Along with a property will, Shabaan Kaak handed the map of his ancestral graveyard to his eldest son. With neatly pencilled arrow marks, the map indicated exactly where Kaak’s grave ought to be dug. Also, the map showed the geometric dimensions of the trench and the lahad, the vault, of the grave.
Aged a hundred and two, Shabaan Kaak would often say: Hati heor gasi insaan pan’ni marzi marun (above hundred one must die at one’s will). One morning, when one of his grandsons told him about the death of a teenager hit by an expired teargas shell on the Hawal crossway, Kaak blurted: Baasaan chhu Khuada saebas chhus ba mashith goumut (looks like God has forgotten only me). But most often he would wish and pray: may I die on a sunny Friday.
He also believed: All Kashmiris know me, know how old I am, and that there couldn’t be less than, at least, ten thousand men at my funeral prayers.
He had witnessed all the major political and social events, changes and upheavals in Kashmir. The rise and fall of cruel monarchs and charismatic political leaders, each India-Pakistan tussle over Kashmir. He had seen famous legends, borne witness to historic treaties and understood the fickle temperaments of several public figures and politicians. He had seen how some revolutionary events had become cyclic, how true legends and old sacrifices would come back time and again. He had observed that it was the common man and the good leader who truly mattered in the circus of power, that it was their own deeds that shone on in public memory. And finally, he had come to the conclusion that nothing was more important than a return to God. He was more faithful to God than religion could have made him.
All his great-grandchildren spoke in Urdu, so Shabaan Kaak had to struggle with his broken Urdu, always funnily mixed with Kashmiri words: Asal kami karni aastaa hai! Ikhlaaq saan jado-jehat karin aasta hai aur Khuadayas zaarpaar karun aastaa hai! Bas mein aur kuch nahin dapta hai! (Good deeds, struggle-with-ethics and God is what I preach; rest is all farce!), he would say at least one hundred times a day. The children giggled at his sayings, but he ignored that and maintained the same formula until his death. In his old heart, he had forgiven almost everyone who had caused him harm in his long life.
Shabaan Kaak had also always prayed for an ‘easy death’, but more than that he was conscious about dying on a sunny Friday and having a minimum of ten thousand men at his funeral. He fell slightly ill for a few days before he passed away. Just slightly.
Kaak died at the start of a strict curfew imposed in the city following the killing of a schoolchild hit on the head by a teargas shell. The curfew would last a week.
It was ten-thirty in the morning of a long Thursday in July. The silent lamentation took place in the grand old house. Prevented by the severe curfew, his middle son Dr. Imtiyaz could only call his brothers over the phone and enquire about the progress of the funeral. The cellphones in the old house would ring time and again and sometimes nobody would pick up the call. Then Kaak’s middle son would call his nephews to ask about the funeral. ‘Hello! Hellooooo! When are you giving him the final bath? … Okay … Has the shroud come? … Okay … Will the Army and police allow you to take him to the graveyard? … Okay,’ he asked all these questions.
Shabaan Kaak was old enough to be noisily mourned. Given the curfew, his sons could barely arrange for a tailor to stitch their father a proper shroud. There was nowhere to find the particular white cloth he deserved. Nowhere to find myrrh to scent the bathwater for Kaak’s gosul, the final bath. In desperation, his daughters-in-law disarranged all the hung, folded and well-ironed clothes in the wardrobes and old tin trunks, searched through every bureau or drawer or hanging wicker basket in the house, looking for a ball of camphor in vain. Ultimately, it was borrowed from a neighbour. Fortunately the local mosque was only a few metres away, so Shabaan Kaak’s grandsons brought the taabood, the bier, home.
When the body was ready for burial, Kaak’s sons sobbed and wailed, not particularly for the loss of their father’s soul, but out of worry for what would happen if they were not allowed to take the body to the graveyard for burial.
The vantage points of the main road were littered with large stones, spiky barricades or coils of razorwire; bevies of policemen and Army soldiers patrolled in riot gear, holding transparent shields and swinging transparent canes, as if dressed to play some odd game, something between cricket and rugby.
Gradually, and with the help of some neighbours, Kaak’s sons somehow managed to talk about the matter to a police officer stationed outside the colony. After an hour of pleading with him, Kaak’s sons were allowed a maximum of ten men to accompany the body to the graveyard.
Shabaan Kaak’s funeral prayer was offered in a narrow lane outside the old house. The lane couldn’t accommodate more than two short rows of men. So only twenty-two men offered the janaaza. The Molvi sahab of the local mosque was on leave, so a neighbour had to lead the prayer. Later, the same neighbour would offer the fateha at the grave, full of mistakes in the recitation, and it would become evident that the funeral prayer too had not gone well.
Finally, two of Kaak’s sons, five grandsons and three neighbours carried the bier, covered in a green velvet pall, to the ancestral graveyard. The weight of the bier was much greater than that of the body. Sometimes, while carrying it to the graveyard, his sons even doubted their father’s presence inside the box. They wondered if they were bearing an empty taabood on their shoulders.
The sunless sky and the swelter of midsummer were making the late afternoon stuffy. The two most prominent sounds in the breathless air were either the sirens of police vehicles or the concert of diverse birdsong, something normally drowned out by the daily din of traffic and anxious human hubbub. Since Ghulam Rasool, the gravedigger, belonged to the other side of Hawal and couldn’t be reached, Kaak’s sons and grandsons had to dig the grave themselves, something they had never imagined having to do. The first rectangular pit they dug was shallow and the vault couldn’t even bear the weight of one human being over it. It crumbled. Then they moved to another side of the graveyard, where, if he were alive, Shabaan Kaak would never have wanted to be buried: under the shade of an acacia tree. The level of the earth here was lower than that of the first spot. This pit began to fill with water as soon as it had been dug.
They threw the mud back into the pit and moved to another side of the graveyard where there was a sprawling bank of irises. At once they again began to turn the earth inside out. Being inexperienced at digging, Shabaan Kaak’s sons and grandsons sweated, panted and cried. Again, it was not because they had just lost their father. Instead, they were worried about whether this pit too would fill with water and prove useless.
At last Shabaan Kaak was irrevocably buried.
Late in the night it drizzled. The next day being Friday, the order for a stricter curfew had been bellowed across the city.
The House
It may be that the satisfaction I need depends on my going away, so that when I’ve gone and come back, I’ll find it at home.
—Rumi
so I wait for you like a lonely house
till you will see me again and live in me.
Till then my windows ache.
—Pablo Neruda
Some lesser husbands built a latrine on the hillside.
—V S Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
Mir Manzil is in disorder but lively.
The maidservant Taja’s daughter’s family lives in two rooms on the ground floor. One room has been given to Gulzar Ahmad, the neighbourhood poultry-seller. Sacks full of chicken feed and new lots of broilers are neatly stocked in the room with two large, netted windows for good ventilation. The bare cement floor is covered with droppings all over.
Another room on the same floor is used for weekly social gatherings.
A corridor divides the second floor into half. One half belongs to Ghulam Nabi Mir and the other to two students, Zubair and Ishfaq. Ghulam Nabi shifted to Mir Manzil in 1995. The two students moved in right after him.
No one is a tenant in the house
.
Farooq Ahmad Mir, the owner of the house, himself lives on the second floor. There are six rooms on his floor. His second paternal-cousin Ghulam Nabi Mir has stowed half of his household paraphernalia in two of the six rooms, even though he lives in an old house in Nawa Kadal with his family. His own house dates back to the period of Dogra rule in Kashmir. Time has made it creaky and rickety. He needed a small but new house and had initiated construction of one in Bemina, but after marrying his two daughters off, he has found himself heavily in debt. He couldn’t finish building the new house and so, he transported half of his household stuff to Mir Manzil.
Three rooms on the second floor of Mir Manzil belong to Farooq’s three children—two sons and a daughter—who live abroad. They visit home occasionally, each one at a different time, so the siblings don’t see each other much. The elder son Aabid is studying management in Sydney. He visits home in midsummer. The middle child, Aasiya, was sent to Bangalore to study medicine, but was discovered living in Dubai without any degree in medicine. Farooq has never properly understood how, why and when she landed in Dubai, or what exactly she is doing there. She has not explained either. He refrains from digging too deep, afraid that she will get upset and refuse to visit him. She comes in January for a fortnight or so, spends very little time with her father and more time out of the house. She goes out on one or the other pretext, returns late at night, trying not to disturb him. Then she goes to her room and plays Taylor Swift at a high volume.
Farooq’s youngest son, Aarif, comes once every three or four years. He was sent to Moscow for a degree in medicine like his sister, but he fell in love with a Russian salesgirl and left the course midway to marry her. He is always accompanied by his wife and two blonde children. On each visit, he becomes a translator-cum-interpreter between his father and his family, translating and interpreting Kashmiri concerns and affections into Russian and endless Russian queries and appreciations into Kashmiri.
Since his wife Zareena’s death, Farooq has never been to the attic on the third floor. Only Taja takes care of the mice-bitten, dusty stacks of mattresses and quilts and blankets and stockpiles of copper utensils, stored in large tin trunks, and all the other odds and ends in the attic.
The two twin bathrooms outside the house are for the use of strangers. The vast compound in front of the house is almost always busy, hosting either a wedding banquet under a marquee or a condolence meeting. Except for a few withering larches and a single unattended weeping-willow, the garden in the compound is bare yet dotted everywhere with tarpaulin sheets smothered by slices of bottle gourds or tomatoes or brinjals—vegetables that the neighbours have scattered to dry in the sun and would store them for use in winter. A wide terracotta path separates the garden from the compound wall. The neighbours find space for their loaned cars on this path at Mir Manzil. The nearest neighbours take frequent liberties in drying their washed laundry on the compound walls. One of the neighbours has even broken the wall to the east of the house and made a shortcut into it to avail the utilities of Mir Manzil.
Unlike old times, the house is now always illuminated and full of noise, abuzz with laughter, bickering, screams, cheeping of Gulzar’s chickens, occasional wails of Taylor Swift, cheer of weddings and humming condolences.
Mir Manzil was once known as the greatest wonder in all of Bulbul Bagh. Farooq Ahmad Mir was the first and the only gazetted government officer in the area. He was the only son of his parents and had inherited a great deal of land. His mother had passed away when he was sixteen. A year after he married Zareena, when he was twenty-five, his father passed away as well. Zareena proved to be a responsible and loving wife and some consolation for the loss of his parents. When Aarif was born, Farooq decided to build a new house in place of his ancestral one. The house he built was the highest, four-storey building in Bulbul Bagh. It was stuccoed on three sides and its façade stood distinct with its white rough-cast. All its large windows were arched on the top and painted in a dark shade of brown. A black plaque at the gate pompously boasted ‘Mir Manzil’.
Farooq was the richest, most reputed, most influential, most arrogant, most stubborn, most envied and most hated person in the neighbourhood. His house looked like an extension of all that he was. People who passed by the grand house would marvel at it and wish that they could take a tour through it. Everyone had his or her own imagination of its interior: colours and shades of the walls, wardrobes, furniture, carpets, curtains, vases—everything.
Zareena had always been opposed to the ideas of grandeur and pomp. Contrary to Farooq’s tastes, moods and beliefs, she was a warm soul, very social and benevolent. Though she came from a family which was a dozen times wealthier than her husband’s, she was modest in all her tastes. Yet she and Farooq loved each other deeply.
People rarely had access to the house, and those who had been to its drawing room—where Farooq, dressed in a long embroidered tweed gown, would attest their papers or listen to their grievances and hardly ask them if they wanted a glass of water or a cup of tea—always wanted to see the rest of the place, stealing glances at whatever they beheld while entering and leaving. Those who had never been to the house would interrogate those who had and demand descriptions and would then fantasize about it. Many couldn’t even dream of having a home as grand as Mir Manzil.
Zareena kept the house lively. Unlike Farooq, who wanted the house to be grand and yet inhospitable, Zareena would try to draw people in. Every Friday morning, she appeared at the gate with a platter full of taher, rice sautéed in turmeric, shallots and salt, and serve it to the passersby. She would stay there at the gate with Taja behind her, long after she would be done distributing the taher, and smile all the while. Every neighbour was as happy with Zareena as he or she was annoyed by Farooq.
Farooq’s children grew up the way he determined them to. They would never interact or play with the neighbourhood kids. They inherited a superiority complex from their father, which made them feel different and more special than the other children. They played with each other indoors and would barely step out of the gate. Against Zareena’s wishes, they followed in their father’s footsteps.
One fateful day in May 1991, two insurgents attacked an Army patrol outside Mir Manzil and escaped through the compound of the house. They ran across it, jumping over the wall at the other end, disappearing into the dense neighbourhood. After hearing the gunshots, Farooq and Zareena rushed out of the house to bolt the gate. Taja had been visiting her house in another neighbourhood and the three children were busy doing their homework. But before they could reach the gate, the Army was already inside the compound, furious and desperate. The troops fired indiscriminately and Zareena was hit.
The next morning, Farooq found himself lying on a bed in the Intensive Care Unit of the Bone & Joint Hospital, surrounded by his relatives, some friends, his eldest son, neighbours and a team of doctors. He had been hit by two bullets in his left arm.
Healing slowly from the bullet injuries, for a month he kept asking about his wife and every time he was told that his wife was alive and was being treated in another hospital. Slowly, as the days passed, he realized that people were lying to him and that his wife was dead.
Days, months and years passed. Farooq’s wounds healed, the political and social situation in Kashmir changed drastically. Without Zareena, Farooq’s family began to disintegrate and he grew more and more lonely, frustrated and deeply forlorn. He missed Zareena and would often stay indoors and cry secretly in her memory. By this time, several houses in the neighbourhood were rising as high as Mir Manzil. Soon, it was no longer the most opulent or tallest house in Bulbul Bagh.
Then came a time when Farooq saw off, one by one, all three of his children. He lavished huge sums of his savings on their education and living expenses.
In his aggravated loneliness and frustration, Farooq Mir would pace from one room to another, without purpose. He would aimlessly run up and down the stairs. He lost interest in everything. He began to be irre
gular at his work.
He would spend all evening watching TV in his room. After the news, he would watch lawn-tennis matches, and even the late night special news bulletins for the deaf and dumb. Unable to sleep, he read outdated magazines and newspapers, stroking his left arm the whole while. Years after the bullet injuries had healed, the arm still ached sometimes.
Gradually, Farooq began venturing out of the house, surprising the neighbours. He began idling at Gulzar’s poultry shop. Once, in the course of a conversation, Gulzar mentioned the smallness of his shop and moaned that it had insufficient space for the chickens and their feed. He said that he was looking for space nearby to station new lots of chickens until he sold those in the shop. Farooq offered one of the rooms on the ground floor of Mir Manzil.
Taja had not been coming to the house for some time. It worried Farooq. The day she returned, she cried all the while, narrating how confused and indecisive she had felt while resolving a problem at her own home. Her daughter, her son-in-law and their three small children had been thrown out of their house for some reason. Taja’s daughter and her family were homeless now and Taja was already running out of space at her own house. Her two sons and their large families were living in a house of two rooms and sharing a single common kitchen. They were reluctant and unable to accommodate their sister and her family.
Farooq came up with a solution. He offered two rooms and a bathroom of Mir Manzil to Taja’s daughter and her family.
Farooq started attending the local mosque. Insomniac that he was, he would even wake up for tahjud, the extra prayers offered in the middle of the night. He grew a long beard. With time, he began taking an interest in the Bulbul Bagh Mosque Management Committee’s meetings and Bulbul Bagh’s social matters. Soon he became an active member of the Mosque Management Committee. People started frequenting Mir Manzil to seek Farooq’s advice on personal matters. Farooq dedicated a room on the ground floor to weekly social gatherings and the Committees’s meetings. He presided over matters regarding marriage disputes, property issues and divorces.
Scattered Souls Page 8