The Night of Broken Glass

by Feroz Rather

  The boss curled up, like a woodworm on a windowsill, overlooking a floor so dark he could see almost nothing. The screams he had buried deep within him now emerged and lay in wait for him in the surrounding gloom; the screams that over all these years time had darkly distorted and transfigured into a net of naked electric wires that would entangle him and send shock waves through his heart.

  ‘Give me some water,’ he called Safir, drawing up his knees to his chest.

  As Safir handed him the tumbler, he closed his eyes. He gulped down the water and let his head fall back. At the back of his mind, unannounced, he heard the screams of the young boys as Inspector Masoodi hit their faces with the metal buckle of his belt.

  The boss’s hands trembled and his temples distended as his eyelids puffed up. He wanted to cry but the tears did not fall. He almost fell asleep and half an hour later when he sat up, he saw Safir sitting on the floor by his feet. He had dabbed his face with a wet cloth.

  ‘My heart is heavy,’ the boss said, ‘and I want to tell you something before I decide not to do so.’ Safir passed him a lit joint and listened.

  ‘A week ago, I went into the Cantonment. There is something called the “Tunnel” under the Wall and within the Tunnel a place called Café Barbarica. When I went in, I saw Inspector Masoodi. He was sitting on a chair by a glass window, already on his fourth drink. He was mumbling something that I could not hear clearly; the cafe was full of loud tourists from all over: Bombay and Delhi, Chennai and Calcutta. I slowly began to understand what Masoodi was saying by reading his lips. He was muttering something about how he had captured Kamran.’

  ‘You mean the fifteen-year-old boy who we thought had disappeared?’ Safir asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s the one I’m talking about.’

  ‘Why did Inspector Masoodi capture him?’

  ‘He beats him every night. He broke his right wrist in the last beating.’

  ‘And why exactly did he capture him?’ repeated Safir.

  ‘Your question is both relevant and irrelevant, Safir,’ the boss said, puffing hard at the weed cigarette.

  ‘How so?’ asked Safir.

  ‘The reason for incarcerating Kamran is irrelevant to Inspector Masoodi. It is relevant to Masoodi that he captured Kamran at all. The person who imprisoned him is irrelevant to Kamran too. All that matters to the lad is that he has been captured.’

  The boss fell silent and did not expand on these cryptic statements further although Safir wanted him to. Only later, from his insinuations about Kamran, did Safir conclude that during the interrogation and brutal beatings, Inspector Masoodi was pitting Kamran against Maryam’s cousin Iqbal who had organized and led a protest after Ishfaq was killed. Kamran, who had come to Srinagar from his village in the south to buy an enrolment form from Kashmir University for his older brother, Shahid, had been randomly swept along in the protest march. Inspector Masoodi had arrested him along with Iqbal and a dozen other boys who had pelted the policemen blockading the demonstration.

  The boss passed the joint back to Safir, who took a deep drag before releasing a plume of smoke.

  Safir had been alone in the office when he heard the gunshots. It was so close, the bullets zinged past the windows that overlooked the river. He dived to the floor until the gunfire died out, and then he had crawled on all fours to peer over the windowsill towards Zero Bridge. He could see nothing; he then crept onto the balcony. Due to the power cut there were no streetlights and therefore it was too dark to see anything at all.

  He went down the three flights of stairs and emerged from the rear of the building. In the deafening silence that followed the roar of gunfire, he walked in the faint starlight along the bank of the river. He was conscious of the danger of getting shot. But his feet were seized with a reckless and relentless curiosity and he kept walking.

  He reasoned that the bridge and the road were at an elevation. From the top of the staircase that rose from the bank he would have a good view, although he needed to ensure that the soldier in the bunker did not catch sight of him.

  He ascended the stairs gingerly and as he reached the topmost step, he trod on something soft and almost fell down in a panic. Fumbling on the steps in the dark, he realized it was a human hand. He shrieked in terror.

  The hand was attached to a human body. Safir turned it over. The person was definitely dead, and in the feeble starlight the body of the youth looked pale and lifeless. His first impulse was to put as much distance between himself and this grisly scene. However, he did not want to leave the dead body there; it could be gone by the morning, fed to the river’s belly.

  He grabbed the corpse by the ankles and dragged it down the stairs to the bank where he stopped to catch his breath. He then wound his arms around the body and tried to lift it. Although he got blood all over himself, the body was too heavy for him. He looked at the bridge overhead. Someone was watching him from behind the wood rails.

  Facing away from the bridge and the body, he held the ankles again and lifted them. The man on the bridge, it appeared to Safir, directed the barrel of his gun towards his nape. Safir put everything he had in him to yank the corpse and haul it away with as much speed as he could muster. As he heaved and lumbered, the man on the bridge took aim at his target. Safir tightened his grip and ran, dragging the body away.

  He didn’t stop running until he drew closer to the office building of the Informer. He stopped and glanced back, sweating and gasping. No one had followed him. He wasn’t sure what to do now. He pulled out his cell phone from his pocket and called Maryam.

  Maryam answered his call almost on the first ring. As soon as he breathlessly outlined his predicament to her, she thought quickly and told him that the best thing would be for him to call the boss. Safir called him straightaway. The boss, sitting in Café Barbarica, immediately arrived with an ambulance and a couple of policemen who helped identify the body and convey the news to the family.

  Safir waited with Wali by Kozghar’s, holding Maryam. She was crying quietly but when the casket arrived floating on the shoulders of mourners, each one of them reciting, la illaha illa Allah, la illaha illa Allah, Maryam broke free of Safir’s grip. She beat her forehead and pulled out her hair, tearing the dawn with her screams. ‘Maine mahrazo, maine mahrazo, my bridegroom, my bridegroom,’ she cried.

  At the office, many weeks later, Safir extracted a picture of Kamran from an envelope that the boss had given him. As he looked at the aquiline nose, high cheekbones and greenish-brown eyes, he shook his head gravely. He knew only too well what was to follow: Kamran had become a rebel and would soon be cut down. He thought about Ishfaq and remembered Maryam. He felt that he had neglected her somehow. Although he had called her many times since the killing, she had steadfastly refused to answer his calls. He did not know how to reach her.

  Then his mobile rang. He was surprised to see that it was Maryam.

  ‘Can we talk?’ she asked.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Safir ventured.

  ‘We need to talk,’ Maryam said.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘At home.’

  ‘Give me a few minutes and I’ll be there,’ Safir replied.

  On the balcony, he ran into the boss.

  ‘Where the hell are you going so early?’ he snarled.

  ‘I’ll call you later, boss,’ Safir said, darting into the elevator.

  As soon as the elevator touched the ground floor and the door opened, Safir strode out of the building. He ran to the edge of the river and stepped into a leaf-shaped boat.

  As the boatman paddled him out to the middle, Safir kept looking towards the bunker on the bridge. He took out his mobile phone and called Maryam.

  ‘I am coming over to your shore,’ he said.

  Beams of bright sunlight streamed over the poplars along the road. The façade of the house was bristling with green ivy, each leaf an oiled metal-blade.

  Maryam stood outside the front door, in a trellis of shadows. Although her e
yes were moist, she was standing tall.

  Safir ran across the road. She gave him her hand and together they walked up the street to the boss’s lodge. They went into the living room and sat on the sofa. She snuggled up against him and as he put his hand around her waist, they fell into a long hot wet kiss.

  ‘I missed you, Maryam,’ Safir whispered.

  ‘Do you really love me?’ she asked.

  ‘What makes you think I don’t?’

  She wanted to tell him what had happened in the car, but he covered her lips with his lips.

  ‘Following his death, I’ve had so many premonitions,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you leave the Informer. Reporting means staying out late and facing such situations.’

  ‘What will I do then?’ Safir asked.

  They both sat up, hands linked, facing each other.

  ‘You could sell shoes or furniture or books,’ she said. ‘Or we can build something together.’

  ‘What do you want to build with me?’ He smiled. He loved her deep voice and her resonant idealism.

  ‘How about a boutique?’

  Safir nodded, although he did not know whether he could afford to leave his job. How was he supposed to survive, and pay for this very lodge that he was planning to rent from the boss so that he could live near Maryam? How was he supposed to buy books from Amazon? And save so that he could travel to the great cities of the world – Barcelona and St. Petersburg, San Francisco and Tehran?

  In any case, he knew he was going to stay with Maryam that afternoon and not file any fucking reports. He knew he had to face the wrath of the boss who in turn would have to deal with the wrath of his boss in New Delhi. But he couldn’t care less. A twelve-page newspaper could not be the script for his destiny. He closed his eyes, slipping his head into Maryam’s lap, feeling her fingers run through his hair.

  As evening approached, Safir went into the kitchen and picked up the keys. He came back to open the front door for Maryam and followed her to his black Royal Enfield which he had parked that morning in the street.

  Maryam sat pillion behind Safir, holding him in an embrace. He drove down the street and to evade Wali, sped past her house over Zero Bridge. Right then a convoy of military vehicles began to issue from the Cantonement. To keep the road clear, Safir, like everyone else driving in that direction, had to press the brakes and stop before the bunker.

  A structure of sandbags, Safir noticed, the bunker was wrapped in whorls of wire from which hung bright shards of broken liquor bottles. Of the soldier inside, only the whites of his eyes were visible. As a motif in the startlingly natural landscape of one of the most beautiful cities in the world, the bunker was an eyesore. It was the kind of makeshift structure one could find in street-corners, within the markets and public parks, in dilapidated houses and defunct cinemas which only the ghosts in Kashmir ever visited. However, what struck Safir then was the oddity that the appearance of the bunker presented and the sinister darkness and boredom in which the soldier seemed irredeemably cloaked. He could have been from anywhere: Jharkhand or Orissa or Mysore. Perhaps he was miserably homesick. But there he was, behind the temporary wall of sand erected in destructive opposition, where the flow of time had been altered. Within, like in a Conrad short story, time was languid, uninterrupted and murderous; without, time was rushed and fractured, a prelude to a funeral.

  The convoy ended and the couple moved past the Cantonment. The soldier was now out of sight, and Safir remembered momentarily glimpsing the bunker while he was on the boat. The soldier – a shadow of the sovereign in a castle of bones – thrust the cold metal he clutched in his frost-bitten hands, beyond the wall, and into the heart of the city. The soldier, imprisoned within the choking walls, could get killed the moment he stepped out of the bunker. And the soldier had an unbounded freedom to kill on the slightest provocation. Safir could not imagine the moral landscape of such a soul – a scorching scrubland? a fatal forest? – which vacillated between the fear of getting exterminated and the terrible duty of exterminating.

  The road swept around the circle. They were moving westward on the wide road flanked by huge sycamores, when in the rear-view mirror, the setting sun caught the Wall in a blood-orange light. The Wall was fortified with iron pillars placed equidistantly and had rough, uneven protrusions between its concrete cemented blocks, which could make one’s fingers bleed if one brushed against them. What kind of device did one need to scratch the blocks, Safir thought. Later, when he would visit Kamran’s father, he would find the answer to his question. He needed a simple device and that was the sickle with which the farmers like Abdul Rashid reaped mustard. With the sickle he needed to enter the Cantonment one dark night and scratch slowly against the Wall. He needed to keep at it until he broke the protrusions and dislodged the blocks. If only for the sake of the moon, so that it might be seen pure and whole.

  In Safir’s troubled imagination, the Wall, shielding the Cantonment in the east, swelled and extended out for miles, towards the northern and southern ends of Srinagar. The Wall, soaring into the sky, halved the city. For Safir, whose family lived in the east of Srinagar, the Wall cheated them of half the day by hiding the sun. For his mother, night fell a few hours after noon. There was no chance for Safir to see his home if he lodged close to where his girlfriend lived, to reside in, or cut across, both his worlds. But what terrified him more was the Wall itself, its sheer size and dimensions, colour and texture, and its strategic placement by the Cantonment kept him from even imagining where his home was.

  When the Sikhs had ruled Srinagar, from 1819 to 1846, they had hanged whoever they considered a criminal among the native Muslim population from the bridges of the city. For days after these executions, the bodies hung there, shrivelled and rotting, shedding skin and flesh until only the skeletons remained.

  Safir could picture the Sikh soldiers capturing Kamran in the jungle and hanging him from the bridge before dragging his mutilated corpse through the streets and into the Cantonment, where they handed the body over to the soldiers to display it on the Wall. In his mind’s eye, Safir could see the vultures descending and tearing away shreds of Kamran’s flesh as fecal flies buzzed around the corners of his mouth and entered his nostrils. The corpse’s tongue would be distended like the tongue of a lamb suspended from the awning of a butcher’s shop.

  They had moved beyond the offices of the Informer and were almost at the Kozghar’s shop, when Maryam squeezed Safir’s arm, asking him to stop.

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Safir asked.

  ‘No, you go ahead and buy a kilo of fish and a quarter kilo of spinach. I have to buy some rosewater and extract for Papa’s sherbets.’

  She got off the bike, crossed the road and entered the shop as Safir drove a few hundred metres further and stopped at Badshah Bridge.

  He parked his bike by the sidewalk and squatted in front of an old fisherwoman to haggle. Despite the heat of summer, she was wearing a woollen pheran. She wore immense bronze earrings and had braided her headgear bedecked with rings into a turban. She had a wicker basket full of minnows in front of her.

  Safir bought the groceries and picking Maryam up, they soon returned to the lodge. Maryam helped him cut and clean the fish and he cooked it with tomatoes and spinach. After dinner, they made love.

  2

  He sat hunched in a chair on the veranda of his house. The house, facing the hills in the east, was at the edge of the village. The village was twenty-five miles south of Srinagar from where Safir had come to visit him. Behind him, he had kept the window to his empty bedroom open so that if either of his sons, Shahid or Kamran, or his wife, Murseh, were to return during the night, he’d hear their footfalls easily. They would call out to him and he would immediately run to open the entrance door downstairs to let them in.

  It was late April. The mornings were cool and still but in the afternoons the air became hot and restless. He was in his usual white kameez and light cotton shalwar, although he had also thrown Murseh’s
shawl over his shoulders. His sleep patterns had grown erratic and last night he had barely slept at all. He felt cold and chilly. Although he was far from achieving sleep, he kept his eyes shut. His back ached and his face radiated a dull pain. His head hung as though in a reverent bow towards the hills where Kamran was suspected to be hiding in a jungle.

  The sun, slanting above the roof, struck the stalks of wild grass in the courtyard with a blinding fury. From the hills, a wind had descended sharply. A page of the newspaper, made crisp by the sunlight, flapped on the table before him, waking him up.

  He had read in the Informer about the soldiers’ lusty speculations about Kamran. They had announced a bounty of ten lakh rupees on his head and proposed to capture him soon and kill him as they had killed his brother. For a moment, Abdul Rashid slipped into sleep and in that fleeting moment, his son momentarily fell out of his consciousness.

  He jolted awake, opening his eyes wide. Safir appeared before him, bursting into a greeting. He told him that the front door was ajar and when he could not find anyone downstairs, he had come up.

  Abdul Rashid invited him to sit down, pointing at the empty chair beside him. Murseh was not home, he said, but would he like a cup of tea, he asked.

  Safir seemed like a sensitive young man like Shahid – well-spoken and well-mannered. Safir thanked him and said that he was fine without one. Abdul Rashid had never met Safir before, but he had read and followed his stories in the Informer. He told him so and Safir smiled.

  Abdul Rashid was anticipating questions now, about his sons – one alive and one dead – but Safir asked him none.