The Night of Broken Glass

by Feroz Rather

  I was watching you from the veranda as they took you out. Papa passed the willow switch to Baba who did not pause to even think before administering the punishment. Turning a deaf ear to my protests that you had stolen merely a fucking fig, and that it was only for me, he flogged you mercilessly as the sun blazed down into the courtyard. When the switch whipped across your face, a bright welt of blood welled up on your forehead.

  A few months later, the news came in hushed whispers that Shireen, who had only feigned convalescence, had killed herself by drinking a bottle of rat poison on the eve of her wedding. As they lowered her bloated body into the grave, her father broke down. He leaned onto Qadir Suth and said, ‘Had I known that the whore loved the measly driver so much, I would have agreed to everything she asked.’

  I find it hard to believe that Baba, who raised, groomed and educated you, is sending you away now when you are ready to lead us to the path of freedom. With him around, we won’t be able to meet during your fleeting sojourn at Syed Manzil.

  I have never seen you scowl. Ever. However, that afternoon, as I waited for you and you deliberately dawdled to our rendezvous, your forehead was furrowed and your eyes were dazed. You seemed lost and distracted.

  You foresee it all: the light and the darkness. You are a miracle of memory draped in the folds of eloquence. I have plunged with you into this scalding river whose brilliant waters I want to embrace without caring whether we’ll reach the shore. I don’t care that my actions will sully my family’s reputation. The world is cruel; it ties us to the stanchions of caste. I will never cease to love you. I am furious to be tethered like this. I want to detonate the skulls by planting rose-bombs and geranium-grenades in the putrid, filthy brains of Baba, Papa, Qadri, Masoodi, Suharwardi, Kubravi, Naqshbandi, Bukhari, Haqani, Mubarki, Geelani. I want to burn down the edifice of the whole damn society who believe that your soul is black dirt because you are a Sheikh while mine is made of white and gold feathers because I am a Syed. I am militant, brash and bad-zat in a metal brassiere. I would gladly punch Nadim on his fucking nose. I’ll get Qadir Suth to give me tight jeans and a pair of high heels, and I’ll saunter through the streets of Anantnag in them.

  I beg you to send your father to talk to Baba as soon as possible. Mama is on our side anyway because I have made it abundantly clear to her that I cannot live without you. However, if you choose to shut the window and sit inside, churning the esoteric rosary that Baba has assigned you to memorize and learn, nothing is going to happen. I swear by that very holy book of the Qur’an that, if need be, I’ll put the entire strip of sedatives into their dinner. That will create the perfect conditions for our departure, my Sheikh, away from this house of Syeds. They will awaken with horror and stupefaction to our absence the next morning from the deep, blue haze of their drug-induced sleep.

  6

  Summer of 2010

  T

  hat afternoon, Nagin had gone to buy the medicine from the pharmacy. As soon as she heard the first gunshot, she crouched on the floor behind the wooden counter. Then the bullets came flying and hit the rear wall, smashing and knocking down the glass bottles filled with a dark syrup that lined the shelves; the bullets tore through the wooden planks of the shelves and the bricks behind her. Transfixed, she heard the tramp of the soldiers’ boots and the local people stampeding in terror. Her sick husband lay resting in their small, modest house, which could be reached by the narrow winding dust road leading from the marketplace on the highway to the eastern end of the town of Pampore. She was a middle-aged woman with slow gestures and a calm beauty. As a wife, she had an acute sense of duty. But she felt unlucky that day; she thought she wouldn’t survive the skirmish. She was worried for her life and also worried that there would be no one to take care of Rahman if she was shot.

  Amidst this clamour for freedom, aazadi, with the boys in the street stomping on the ground and chanting ‘Go India go back, go India go back’ as they heckled and pelted the gun-toting, trigger-happy soldiers, the compounder, Inam, Sajeh’s fearless son, pulled the shutter down and lay down beside the customer on the floor. Inam was still, but vigilant. Nagin’s breath rasped in terror. As the noise receded with the demonstration drawing further away, Inam lit a match and whispered that there was a backdoor through which he could let her out. He motioned to her to keep her head down. The soldiers could still be waiting outside to shoot on sight.

  As the two made their escape, Inam led her through the graveyard and into the long corridor of land in front of the mosque. Then he ran in the direction of the road from where they could hear screaming.

  When Nagin reached home, she found her husband on the veranda.

  ‘The gunshots woke me up and I got worried,’ he quavered. His face was pale, and his hands were shaking. ‘What happened in the market?’

  She had a bad feeling, but she did not know the details yet.

  ‘Something happened there,’ she said casually and took him inside into the sitting room, baithak. She shook out the quilt and folded it neatly and made him lie down on the mattress. Then she gave him two paracetamols from the strip she had in her pocket and asked him to rest.

  She spent the rest of the day cooking inside the kitchen. As night began to fall, her husband fell asleep, and she came out on the veranda. She rested her tired back against a cushion and wondered where Inam had gone. Her house shared the courtyard with Sajeh’s house. She had told her what had happened earlier in the day but now she somehow felt irresponsible; had she not been frightened witless, she would have forced Inam to come home with her. She looked westward to the point where the road twisted. Beyond the cluster of tall houses, in the falling dark, she saw the angular silhouettes of the roofs go black.

  After a while, Inam returned. Sajeh came out of the kitchen and confronted him in the corridor.

  ‘Where the hell have you been? How many bullets have you taken to your chest?’ Sajeh expostulated as she held him in a tight embrace. Inam was silent for a moment, perhaps remorseful too, for being careless and not returning home to his mother immediately.

  But as he started talking, he became incensed. Nagin overheard him tell his mother that four boys who belonged to the households across the highway, and whom he knew very well and played cricket with occasionally, had been hit with bullets in their heads or thereabouts and three of them had died on the spot. The one who was rushed to Srinagar, the evening news bulletin on Radio Kashmir a few minutes later announced, had died in the hospital.

  One cold night, in December of 1991, Nagin was asleep on Rahman’s arm in the baithak. Before dawn, Rahman woke up and went into the kitchen. He lit the lantern on the windowsill and returned to sit on the bed by her side.

  ‘It is time to go to the shop,’ he bent to whisper in her ear.

  She rolled over but did not open her eyes. As she heard him get ready to leave without her, she reached out and yanked him back to the bed and pressed his head to her breast.

  ‘I’ll be late,’ he groaned but she muffled his protests against her, running her fingers over his hairy shoulders. He was a huge, stout man, and she liked to feel his large, woodcutter’s biceps. He squeezed her and tickled her waist. He made her giggle and coaxed her out of bed.

  Down the dust track they walked together, through the faint mist of the morning. He strode purposefully, swinging the axe from one hand and holding a log of mulberry wood over his shoulder with the other. She held a lantern. They walked past clusters of houses and quietly sleeping dogs, huddled together. On either side of the road, in the gaps between the houses, the lantern’s light flashed on little stretches of fields. The saffron was in bloom and the flowers gleamed in the yellow light.

  When they reached the market square, it felt eerily empty and vaguely ominous. In front of their shop, one in a long row of shuttered shops flanking the highway, Rahman stood the thick, cylindrical log on the curb of the highway. As he raised his axe above his head, he swiftly scanned the area.

  The army convoy started early
in the morning and carried on for an hour or so. The soldiers did not stop usually, but when they did halt to let their dogs loose to sniff out landmines, they stopped the civilians and asked questions. However, on this day, only three white jeeps hurtled through the market at a frightening speed.

  Although the highway was clear, Rahman seemed distracted. He raised his axe and brought it down with a crushing blow and the log wobbled and fell down. Nagin smiled at him as she helped him to raise the log and brought the lantern closer. He glanced at her, aiming with the tip of his axe at the thin groove.

  ‘Say bismillah … it won’t topple over then,’ Nagin said.

  He smiled, gripping the handle of the axe. Then with firm control, he brought down the edge of the axe right into the groove. The log split with a loud crack into two pieces. Nagin would have clapped had Ali Mohammad not started the call for prayer.

  Inside the shop with smoke-blackened, mud walls, she sat by the flat, wooden table beside the tandoor, oven, at the far end. On the table was a round, aluminium pan with a mound of dough. Rahman had added yeast to the atta and had left it to leaven overnight. He sprayed kerosene from the lantern over the wood chips and threw a match into the tandoor. Plumes of acrid smoke rose as the initial flames flared. She tore away at the mound, making little white spheres with her palms. Then she dusted each sphere in a bowl of dry flour.

  With a quick flourish, Rahman slapped the pad against the inner wall of the tandoor, which blazed purple and blue. The first lawas formed, blooming with bubbles, and the delicious aroma of burnt wheat spread through the shop.

  Ali Mohammad and Dr Mushtaq greeted Rahman and Nagin by their bakery door, their eyes squinting and their heads thrown back to keep away from the smoke spiralling out of the door.

  Both men were in their mid-fifties. Ali Mohammad had a round face with a long white beard and large, luminous eyes. He had six daughters and only three of them had been married off. He had not done well as a contractor and in the failed deals, he had incurred debts from his friends. However, because of his clean conduct and steadfastness, his friends did not badger him for repayment. ‘He’ll redeem his debts when God sends him enough,’ they said.

  ‘What do I do, Dr Mushtaq?’ Ali Mohammad asked, lacking his customary calm.

  ‘You’ll have to have the stamp of a gazetted officer on your identity card,’ said Dr Mushtaq. ‘Come to my clinic in Srinagar later today and I’ll stamp it for you.’

  Unlike Ali Mohammad, Dr Mushtaq never wore a pheran. He had wrapped himself in a shawl and was wearing a thick woollen sweater that reached his knees. He had a florid countenance, a high-bridged nose. He hid his bald and shiny head with a black woollen karakul hat.

  ‘I want my lawas crisp,’ Dr Mushtaq said to Rahman. ‘And instead of eight, give me ten today; we have guests.’

  ‘Ali Mohammad, how many do you want?’ Rahman asked.

  ‘Nagin, how is your back ache now?’ Dr Mushtaq asked.

  ‘Give me six and no more,’ Ali Mohammad replied.

  ‘The pain went away, doctor,’ she replied. ‘I’m feeling better.’

  ‘Are you all right? You seem perturbed,’ Rahman asked Ali Mohammad.

  ‘Keep drinking the syrup. You’ll be fine,’ Dr Mushtaq said to Nagin, pulling his shawl over his shoulder. He glanced at Ali Mohammad.

  ‘What to do?’ Ali Mohammad remarked cynically. ‘We live in a different time now. It is all the same … whether we live or die, what difference does it make?’

  ‘What happened?’ Rahman asked.

  He put the skewer aside, uncaring that the lawas in the tandoor would burn, and stared at the two men. They stood in silence outside the door. The day had broken but the sky was covered in a dark swirl of clouds and the flickering flames caught their faces in a purple-reddish light.

  ‘The other day the soldiers stopped Ali Mohammad,’ Dr Mushtaq said. ‘And because the picture he had pasted onto his identity card did not have a stamp, they slapped him.’

  There was a silence. The shop filled with the gloom of humiliation. Ali Mohammad’s face flushed and he bit his quivering lower lip. Before he could say anything, Nagin stood up and gathered the hot lawas from the table.

  ‘Did you say six?’ she asked, although she knew exactly how many he wanted.

  ‘Yes, and one soft one for my Bity,’ he said. Bity was his little girl.

  She felt the lawas with her fingertips and found a softer one for Bity and crisp ones for Dr Mushtaq.

  As soon as the two paid and were gone, Nagin told Rahman, ‘I’m going, home now to cook. But before the soldiers stop you, you too must have your identity cards stamped.’

  Nagin stood by the window that was cluttered and gnarled with the branches of the old elm tree. The thick screen of leaves blocked out the morning sun mounting the back of the bald hill. The dark pervading the kitchen was penetrated by a single ray of light that had pierced the natural curtain like a thin needle of glittering steel. It will perforate the mud wall, it will singe my skin, Nagin thought, if I cross it, it will slash my eyes and tear a hole in my head.

  It was still early in the morning and quiet inside the house. Only the ray of light roared. She glanced away from it, across the mosquito net strung over the knee-high wooden wall, towards the baithak. There Rahman lay on a mattress on the floor, under a light, darned quilt. His face had faded and his hair fell in a tangle over his eyes. He had been sleeping in the same position for a few hours now. Facing the ceiling, his lips dry and chapped, his mouth half-open. Had his chest not been faintly rising and falling, she would have thought him a dead man. Dead.

  Although several weeks had passed, she recalled a moment in the shop. How prolonged that moment felt. So close to death she had been, a mere width of a needle apart. Her throat had parched and, unable to breathe, she had almost choked. That moment had been seared indelibly into her mind. Ever since then, the tiniest sounds amplified deafeningly inside her head: the buzz of a bee caught in the window netting intensified to intolerable decibels, birdcalls became raucous and agonizing. Her mood had altered as well. This morning, she was swamped by a profound bleakness. The mood within merged with the mood without because of the curfew that had been imposed as soon as the news and the heavy odour of death had spread through Pampore and all 5000 residents had resolved to give the boys a dignified funeral. She did not know the boys, but she knew Inam. Inam, a tall, tough kid who could take anything but humiliation. Since his father, Nabir, could not support his education, he had started working in Dr Mushtaq’s pharmacy as soon as he matriculated, at the age of seventeen, two years ago. He knew how to give injections and he took the needle out of the flesh with such ease and confidence that it was completely painless. He was into mobile phones and girls. He had a couple of expensive black Motorola phones with English-song dial tones and the pictures of cricketers. He texted and talked to Bity during the night on the phone. He smoked cigarettes. When he had seen Nagin coming towards the shop that day, he had quickly pressed the burning end of the cigarette and stubbed it out against the counter. Not merely because he was afraid of Nagin who would report his activity to his mother, but also because he respected her. He coughed as he briskly waved away the smoke suspended in the air.

  Nagin wondered about the boys: did they look like Inam when they were alive? Dressed in tight blue jeans torn at the knees and a white T-shirt with the picture of a blond American actor she did not know? Did they also spike their hair with hard gel that made their gaunt faces look gaunter? Were they still at the tender age when colourful pimples bloomed with a soft stubble along the innocent curve of the jaw? She had probably seen them in the marketplace. Rahman was probably familiar with the boys’ fathers because most of Pampore came to his bakery for bread. She had not told him what had happened. She was afraid of what would happen if Rahman were to come to know of the incident. She wondered what the mothers of the boys were doing now. These boys, who had been erased from the face of this earth, were only sixteen, thirteen and eightee
n years of age. She pictured the prayer before the funeral. Males standing in taut lines within the compound and women with their scarves covering their woeful, tear-streaked faces, standing at the fringes in the surrounding saffron fields. But the funeral had to be cancelled because the soldiers had coerced the imam, Ali Mohammad, to make an announcement on the mosque’s loudspeaker: If more than three people are seen walking together anywhere, we’ll shoot them. Inam told her that before the bodies rotted, they should be taken elsewhere and buried. That very night they were smuggled into a neighbouring village where they were buried quietly.

  She touched the pillow under Rahman’s head with her fingertips, leaning over him. She wanted to kiss him on the forehead but felt that the touch of her lips would wake him from his fitful slumber. She gently brushed his hair to a side, listening to him breathe. The sound was distant and reassuring. He was adrift in some remote sea of sleep.

  She smiled and as she stood up to go back to the kitchen, she smelled turd. It was coming from the corridor. She walked out, and realizing what had happened, she stepped through the front door and grabbed the neck of Sajeh’s goat and slapped its mouth. The goat bleated, squirming from her grip.

  ‘Damn her,’ Sajeh cried, emerging from her house. In the bright sunlight, the two women surveyed the new bed of hakh plants that they had raised together, now laid to waste with half-nibbled green leaves.

  Sajeh was a short, bright-eyed fiery woman. She moved with a great agility and ran after the goat and grabbed it by the neck.

  ‘Keep that little beast tethered somewhere,’ Nagin recommended.

  Sajeh pulled at the ears of the goat and threatened, ‘I’ll feed you to jackals.’ Then she asked Nagin in a softer voice, ‘How is Rahman feeling?’

  ‘He’s burning up with fever,’ Nagin said angrily. ‘The pills Inam gave me are dust.’