by Feroz Rather
The wind whooshed and the stalks swayed. Abdul Rashid sat back in his chair, quelling a rising sigh. Safir remained silent. In that, he was not an inquisitor like the other journalists who had visited before him. Abdul Rashid liked the way Safir was sitting with him, calm and cross-legged like his own son. He fixed his eyes on the quince tree at the end of the courtyard. Even the gusts of the gale did not distract him. However, as the force subsided, sweeping away a handful of dusty-green leaves and hurling them against the plastered façade of the house, his gaze intensified on a low branch Safir could not fathom why.
Beyond the quince tree, the mustard was in bloom. The terraced fields rose like a wide yellow ladder towards the hills. With the evening’s arrival, the glazed dome of the sky became laced with light clouds.
Safir muttered something as though trying to begin a conversation. But then, he fell silent again and they continued to dwell in the silence they both seemed determined to keep. The sun sank behind the house and although the call for the dusk prayers was about to be given, there they sat, sharing the consciousness of the other’s presence, saying nothing. The wind died and the fields became listlessly grey. From the village, no cackling of hens or lowing of cows could be heard.
Abdul Rashid rose, clutching Safir’s arm and looked him in the eye. He told him how it was the younger son whose corpse he had imagined coming home. That day, after offering the Friday prayer in the mosque down in the village, when he returned home and sat down in the chair to read the newspaper, Murseh had given him his usual cup of tea.
‘Then there under the quince tree,’ Abdul Rashid said, not completing his sentence.
On the night of the last Thursday in the month of March, Shahid had said that he wanted to go to find his younger brother, Kamran, who had not been home for months. Abdul Rashid sensed danger. Was not life, the fact that we were alive, a prospect of tremendous danger? Upon seeing Shahid’s determination, he did not stop him. Neither did Murseh. Instead, they gave him food in a stainless-steel container, dates and yellow rice. He left at midnight, going over the fields towards the hills. The next evening, the villagers brought a corpse home and placed it under the quince tree.
Abdul Rashid was the father. And Murseh was the mother. She had dropped her headgear and lost her sanity; she ran naked and barefoot from shrine to shrine, dribbling in deranged grief. She talked with Lal Ded, the saint in an ember-embroidered, paradisiacal pheran of fire, long dead but eternally alive; she sang senseless songs. She was far from the young maiden Abdul Rashid had seen in the fields one dazzling spring afternoon many years ago, when her pheran of diaphanous silk seemed to be on the verge of catching celestial fire and he decided, in that moment, to marry her. After Shahid, their first-born was killed, she had disappeared without a trace, leaving Abdul Rashid alone in the house.
We are tied to the rebellion with blood. Murseh’s wish-knot, and seven million wish-knots on the trellised windows of Lal Ded’s shrine, is one single wish for freedom woven in knots of blood.
Abdul Rashid had expected Kamran’s body coming home because, after his lone visit to Srinagar, Abdul Rashid did not really know what had been done to Kamran there. And, soon after, Kamran took to arms. But that afternoon, who was it when he raised the shroud from the face of the corpse? Not Kamran, but Shahid. His forehead had bled, leaving behind a dry red trail, around the wound the width of an index finger. Abdul Rashid had given Shahid the final bath. He lowered Shahid into the grave that the father himself had dug for his son.
The soldiers had ambushed Shahid as he handed the parcel of food to Kamran. Abdul Rashid told Safir that he often kept wondering what Shahid said to his brother a moment before the bullets hit him. What were his final words? Did he give Kamran those dates? Did the grains of soft yellow rice scatter in the air as metal tore through metal? Did Shahid hug Kamran on his mother’s behalf because he had promised Murseh he would do so?
‘Do you think the dead body flinched as the soldiers struck it with their guns and broke its forehead?’ he asked Safir. ‘What are the screams like when a dead body cries?’
Then the summons to the dusk prayers began and Abdul Rashid stopped speaking.
After a long moment of funereal silence, he said, ‘It’s time for prayer.’
‘I want some water,’ Safir said.
‘The kitchen is downstairs to the left of the corridor,’ Abdul Rashid said. ‘I’m going to the mosque to pray.’
When Abdul Rashid returned, he led Safir to Shahid’s room that was opposite the kitchen across the corridor. He switched on the lights, pointing towards the picture hanging on a wall between two long identical double-slit windows. Shahid, in a blue suit, was standing by the groom. The groom, Shahid’s close friend, held the feathered crown in his hands above Shahid’s head. With a sly smile, the groom squinted at Shahid; the groom’s surmeh-smeared eyes had a ticklish glow and were filled with the anticipation of tasting the first delicious sip from the cup of his connubial bliss. Shahid had his arm wrapped around the groom. He had looked into the camera with the sparkling eyes and youthful charm that distinguishes a young man at the age of twenty-five. It was this youthfulness of his oval face and the sparkle of his light brown eyes that young men and women in the free nations of the world radiate. The proud posture and gait that Safir had seen in the youth parading through the streets of Paris during the revolution as depicted in the various movie adaptions of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, the recklessness and fatal dignity that he had dreamt of as he prowled the streets of Srinagar at night.
Below the picture in the steep sill of the window to the right, there were two sickles. They were lying side by side, facing each other. One sickle was exactly like the other, with a curved jaw of sharp shining teeth. Abdul Rashid lifted the sickles in his hands.
Shahid helped him reap mustard, he said, handing Safir the sickle he held in his right hand. ‘That was the one he used,’ the father remarked. Safir smiled vindictively, thinking about the Wall.
When Safir offered to help him harvest the mustard, he nearly called him ‘father’. After his prayers at the mosque, far from having a mournful demeanour and sad voice, as Safir had expected, Abdul Rashid returned radiating a stubborn dignity. He smiled as he opened the tin trunk beneath the other window. He handed Safir a polythene bag smelling of attar that contained a folded garment.
As Abdul Rashid moved his index finger over his own forehead, indicating the place where Shahid’s forehead had been broken, Safir connected the dots. The pheran in the bag was Shahid’s, the one he had worn on the day he was killed. It was a white woollen pheran, with a zip and a V-shaped collar. It had three holes in the front. One where the right sleeve met the shoulder, one on the abdomen and one right on the heart. Around each hole was a patch of dark red, but the patch around the heart was the largest. It extended to the middle of the pheran over the chest and down where it spilled into the area around the abdomen.
Abdul Rashid held the pheran up by its shoulders for Safir to take a good look at it. It had become Abdul Rashid’s ritual each night to come into the room, take the pheran out of the trunk and hold it up to look at it so that the memory of his son’s murder was freshly engraved in his mind.
Abdul Rashid folded the pheran and replaced it. ‘For tonight, this is enough seeing,’ he said.
3
A Rebel’s Return
I
lay motionless upon a tattered mattress on the floor, my eyes half open. The muscles in the back of my neck were stiff. My stomach roiled and my eyelids burnt. Broken images of flying glass shards from my midnight dreams flashed through my mind, like the sensations of hurt, drifting through a languorous darkness.
As I lay there longing for the peace of dreamless sleep, the door opened allowing a blinding streak of light into the room. I whimpered as I flung my arm over my eyes and cringed away as far as I could go, until my skull pressed against the wall.
When I slowly opened my eyes, Inspector Masoodi’s son was standing by my fee
t. He was in his khaki uniform, with shoes and a belt of shining brown leather. He crouched over me.
‘Your words failed,’ he said.
‘Don’t become your father,’ I whispered.
‘You must be joking,’ he laughed, patting his holster. He smelled of aftershave. He had nicked himself shaving, below his Adam’s apple. The cut was covered in a purple clot. My eyes lingered there for a moment until the buckle of his belt glinted in my line of sight. Even in the darkness, the Sarnath sign gleamed with its three lions rearing up on their hind legs. Gaping maws and roaring, I thought, all set to pounce on me and gnaw at my bones.
‘I will be sworn in as the next station-house officer today.’
‘Is that what you came to tell me?’
‘I am here to tell you that your words mean nothing. I am here to tell you that I will do anything to stop the likes of you from coming back to life.’ He spoke with a deep conviction.
I stood up and looked directly into his eyes. ‘I am not done yet,’ I said softly.
‘Stop raving, Ilham,’ he said. ‘You died many years ago, you know that. Hell, the whole world knows that.’
Once upon a time, I led an outfit of young rebels. My area of operation was Sopor, a small town in the north. Late one autumn evening, as my comrades and I crossed an apple orchard, heading for the marketplace on the other side, we were ambushed by soldiers hiding in the thickets. All five of my men were killed instantly. I sustained the crossfire single-handedly. However, at the end, there were no bullets left in my Kalashnikov. The soldiers zeroed in on me, throwing a dagger in my direction that sunk into my back.
Half dead, the soldiers handed me over to the local police who put me into an ambulance. I was growing weaker as the bleeding wouldn’t stop. The vehicle floor beneath me moved and a bluish darkness fell over me. The windowpanes became viscous and foggy, with two distant voices floating above me.
‘What are we doing to Ilham, Inspector Masoodi?’ asked a somewhat subdued voice.
‘We take his corpse back to Srinagar,’ Inspector Masoodi replied.
‘But he is still alive and if we take him to the hospital, he could survive.’
‘He won’t make it all the way.’
Like poison, a pain slowly spread through my body. My head was throbbing and gradually going numb. ‘Water, water,’ I wanted to call, but my lips refused to move.
Almost an hour later, at the outskirts of Srinagar, I was hanging on to life by a thread when Inspector Masoodi asked the driver to stop the vehicle by a brook. ‘Go, get some water for him,’ he said.
I heard the door slide open and the man strode away. But when he returned with water in a can, originally used for diesel, and looked at me, there I lay: strangulated, my bitten tongue protruding through my teeth out of my mouth.
‘What happened to Ilham, Inspector Masoodi?’ the man asked.
‘Poor guy. He died,’ Inspector Masoodi replied.
At dawn in Srinagar, the air at the graveyard on the banks of the river Jhelum was rent by the mourners’ laments. A wind began to blow through the city. Inspector Masoodi walked along the curving bank, crossed the road at Badshah Bridge and entered his tall house. He went upstairs to his bedroom where Sabrin was deep asleep. He changed noiselessly and climbed into bed. He noticed that his fat, twelve-year-old son, who always slept clinging to his mother during the night, was missing. He gently shook Sabrin’s shoulder.
‘Where is Imran?’ he asked.
‘He must be somewhere in the house,’ Sabrin murmured and fell asleep again.
‘Foolish woman,’ Inspector Masoodi grumbled.
He rose and switched on the lights. Sabrin was still snoring when he returned to the bedroom after searching the three sitting rooms in the house. He pushed open the door of the bathroom. As he stepped in, he slipped on a wet tile and knocked over a bucket filled with water with his knee.
Outside, the wind grew furious, rattling the window panes discordantly. Inspector Masoodi, spooked and suspecting ghosts in the house, ran down the stairs. He went into the kitchen, the drawing room and the guest room. ‘The whore has lost me my son,’ he bellowed. He returned to the kitchen and gazed out at the wind flailing about with brute force. A tremor of fear shook him, but he gathered himself quickly, clenching his fists. He darted out to the veranda, the only place in the house he had not searched.
He found three patio chairs around the iron table; the wind had shattered the glass vase, the fragments of glass and fake flowers were strewn about the tabletop. He wanted to call out for help, but he heard a human voice. He looked across at the Jhelum, ruffled and loud. He thought he was hallucinating; the sound was coming from somewhere beneath his feet.
He went down the steps into the cellar, shining the torch in his hand. At the rear of the basement he found Imran facing the wall and mumbling something.
‘You devil!’ shouted Inspector Masoodi. ‘I looked everywhere for you.’
Imran looked immensely relieved and ecstatic. His eyes, tinted with a strange pallid shine, were overflowing with tears. He had peed in his pyjamas and his legs trembled.
‘Who were you talking to?’ asked Inspector Masoodi.
‘Papa, can’t you see him? Can’t you see, Ilham?’
‘Which Ilham? How do you know about Ilham?’
‘Ilham, talk to my Papa,’ Imran said, turning around.
‘Ilham is dead,’ Inspector Masoodi shouted in horror, ‘Ilham is dead.’
He grabbed his son’s arm in a bid to haul him into his arms, but Imran had become immobile like a hefty, frigid corpse. He did not move an inch.
‘You son of the devil,’ Inspector Masoodi slapped him, crying and wrapping his son in a firm embrace.
Ever since Imran was taken away by his father, I have had no one to visit me in this low-ceilinged, narrow basement. The walls are cracked and chipped with deep cavernous shelves where bugs sing, mate and proliferate. Beneath the hay mat on the floor, the mice have dug long tunnels. Last night, I climbed the stairway leading to the door. I was enjoying a bug, chewing at its crunchy wings as the mice emerged from their tunnels and burrowed into the mattress, ripping fresh holes in the mounds of cotton. Rascals! I was furious and lashed out at them with a bamboo broom that broke as they skittered away.
I am a forbidden shadow in this space, and in the absence of light and human contact, I feel an almost lethal contentment. The walls contain me. I’m sick with their warmth. My head hits the ceiling. I scream, desperate, my arms flailing. This is the point when I want throw myself out of here.
That morning as Imran, who calls himself Inspector Masoodi now, left, I followed him. However, like his father, he shut the door on me and latched it from outside. I sat on the top step, ruminating on the wings of the bug I had caught. I regretted the whole thing – our first meeting, how I had won him over, how he had believed me and vowed that he would never become his father.
I was so angry that I turned around and punched the wooden door. I hit the door so hard that one of the fingers fell off my right hand. A finger without flesh. Picture what that looks like. Three thin bones one on top of the other. A piece of fragile artwork.
My finger fell on the topmost stair and walked down like a human baby with legs. As soon as it reached the floor, it ran after the mice. I ran after it. My finger was giving me a hard time, but I finally caught it as it emerged from a burrow. I put it back on my hand.
I was at the door again. I hit it so hard this time that all my fingers fell off. But it was all good, I tell you, it was all good. The latch on the other side fell off.
I roamed the city that entire day, but finding that no one could hear, see or touch me, I became miserable. In the evening, I stood on Zero Bridge, looking at the river Jhelum. It was full and green and small boats floated on it. It was the river in which I had bathed and laughed as a child, playfully splashing water onto my friends. I wondered whether I could at least generate a ripple in the river if I jumped into it. But with the sun disa
ppearing behind the Himalayas and the darkness falling over the city, it seemed unlikely. Srinagar was both deaf and blind to me. I had an overwhelming urge to return to the basement, ensconce myself on the mattress and sleep among the skittering mice.
I walked to the end of the bridge. I noticed a soldier inside the bunker and decided to explore the Cantonment instead of heading back to the cellar.
Inspector Masoodi was seated on a sofa in Café Barbarica, sipping a brandy and enjoying the opulent ambience. Noisy tourists were window-shopping and gazing at the souvenirs whittled from bones and wood. I noticed a wooden hand with missing fingernails. An authentic-looking ribcage missing its mid ribs. There was also a magnificent elbow, suspended from the ceiling by a skin-coloured string.
Inspector Masoodi finished his drink and stepped out into the Tunnel. I followed him as he walked to the furthermost end and went into a dark prison cell where two young boys were lying on the cold, stone floor covered in spit and stinking of faeces. He tapped his cane against their feet.
‘Fucking miscreants,’ he shouted. Opening their eyes, they stood up, groggy and terrified.
‘Kamran, take this,’ he said to one of them, ‘or I empty my gun into your head.’
As Kamran took the tweezers from his hand, Inspector Masoodi unclasped his trouser belt. He thrashed the other boy’s back with the buckle-end. He grabbed his arm and ripped off the sleeve of his shirt. ‘Pluck out Ishfaq’s hair,’ he shouted at Kamran. Kamran took a second to respond and Inspector Masoodi started to beat him.
As I watched this scene play out through the bars on the window, I realized that it made me neither sad nor angry.
As Kamran collapsed onto the floor, I entered the prison cell and stood behind Inspector Masoodi. He grabbed Ishfaq by the scruff off his neck, ripping the collar off his shirt as well. He produced another set of tweezers from his trouser pocket and slapped Ishfaq before stabbing him in the shoulder with the forceps.