by Feroz Rather
‘I had told you that Force 10 was following us everywhere. Even in the ground where we went to play cricket.’
‘But Amir did not throw stones. He only wished to.’
‘We did and Force 10 saw him playing with us later.’
‘Where can the policeman hide? Next time, we’ll finish him.’
‘There’s plenty of bricks and rocks in the streets of the city.’
Mohsin turned around and saw the two boys. They were barely fifteen or sixteen. Although they were not crying, their faces were streaked with tears, their eyes swollen and red with rage. They saw Mohsin watching them.
‘He was our friend,’ Nazir said.
‘We were in the same class,’ Imtiyaz added.
Mohsin wanted to ask them more questions about Amir, but Najib who was inside the tent, waved at him, beckoning him inside.
He moved through the narrow aisle between the women seated on the tarp sheets, and the two boys followed him. A grieving woman suddenly rose from the centre of a cluster of women to his left and pointed her finger at him. ‘That satchel belongs to my son,’ she cried. Her eyes were swollen and her hair was in disarray. She slapped herself on her forehead and sobbed. She seized her pheran and ripped it from the collar down to her belly. She leaped over the women seated around her and snatched the schoolbag from Mohsin. She kissed it and hugged it, still self-flagellating and intoning her son’s name during the pauses. The women rose to hold the bereft mother and escorted her into the house.
Inside the tent, it was dark and still. People’s faces were barely discernible and the voices themselves sounded muffled. The centre tent pole appeared too fragile to hold up the weight of the canvas and Mohsin was afraid that the entire edifice would crash down on the mourners.
Following Najib’s instructions, Mohsin and the boys hefted the casket to the side. Abba wrapped Amir in a white shroud. He raised his son’s upper body, holding the shoulders of the corpse, and Najib and Mohsin lifted the feet. Mohiddin raised the lid of the casket and together they lowered the dead body into it. As Mohiddin secured the lid, Abba looked him in the eye, frowning; he seemed discombobulated. What if my son woke up inside the casket? he seemed to ask. Would he not need air to breathe?
Abba gave a cry and his knees buckled. Before he could collapse, Nazir and Imtiyaz grabbed his shaking shoulders and held him upright.
A year ago, Mohiddin’s son, Ishfaq, had escorted his cousin to her house after dinner, driving her in his car. On his way back home, he had passed by a military camp. The car, a mere machine, lacked the mechanism to understand the dire consequences of breaking down in a city like Srinagar. The car stalled in front of the military bastion on that dark night. The soldiers in the bunker at the end of the fence facing the road became suspicious. That is not perfectly accurate – the soldiers here were always paranoid. For them, the city was a dangerous jungle, the roads, fanged serpents feigning sleep. Any car coming to a sudden stop in front of their camp was a ploy to dynamite them. That fateful night, when the car spluttered and died, they yelled at the driver, asking him to go away. When he failed to do so, they shot him.
Later that night, when Mohiddin received his son’s corpse, following the initial staggering shock, he performed the ablutions and recited from the Qur’an. He admonished his wife, son and their neighbours – Mohsin and his mother, Zarin and Najib – who had come to mourn, forbidding lamenting. The boy’s chest was riddled with bullets – seventeen of them. In the ritual of final cleansing, the father had washed away the blood around the wounds. When he had shrouded the body, he embalmed it with the perfume he had bought from Medina years ago while he was on pilgrimage. He asked a few young men to help him place the body in the casket. He was the foremost pallbearer and when the procession reached the graveyard, he announced: ‘I’m going to bury my son myself.’
Across the coppice, the father who still mourned the death of his own son, now led the funeral prayer in the graveyard by the shore of the lake. Mohsin stood between Najib and Abba, his hands clasped over his heart. Unlike the coppice and the backyard, the lake in the front was placid. In the thickening heat haze, the sun in the sky was a mere blood-orange blot. It hung low over the lake, making the city look surreal.
As the prayer began, Mohsin’s heart heaved. He wanted to run away from the mourners, now mutely grappling with the suddenness of their loss. Abba’s and Najib’s shoulders were crowding him in. He longed to push them away. He wanted to catechize Mohiddin about his stoic fortitude that sustained him despite having had to witness coffin after coffin containing the corpses of children and young men. From where did he get the courage to lead the prayers? How come he hadn’t suffered a nervous breakdown and gone to pieces?
In that moment, Mohsin hated him. He wanted to be like him: at peace amidst the upheavals and turbulence of war. He wanted something to hold on to as he waded through the sea of cadavers. He found it difficult to breathe. The heaviness in his chest turned to a dull ache that spread across his limbs and head. He was nauseous and thirsty. The duration of the prayer lengthened extraordinarily.
Amir’s mother’s wails seemed to emerge like little white birds that winged through the walnut trees into the cemetery. In Mohsin’s fevered imagination, they circled over his head, dripping blood from their bruised wings.
When the prayer finally ended, the birds soared away across the lake where, blinded by the heat haze, they plummeted into the water and drowned.
A grassy area of about fifty yards separated the main road from the concrete elevation of the garage where Mohsin worked. The cars moved slowly by the shop in the front where Najib sold magazines and newspapers; they came in along the dirt track strewn with boulders and went up the inclination on to the concrete elevation where Mohsin expertly cleaned them.
A year ago, towards the end of his first week at work, Mohsin was on the dirt track. With one eye on the road, to keep a sharp lookout for potential customers, he was chatting with Najib who was in the shop, seated in his chair behind the counter with the customary cigarette hanging from his mouth. Najib absently flicked through a magazine as he made desultory conversation with Mohsin. A Zen veered off the road and hurtled towards Mohsin. Had Mohsin not stepped back in time, he’d have been tossed over the bonnet of the car.
The Zen screeched to a halt at the elevation. The door opened and out came Force 10. He was a tall man with a thin face. His brown eyes had an unusual blue tint. He had a beaky nose and a small, rodent-like mouth.
Mohsin, who had fallen on the boulders, stood up, dusting himself. Force 10 threw the keys at him and Mohsin reflexively caught them before they hit his face.
‘Have it cleaned up, kid, by the time I get back,’ Force 10 said and walked across the road and into the market.
‘Do you know him?’ Mohsin asked Najib.
‘Sick, son-of-a-bitch,’ Najib replied, tossing the cigarette stub on to the track. ‘He is the new SHO.’
When he returned half an hour later, Mohsin had washed the car. He handed him the keys. ‘Two hundred rupees, sir,’ he said.
Force 10 took the keys. Using his long, bony fingers as pincers, he gripped Mohsin’s jaw and stared into his eyes menacingly. Then he slowly released him and at the last moment he slapped Mohsin.
‘Do you want more?’ he asked.
Mohsin just stood there stupidly, speechless as he watched Force 10 unlock the car door and get into his vehicle.
Mohiddin, who was buying a newspaper at the shop, saw the entire episode. As Force 10 started up the car, reversed it and sped away, he came over to Mohsin, as did Najib. Mohsin felt deeply humiliated by the pity and compassion in their eyes and wanted to run away and hide.
‘If I could,’ Najib said, ‘I’d break his head with a stone.’
‘Shut up, Najib,’ Mohiddin said. He stroked Mohsin’s head gently. ‘Be patient, son. Be careful,’ he added.
This is the first week of my work, Mohsin wanted to scream. What was he supposed to tell his hopeful mothe
r who, although she never overtly mentioned it, wanted him to build a new house before he got married? That he had toiled in vain using a gallon of soap water to scrub the windows and tyres, and had dusted the filthy seats and erased the flecks of blood from the dashboard and steering wheel – what was Force 10, a cop or a fucking criminal? That he had sprayed air freshener into the interior of the car that reeked of weed, alcohol and cum – all for nothing?
‘Just make an exception in his case,’ Mohiddin advised Mohsin. Najib tried butting in at this point, but Mohiddin shooed him away. He took out two one-hundred-rupee notes from his wallet and tucked them into the breast pocket of Mohsin’s shirt.
Mohsin lowered his eyes, blushing as grateful tears sprang to his eyes. He shook his head and returned the money.
‘Foolish, boy, keep it,’ rebuked Mohiddin, holding him in an embrace.
A month later, when Mohsin refused to wash Force 10’s car for free again, he drove him along the rim of the lake, and jolting him in the back seat, sped past the apple orchards to pull over in front of an old colonial mansion. The walls of the mansion, built into the cliff that was covered with pines and ivy, were washed white. It had a square garden in the front with rose hedges and cherry trees. Odd as it may sound, on the door of the mansion, the sign read: POLICE STATION.
Force 10 marched him past the living room that served as the office and through a door at the back into a tunnel. The row of ceiling bulbs didn’t quite dispel the gloom here and water seeped through the stone walls.
At the end of the tunnel, Force 10 shoved Mohsin into a hallway that opened into a cell with a door of iron bars. He shackled his prisoner’s arm to the door and unbuckled his belt.
‘You asked for payment,’ he grabbed Mohsin’s face with his claw-like fingers and glared into his face with bloodshot eyes. He hit Mohsin’s manacled wrist repeatedly with the metal buckle. ‘You … asked me … to pay you … money?’ he bellowed. After Force 10 had broken all the bones in Mohsin’s wrist, he undid the cuffs and dragged the semi-conscious lad through the damp tunnel. He hauled him past the living room and out of the mansion and dumped his body in a rose bush.
Thirty-six hours later, when Mohsin opened his eyes, he was in bed at home. His wrist was in a cast. He saw Mohiddin and his mother standing at his bedside.
‘These young boys never listen to us,’ Mohiddin complained. ‘Don’t they realize that an entire army is out there to break their bodies?’
She was a sad, shrivelled woman with frail arms and grainy skin. There were dark circles around her grey, misty eyes. She had aged prematurely. Barbed wrinkles ran across her temples, creating tangles of beleaguered grief. Hamid, her husband, had disappeared seventeen years ago when she was barely twenty-four years old and Mohsin, a mere toddler. She had registered numerous missing persons reports at innumerable police stations. Holding her husband’s photograph, framed in glass and wood, against her chest, she had picketed in the public parks along with other women who had lost their menfolk to the unrest that had broken out in 1989. With civil rights activists and human rights lawyers, she had visited military camps to plead her case to top-ranking officers. A lascivious lawyer offered to promote her case in exchange for an extramarital affair with him. He proposed that she spent a night with him, in a hotel on the outskirts of the city. No one would know, he told her. She became angry but nevertheless thought about it; her nights were long and lonely and the desire for a man’s intimate touch pulsed through her body, the memory of her husband, flooding in. She felt guilty of her thoughts for reasons she could understand and reasons she could not. She cried as she resolved to refuse the lawyer, devoting herself entirely to her son.
Mohsin was all she had. He was grown up now, the shadow of a moustache over his upper lip resembled his father’s.
A few days after Amir’s killing, before the spinach would shrivel and tomatoes rot, she bought a wedge of cheese from the market and cooked Mohsin his favourite dish. When Mohsin returned in the afternoon, she prettied herself up, donning a new headscarf and freshly laundered clothes. In the entranceway, he smelled the delightful aroma of garlic.
She asked him to sit in the narrow sitting room that was across the corridor from the kitchen and she brought out the festive, yellow and black printed dasterkhwan and spread it before him. But as she unfurled it on the floor, it reminded Mohsin of his mother’s old snood with which he had shrouded Amir’s face.
She returned with a tray on which she had placed a bowl of water, a bowl of yoghurt, a plate of white rice and a bowl of cheese dish cooked with spinach. She sat beside him, smiling and watching him eat. He kept glancing at the dasterkhwan and his mother’s new snood. He suddenly stopped eating.
‘Is the cheese burnt?’ his mother asked anxiously. ‘Haven’t I cooked it the way you like it?’
‘It is not that, mother,’ he replied. He did not want to upset her, but a great icy weight had settled in his stomach and had killed his appetite. The image of Amir’s face, his eyes glued shut by singed, swollen flesh, flashed across his mind.
‘I’m full,’ he said.
‘But you haven’t had enough,’ she protested.
‘I’m full, mother,’ he said loudly and immediately regretted yelling at her. He rinsed his hand in the pot and, drinking a long sip of water, he rose.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘I’ll be back soon,’ he said tersely. As he said these words, he was filled with an ominous premonition that he was going to share Amir’s fate very soon.
He emerged from his house, an ugly monstrosity that he had failed to refurbish. He strode away from the entrance door towards the market. He was amazed that the world went on with its humdrum routines without even pausing to acknowledge Amir’s death. How can I eat after Amir’s skull was shattered right there on the street? he asked himself.
When he approached the bridge, he vaulted over the strip of reeds and on to the bank. He rolled up the bottom edge of his trousers to his knees as he planned to get into the stream to rinse off the oppressive feeling that was weighing down his chest. As he dipped his hands into the water, he heard someone call out his name. The ripple of sound seemed to come from under the bridge. Beyond the branches of the willows and ferns growing out of the muddy end of the cemented ledge, he saw Najib, looking taut and drawn, his cheeks scruffy and sunken. ‘Come here, Mohsin,’ he whispered urgently. ‘NOW!’
There was a fire in his eyes. Without unfolding his rolled-up trousers, Mohsin stepped into the water and waded downstream.
As he moved under the bridge, he saw the two boys, Nazir and Imtiyaz, also there wearing hangdog expressions. They were standing on the ledge, and around their feet were wet heaps of rocks they had collected from the bed of the stream.
‘What’s this all about?’ Mohsin frowned at Najib.
‘Don’t you know?’
‘What’s this about?’ Mohsin repeated, raising his voice. Over the bridge, a huge truck rumbled past.
‘That sick, son-of-a-bitch. We’re planning to teach him a lesson.’
‘I’m going to throw the first rock,’ Nazir said, thumping his chest.
‘I’ll throw the second one,’ Imtiyaz said.
‘And as his car slows down,’ Najib said, ‘you’ll have to drop a huge, huge rock from the roof of my shop on to the roof of his car.’
Mohsin felt the blood rushing through him. The naked rage in the eyes of the two boys fascinated him. Mohsin picked up a stone and regarded it for a moment before nodding to Najib. Najib lit a cigarette. He drew a long puff and as he blew the smoke out, he spat into the water. ‘Sick son-of-a-bitch,’ he muttered.
At that moment, Mohiddin began his mournful call for prayer in the mosque. His voice, reverberating over the city, struck Mohsin below the bridge. Making an instant decision, Mohsin shook the hands of the two boys and Najib and hastily walked out of there.
He mounted the bank, performed his ablutions quickly and returned to the road. He ran into the market and
was almost hit by a white jeep.
‘D’you want to fuckin’ die?’ Force 10 shouted. Mohsin threw a glance at him but did not stop. He crossed the road and entered the mosque.
He walked to the front and sat down beside Mohiddin, who smiled at him. Mohsin sat in silence composing himself. Then, as Mohiddin started reciting, ‘Ya Rasullallah, Ya Rasullallah,’ he clutched his hand and recited the incantation along with him.
9
The Cowherd
A
t sixty, he was still the cowherd of Kanelwan. His real name was Mohammad Sultan Sheikh but everyone in the village called him Sul Watul. He was wiry, with enormous eyes and a hunchback. His sharp chin jutted out below his sunken cheekbones. He wore a grimy conical cap to cover his bald head. Years of consuming snuff had blackened his teeth and given him an ulcerous mouth. The corners of his lips trembled as he spoke, the words emerging in rancid, frothy torrents.
That morning he sat hunched in the cold, dark kitchen. As the corners of his lips began to tremble, Gulam, his son, glanced sideways at Halim in the corner. She nudged the ladle-like skewer, krootcsh, into the mouth of the mud oven and twisted the long handle. The twigs crackled and a flame leapt above the cauldron of tea. She dished bright embers of charcoal into the firepot.
‘Gulam, give this to Baba,’ she said to her husband.
Sultan snatched the kangid from Gulam and instead of putting it inside his pheran, he raised it over his head saying, ‘I want to burn Anzar Shah’s beard. He stole my grandson from me and shut down my business. Who do I play with? What will we eat?’
There was a long silence. Then Sultan said, ‘His mother’s roasted cunt.’
Halim covered her mouth with her scarf in shame, fixing her eyes on the smouldering fire. Gulam rose and held his father. He pressed down Sultan’s arm that was shaking with rage and lowered the fire-pot to the floor.