in the stone battles with the police and Army, his parabolic hurl landed smack-bang on the target. He became famous in Batamaloo, and was called Shoaib Akhtar after the Pakistani fast-bowler. He earned new respect from the big boys, those who had bullied him ea
rlier.

  Before lobbing them, Biul would examine the texture and dimensions of the stones, heft them, consider their edges and roughness. Each time he threw a stone, it felt like he was shedding off a burden. He used the slingshot too. In one pelting spree, he injured three police constables in a row, like a clean-bowled hat-trick. One of his targets was a policewala whose glass shield read Sexy Nazir. Biul made the stone ricochet off a telegraph pole and fly into the policewala’s face from under the glass face-guard of his helmet, breaking his lower jaw. All his companions noticed the art and skill in his performance, and were impressed.

  That evening the big boys brought him home on their shoulders. He stood apart, reserved, unsmiling.

  Strangely, the only person who did not appreciate Biul’s ventures was Mohsin. This disapproval, in turn, made Biul edgy. He wanted to speak to him, but the constant presence of his uncle didn’t give him any chance. His uncle was already extremely angry at the indefinite shutdowns in Batamaloo, which were affecting his business drastically. Even the routine passport photography had taken a hit, forcing Mohsin’s uncle to sell phone recharges to make ends meet.

  Sakeena seemed indifferent to Biul’s new exploits. She did appreciate how society had begun to respect him, taking him into the fold.

  One night, the police raided the homes of the known stone pelters. They dragged the big boys out and kicked them all the way to their battered white Rakshak jeeps. Biul was also plucked from his home and caught red-handed with a bagful of stones.

  The first thing the police did with Biul and the other captives was lash them naked with the buckle of their leather belts. Then they photographed them and opened files on them. This ‘criminal’ record would stick to Biul for the rest of his life:

  Name: Bilal Ahmad (alias Biul alias Shoaib Akhtar)