The Night of Broken Glass

by Feroz Rather

  Inspector Masoodi was silent and Major S glanced at him suspiciously. He wondered whether he had somehow crossed a line with his crassness and whether he had lost an ally who felt bound to shift loyalties to the other side – my side.

  ‘Rate tschute aazadi. Arse, take in freedom,’ Inspector Masoodi said softly in Kashmiri, corroborating Major S.

  After a pause, Major S laughed and Inspector Masoodi laughed and laughed so hard that tears welled in his eyes too and he almost fell out of the chair in merriment.

  Inspector Masoodi! Inspector Masoodi! What was I supposed to do with this Inspector Masoodi now that it was cancer and not me killing him?

  After surviving the torments of prison and the murderous depths of the lake, after years of living away from my city I masqueraded as a shawl-seller in Ladakh for a while. During this time I had spent every waking moment planning my revenge while adopting such a subservient and resigned manner that I blended into any background. I had come back to this village as a domestic servant and found a job near the cottage. I had befriended Gulzar and had manipulated him to spy for me and give me information about Inspector Masoodi’s movements. He had told me that until a few years ago, Inspector Masoodi came every Sunday night to this secluded cottage to drink with his friends. Later, I nearly fainted with joy when he told me that I did not need to cross the lake and scour the city looking for him because his own son was going to bring him here. This was a stroke of luck.

  I was agitated. I went into the dark kitchen and struck a match to light a candle. The knife gleamed in the firelight.

  In Inspector Masoodi’s bedroom, I put the candle on the bedside table and sat on the chair by the dying man’s bedside. He was still breathing. But it was so faint and rasping that I could barely hear life within him. I was torn now. I wanted to put the knife to his throat and slit it open, but then he was seized by a paroxysm of coughing and was thrown out of his doze. I put the knife on the table beside the candle to grab a fresh towel from the wardrobe, aware that he would spit out blood in a few minutes.

  He wheezed, gasping for breath. His eyes bulged out. ‘Water, water,’ he begged.

  I made him sip and as the water went down his gullet he threw up. His entire body was convulsing as he coughed again, spitting out blobs of blood and mucus. I held him firmly, but the force of the convulsions did not abate. I wiped the blobs from around his mouth and chest. I held his head tight in my hands. Then, suddenly, the fit passed. He was so exhausted that he immediately fell asleep.

  I returned to my room. It was very late. I lay in bed and closed my eyes. My thoughts whirled in my head as I pictured Gulzar telling Inspector Masoodi’s son that I had enquired about him and his father. I felt that this was all an elaborate trap into which I had fallen so easily. He was going to come for me while I was asleep and shoot me dead. I was suddenly very afraid. My head felt hot and feverish and I had to suppress this idea hard to fall asleep.

  When I woke up, I opened the window. The day was dawning and the sunlight spread through the willows like a distant, doleful sensation.

  I returned to Inspector Masoodi. I did not look at his face, but I touched his shoulder. It was cold and frigid. I knew he was dead. I was tempted to look at his face, but I did not. It was I who was in power now; I was almost sure that if I looked at him, I would mutilate him. I knew his mouth must be open, as would his eyes. I did not make any effort to shut them. I picked up the knife from the side table and put it back in the kitchen.

  I took the chit out of my pocket and called his son. ‘Your father is dead,’ I said.

  He sighed but said nothing. He was lying by the side of his wife whose breath I heard rising and falling serenely in the background. Had he wept or shown any emotion, I would have told him who I was. I would have told him that had his father been healthy, I would have chopped his body up and thrown him into the lake. It was obvious that his father’s death had brought him relief. He would share the news with his wife as soon as she woke up.

  I did not know where to direct my anger. I was furious and frustrated. I found myself holding on to the telephone long after he had hung up. Tears gathered in my eyes. In a sudden frenzy I yanked at the telephone wire. I pulled so hard that I hurt my hand. The receiver fell to the floor. I kicked it hard and it smashed to smithereens against the wall. I punched the rotting wall with my hand and broke a plank. Through the gap, I had one final glimpse of Inspector Masoodi.

  I went into the bedroom where I had spent the night, picked up my axe and walked out of the cottage.

  2

  The Pheran

  1

  I

  t was the month of November, damp and bleak. But that afternoon the sky filled with brilliant light pouring blue into the horizons where clouds lay like mountains of tousled snow. The old, three-storeyed house stood by the main road that ran through central Srinagar, parallel to the river Jhelum.

  As Wali was away at work, Maryam sat close to Safir in a wicker chair in the back garden, their knees touching. He leaned towards her and brushed back a tendril of her hair that had worked loose, whispering something to her that sounded like a dirty joke. Maryam had only heard the words ‘tickle’ and ‘butt-crack’, but that was enough for her to throw back her head and send the garden resounding with her laughter. She moved in closer to her boyfriend and was about to place her ear close to his lips again when she sensed Wali looming in the kitchen door behind her.

  As her father stepped into the garden, Safir stood up immediately, sheepishly greeting him.

  ‘Sit, sit,’ said Wali coldly as Maryam disappeared into the house.

  As he subsided back into the cane chair, Wali remained standing before him.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  ‘Safir.’

  Maryam had mentioned his name many times during their conversations.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Wali asked.

  ‘I am from here … from Srinagar,’ Safir replied.

  ‘And what do you do?’ Wali asked.

  ‘I write,’ said Safir after a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘That’s fine, but what do you do?’

  ‘I write,’ repeated Safir.

  ‘Writing, etc., is fine,’ the short, wizened old man stepped closer, ‘but what exactly do you do?’ He took off his thick-rimmed spectacles and his myopic eyes went blank. As Safir raised his eyes to meet them, an awkward silence fell between them.

  Safir glanced at the time on his cell phone, ‘I should go,’ he said, rising.

  ‘Have tea with us,’ Wali said, slipping his glasses back on. He beckoned Maryam, who was watching them anxiously through the kitchen window, and asked her to bring out the tea.

  ‘Papa, give me a few minutes,’ she called back, turning off the faucet that she’d turned on to wash the cups that were already clean.

  ‘Thank you, sir, but some other time,’ Safir said and walked away from Wali.

  When he entered the kitchen, he was sweating. ‘I’ll go now,’ he muttered, without looking at Maryam and made a dash for the front door.

  Maryam did not want to talk to her father as they sat in the sitting room for dinner that evening. However, winter was around the corner and she had to tell him that they needed to stock up: spices, rice, cooking oil, pulses and dried vegetables. Wali knew that all this would entail a lot of expenditure, but sensing he had upset his daughter, he readily assented.

  With Maryam busy preparing for her college exams, the rest of the month flew by, with extremely short periods of daylight. At the beginning of December, on the day that Wali retired as the head clerk from Jammu and Kashmir Bank, it snowed and he fell ill. The doctors advised Maryam to avoid giving him spicy or oily food. His lungs were weak and his throat, parched and dry. He needed to be kept warm with extra blankets and duvets in a warm room. Maryam planted him on a bed with two mattresses in the sitting room by the kitchen and wrapped him in two blankets and a thick woollen quilt. She put fresh pillows under his head and placed a spi
ttoon by the bed.

  When her mother had abandoned her father, sixteen years ago, she had been only eight years old. She missed her mother and had tried to fill the void by imposing her authority in all the three storeys of the house. She grew to enjoy being in charge of the household without having to answer to anyone. She had managed to run the house, efficiently stretching Wali’s thin salary to make ends meet and then later supplemented his income by embroidering pherans. In her room on the third storey, she would rise early and spend the mornings making venations of leaves – elm, almond, walnut, cherry and willow – around the necklines, down the fronts and around hemlines and borders of the sleeves of the pherans. She had often resented schoolwork and textbooks, and her routine household chores, and it was here, in the privacy of her room, pricking the cloth, that she released that anger. With each delicate stitch, she wondered whether she could develop a script to instruct her future children with Safir in the intricate art of embroidery; she wondered whether she could begin their lessons even as she suckled them at her breasts, abrading their soft cheeks against the hard threads of silver.

  As soon as the temperature rose from -5°c to 15°c and the snow disappeared, Wali’s condition improved. He asked Maryam to put away the mattresses and blankets. Instead of Corex – the sickly sweet cough syrup that burnt the lining of his stomach and made his head heavy – he asked her to buy him a potion from Kozghar’s and half a dozen apple saplings from the market.

  Maryam boarded a mini-bus which took her over Zero Bridge to the Cantonment with a bunker at the beginning of the front fence of corrugated tin sheets. Over the fence, she saw the sprawling concrete multi-storeyed building where the soldiers camped, and behind the building was the Wall soaring into the sky. The road gently arced along the western shore of the lake and finally reached Kashmir University.

  She caught up with Safir and they skived classes and went to Lofty Chinars. They sat side by side on the shore of the lake under a huge sycamore tree. Safir lit up a Revolution for her which she smoked as she contemplated the oval lake tapering towards the city. Along the soft curves of the lake’s shores, looking at the still green water, the branches of the willows hung low. She heard the calls of lapwings and moorhens. From behind the lines of boat houses emerged boats loaded with flowers from stern to stern. Because she was looking at the city from the distance she deliberately sought, her heart filled with a sudden and sharp longing to return.

  Across the lake, she glimpsed the top of a hill. Rumour had it that the soldiers in the Cantonment planned to dig into the hill for the raw material to extend the Wall into the city. They were going to employ two yellow bulldozers to raze the market town at the foot of the hill. When she had first heard about this dreadful plan, she had pictured bulldozers lumbering up the steep slopes, the gleaming teeth of their buckets remorselessly piercing the green soil. As these monstrous machines crested the hill, they would leave behind a city in ruins below with bodies crushed under the debris. For many nights, just before going to sleep, she had imagined that upon her arrival on the scene on a quiet noon, she would be all alone. She would run from one mound of rubble to another, and unable to pull out the corpses by their hands, visible and outstretched, she would become tired and frustrated. She would stop trying and stand straight, terrified by the sight of her own blood-splattered hands illumined by the blazing sun.

  She was grateful for the foliage of the willow trees that obstructed her view of the base of the hill and the doomed market town. She rested her head on Safir’s shoulder and sighed contentedly, asking for another Revolution.

  As she puffed at the cigarette, she reached for and clutched Safir’s hand. A haze of smoke spread over her head and wafted towards the lake.

  Wali was bent double as he dug up the earth by the dilapidated poplar picket fence in his backyard. Lumps of loosened soil lay at his feet and, as the dusk approached, he planted the last of his six new saplings in a winding row.

  ‘Dear Papa,’ Maryam thought affectionately, glimpsing him through the kitchen window. ‘For years you slaved away in Jammu and Kashmir Bank and even now you have not ceased your toil.’

  As she took out the flagon of rose sherbet from the refrigerator, she thought back to the day when Wali had evicted Safir from their house. Once Safir left, her father had come inside the house to wash his face and arms in the bathroom. He had gone back to the garden quickly to pray on the faded, dwindling grass. Despite the glow of peace on his forehead and the posture that suggested nothing but calmness and repose, Maryam had wanted to scream at him and tell him that Mama was right in leaving him for another man. Wali, with his clumsiness and bad habit of intruding, didn’t quite measure up to match Mama’s beauty as that other man did. However, Maryam was aware that Mama had been very cruel to Papa. She had left him for the bank manager who was Wali’s boss at the time, and only a few days after Wali had hosted a dinner for the man. Wali, who had hoped that the gesture would win him a promotion, lost his wife instead. He had vowed not to remarry and devoted himself to the care of his daughter with a quiet ferocity. He had spent money on Maryam’s clothes, shoes, books and notebooks.

  Maryam poured out a glass of chilled sherbet for her Papa and tasted it. She giggled as she suddenly remembered how Safir had exited like a scalded cat that day, his macho self-image in tatters.

  She looked at her father again, at his forehead glistening with sweat. She grabbed another glass from the shelf and poured herself a drink as well and went outside. He threw the shovel to a side, straightened his back and smiled.

  ‘When did you come back from the university?’ he asked by way of greeting. He was panting a little after his exertions in the garden.

  ‘I made this for you in the morning before I left,’ she said, ignoring his question, and smiling affectionately as he drank thirstily.

  ‘Is there more?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, Papa. Would you like some more?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ he replied.

  When she returned with another tall frosted glass, he was seated in a patio chair surveying his saplings intently. As she walked towards him, without turning and facing her he said, ‘I’ve not seen Safir for a while now,’ he said.

  ‘He must be busy, Papa. He reports for the Informer now.’

  ‘Do they pay him well?’

  ‘Yes, they do,’ she said, shortly.

  ‘Wise boy! I knew he’d get the point.’

  Maryam frowned and looked away. Her father was old; his sparse grey hair could no longer hide his cracked and discoloured scalp; his wrinkles were deep grooves; his body was stooped and flabby. It was the natural erosion of age, gradually shrivelling and withering the human body. How could Wali, so obviously in the fading twilight of his life, understand what Safir inspired in Maryam?

  Wali’s feet, shod in Liberty leather shoes with worn soles, dangled several inches above the ground as he perched on the chair. He had to stretch his short legs to alight. He was still out of breath. He slurped the sherbet noisily, the liquid dribbling from the corners his mouth and trickling down to the cleft of his unshaven chin.

  The cold drink seemed to pacify him. His breathing calmed down and his perspiration disappeared. He carelessly dropped the glass tumbler by his feet and sat back to survey the row of newly planted saplings, the picket fence and the silent backs of the houses beyond.

  Maryam put her hands on his shoulders, gently massaging them. She wondered whether he was even aware of her presence as he contemplated the cracks in the wood, the flakes of peeling white paint sticking to each picket. He had been planning to work on this for months.

  Wali had wanted Maryam to write the aptitude test that would qualify her to become a junior clerk in the Jammu and Kashmir Bank. He had even offered to bring home the new manager, who had the final say in the selection, and host a dinner for him. However, Maryam had her own plans for her future. At the end of the that year, when she completed her MA in journalism from Kashmir University, she joined the Informer.
<
br />   For her first story, she walked away from the Informer offices to Badshah Bridge and went to the Kozghar’s. Inside the shop hung a faint aroma of rose petals and mould. The owner, a middle-aged man of Turkish descent with a dense, black beard and deep, pensive eyes that seemed to glitter with the peril of extinction, who lived in semi-darkness surrounded by empty, cracked and dusty glass jars on wooden shelves, emerged from the rear of the shop.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ he said as a greeting.

  ‘I want to buy some sherbet,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, of course. Please come in and sit down.’ When they were seated in the dingy room, she told him that she wished to write about him.

  ‘I am the master of a dying trade,’ the man said sadly. His family had been living in the city for the last 400 years and he feared that he was the last in their line of trade. With the advent of modern medicine, his sales had plummeted and the practice of making sherbets, lucrative once, was on the verge of dying out completely. The only thing that sustained the shop was the sale of rosewater to the mosques, where it was sprinkled on the walls on Fridays.

  ‘I am happy to write about you,’ Maryam said. ‘I also want to buy a jar of rosewater and another one extracted from starflower.’

  ‘Do you mean Kahzabaan?’ he asked.

  ‘Kahzabaan,’ Maryam nodded vigorously, repeating the native name after him. The Kozghar disappeared into the dark recesses of his shop to reappear with some jars that he put on the counter.

  ‘If you can convince the city to somehow save my tottering business,’ he said, ‘I’ll give you these for free.’

  Maryam chuckled at that. She knew she would not take anything from the old man without paying for it. She threatened to leave the jars behind and walk away when he waved away her money.

  ‘Oh, alright, I’ll take the money,’ he grumbled, ‘but please allow me to give you this.’