by Feroz Rather
Sultan hissed in air through the gaps in his clenched teeth. He glared at his son and grabbed him by the scruff of his neck.
‘I told you not to touch me, you coward,’ he shouted.
Halim hurriedly positioned herself between the two men. ‘We’ll find something, Baba,’ she cried, trying to prise Sultan’s hard hands from around her husband’s throat. ‘If nothing works, I’ll go begging in the village.’
Gulam’s face swelled, his eyes bulging.
‘Baba, Baba, for God’s sake,’ Halim pleaded, ‘let him go.’
‘I want my grandson back,’ Sultan shouted, pushing his son away. ‘Why don’t you go and bring Jamshid back from that vile preacher.’
Gulam ran out of the kitchen and stood gasping for breath on the flat rock outside the entrance door. He straightened his hurting neck, breathing hard.
Halim came out and gave him a glass of water.
‘He is becoming a beast,’ Gulam said, swallowing the water, his voice hoarse.
‘If we don’t bring Jamshid back, that is fine. But we do have to do something about the food,’ Halim said.
‘Let him starve. Fucking, filthy watul.’
‘He’s your father.’ Halim took the glass from him and went back inside.
Gulam’s feet were freezing. He went into the corridor where he had put his rubber shoes and slipped them on. He sank into the snow up to his shins as he walked out into the vast grove surrounding the house. It was a forest of mute trees, with trunks grey and bone-coloured, and bare branches laden with snow. He leaned against the trunk of an old elm. He was breathing calmly now. The air was crisp and he could see far. When he looked back at his house, it stood out like a dirty-grey hayrick in a pristine, white jungle. To the rear were elms leading to the pasture around which wound the Jhelum, dry and diminished at this time of the year. Three days ago, when it had not snowed and the ground was dry, it was there to the riverbank almost two miles to the north, that Sultan had dragged the cow soon after it had died. It was there that he had repeatedly suggested they go after the food in the house had been depleted.
Gulam knew the cow. It had belonged to Rafiq Galwan. It was a lithe, black animal with a big white spot on its forehead. Over the last several years, it had calved thirteen times, yielding hundreds of kilos of milk to the family. Rafiq Galwan could have sold it to the butcher as it grew old, but he showed exceptional mercy and allowed the cow to age, feeding it fresh bales of grass, even after its udder had dried up completely. He asked Sultan to take it away from the byre as soon as it died. ‘Do not skin her,’ he had told him. ‘Just take her away from here.’
Gulam shuddered as he imagined the carcass, its eyes sad and shiny. I’m not going to go anywhere near there, no matter what, he thought.
He turned around and looked westward. The gulf between his house and the village seemed even wider because of the difficulty of trudging through the snow. The spire of the mosque steepled to the sky beside Rafiq Galwan’s three-storeyed, concrete house. The house had a winged roof of corrugated tin sheets almost as high as the spire. Rafiq had the biggest paddy farm in the village of two hundred households. He owned four cows and dozens of sheep and goats. He was prosperous because he was the most devout murid of Syed Anzar Shah.
Last summer, one bright June afternoon, Gulam walked Jamshid to the village. As the two emerged from the grove, they saw Syed Anzar Shah. He was a tall, wide-shouldered man and walked with a light step. His bright face was covered with a white broom of beard. He was clad in a starched white shalwar kameez and black shoes of soft leather, and a black vest. A high, blond karakul crowned his head.
Gulam was awestruck. He slowed down, gripping his son’s wrist. It was said that Syed Anzar Shah had the power to communicate with jinns. Whenever a jinn transgressed and entered the domain of humans, he was the man to be consulted. He tamed the evil jinns; he fought with them by chanting the knots of words from his rosary. In the little town of Bijbyor across the river, people thronged to his house, Syed Manzil. Young girls in love babbling gibberish at night; men struck with losses in business; housewives with difficult calves; infertile couples; and the heads of the households whose families were held in thrall under dark spells of sorcery.
Gulam led his son to the entrance door of the mosque only after Anzar Shah had disappeared inside.
‘I’ll return after an hour and meet you here,’ he said, kissing the boy’s head. ‘Don’t play with the village kids. Do you remember the last time when Suhail Galwan called you watul?’ Suhail Galwan, who had hurled the casteist slur on Jamshid, was Rafiq Galwan’s grandson.
‘I won’t, Father,’ Jamshid promised and went inside. Suhail Galwan was sitting in the first row near where Anzar Shah was seated on a high wooden chair. Jamshid kept his distance and subsided to the last row.
As Anzar Shah began to recite from the Qur’an, he noticed Jamshid. The kid was aloof and sitting apart.
Anzar Shah stopped chanting and asked Jamshid to stand up. He asked him his name and the name of his father.
If Syed was at the top of the echelon among the castes in Kashmir, Sheikh lurked somewhere near the bottom. If pir signified knowledge, purity and culture, watul denoted the stink of faeces, scavenging and raw leather.
While the other boys and girls in class could not stop whispering, Jamshid sat quietly awaiting his turn in his place. And when it came, he stood up, clasped his hands over his navel, closed his eyes and recited ‘The Cow’, accurately reproducing the 286 verses of the longest chapter from his prodigious memory. The boy’s sweet voice dazzled Anzar.
The next day, soon after the Friday prayers, Rafiq Galwan entered the kitchen. The strong fellow seemed shattered.
‘Sultan … congratulations,’ he said.
‘What for?’ Gulam asked.
‘Today, while delivering the sermon in the mosque in Bijbyor, Syed Anzar said that he has chosen Jamshid as his disciple. He wants him to live with their family in Syed Manzil where he’ll teach him the Qur’an.’
‘He must be joking,’ Sultan said.
‘Really?’ Gulam asked Rafiq. ‘You shut up, Baba.’
‘Yes. He sent me to fetch the lad,’ Rafiq Galwan said.
‘Is Anzar Shah still encouraging you to buy hides from us watals, Rafiq?’ Sultan interrupted.
‘He had nothing to do with that and that is not why I have stopped buying from you.’
‘Can you tell me why?’ Sultan persevered.
Rafiq did not explain. He rose to leave.
‘Please stay and have tea with us,’ Halim said.
‘Some other time, I need to go now,’ Rafiq replied.
‘Let him go back to his pir,’ Sultan said. Then to Gulam and Halim, ‘He won’t tell you, but I will. Anzar Shah is building a shop by the highway. While the father sells verses of the Qur’an he has written on small paper chits, taweez, his son will sell the shoes made in the factories of Punjab. Anzar Shah broke his deal with the shoemakers of Srinagar to whom he sold the hides that he bought from Rafiq.’
The couple ignored Sultan’s bellyaching and went into their room. They sat on the mattress on the floor, with Jamshid between them, a primer in his hand.
‘The old man keeps babbling,’ Gulam said. ‘Don’t ever listen to what he says.’
‘Our Jamshid is very fortunate,’ Halim said, smiling and stroking her son’s head.
The next morning, all spruced up, they took him to Rafiq Galwan’s house. He was standing in the courtyard, examining the cracks in the wall of the cowshed.
‘Don’t heed my father,’ Gulam said to him by way of greeting.
‘Useless and bitter,’ Rafiq replied. ‘But don’t worry. I’ll take your son to my pir right now.’
The couple thanked him and, kissing Jamshid many times, they walked back home. Their hearts were filled with a sad, overflowing joy. How was it possible that an all-important man like Syed Anzar Shah should pay their son any attention? How did this miracle happen?
As so
on as they reached home, Gulam, who had never spoken to Anzar Shah, began to think of thanking him in person. He needed to find him a gift.
‘You should ask Rafiq for work,’ Halim suggested.
So back he went, to ask for work. Rafiq was stingy and reluctant. Gulam had to negotiate hard until Rafiq agreed to give him the task of repairing the wall.
At the end of his two-week stint, cutting hay and preparing clay to stack the fresh bricks, instead of money, Gulam asked Rafiq for a lamb.
‘I’ll give you a lamb, but you owe me one complete month of labour,’ Rafiq replied.
Gulam agreed and took the white-fleeced lamb home where Halim fed it green willow leaves and lined its eyes with kohl and daubed its hooves with henna. The very next day, a Friday, Gulam put on his best kameez and shalwar and set off for Bijbyor with the lamb in his lap.
A passenger boat ferried him across the river. He entered a wide street lined with shops on either side. He recognized Anzar Shah’s voice booming out of the loudspeaker. He made his way along the edge of the highway, a group of six children followed him, heckling and bleating like roused lambs. They trailed him up to the mosque.
Gulam cursed them as he opened the picketed gate and quickly walked in. He strode across the lawns and mounted the stairs leading to the veranda. When he turned around, to his relief the gang of children had disappeared. Little bastards of Bijbyor, he thought. Town boys making fun of a village bumpkin.
He put the lamb down on the steps, holding on to its ear, in order to remove his shoes. Through the loudspeaker, Anzar Shah continued his sermon:
‘Those who make a living by skinning dead animals, those who make leather by plunging into stinking ditches, are committing an act that is impure, makruh. It is as disgusting to me as adultery. In my area, in all our thirty-four villages surrounding our little pure town of Bijbyor, these people must abstain from this contaminating practice. They must or we will see what to do with them.’
Gulam was startled. He pictured his father’s face, furrowed in rage. The lamb shook its head, making Gulam lose his grip on its ear. He chased after it with one shoe as it gambolled away on to the highway where a speeding truck ran over it.
When Gulam returned home, he went directly to his room. Halim was lying on the mattress on the floor. Her face was pale and her eyes were sunken. As the winter deepened and their stock of food dwindled, her hips narrowed and her skin became dry and desiccated.
‘I am going to faint with hunger,’ she said, grabbing Gulam’s arm. ‘I wonder why Syed Anzar Shah prohibits eating a dead animal when we have to kill it anyway?’
‘The old man has corrupted you,’ Gulam said to his wife and left the room.
When he entered the kitchen, his father taunted him. ‘Even the strongest men become meek in their women’s beds.’
‘Fine.’ Gulam sighed, giving in. He too was feeling frustrated with hunger.
The snowflakes were drifting down from a sky luminescent with a soft, white light. Gulam followed his father to the pasture. On the way, he glanced back once and saw in the distance the roof of Rafiq Galwan’s house. Smoke was rising from the chimney, pushing the snowflakes upwards. He wondered what kind of sumptuous dinner was being cooked there. His mouth watered and his stomach rumbled. A snow-laden bough broke with a loud crack and a dog howled in the distance.
It took them almost an hour to reach the riverbank where the cow’s carcass lay, covered with a shroud of fresh snow. Had it been summer, the shrivelled old beast would have gone sour and putrid in the heat because of the open wounds caused by the jagged rocks on the ground as Sultan dragged it. It would have attracted and maddened the village dogs feasting on its flesh.
Sultan wiped the tip of his nose, pink and runny in the cold, with the coarse sleeve of his pheran. He dusted off the snow from the corpse’s neck and handed Gulam the axe.
Gulam struck a blow but nothing happened.
‘You’re hopeless,’ Sultan said, snatching the axe from him. He flung his pheran on the snow. Then, taking a deep, contemplative breath, he delivered terribly strong blows on the carcass. An entire flank came loose.
Gulam picked it up and, stepping away from his father, put it on his shoulder.
Sultan raised the axe higher, delivering blow after blow upon the dead beast, hitting its head and haunches. He struck it along the spine repeatedly. He turned red in the face and his breath became hoarse. But he did not stop; he continued to hack away at the animal’s belly, spilling out its entrails.
It was getting dark and the snow had stopped falling.
‘Come, let us go now, Baba,’ Gulam said. ‘We have enough meat. Let us go home, Baba.’
Sultan was deaf to his son’s calls. His eyes filled with tears and he threw the axe away. He picked up the pieces of meat he had shredded and hurled them at the trees. With his bare hands, he dug out the guts from the cow’s belly and flung them on to the branches of the surrounding trees. He scampered about, yammering to the trees, laughing and crying simultaneously as night fell.
10
The Nightmares of Major S
A
t three o’clock in the morning, Major S was startled awake with the sound of a crash. As he returned to consciousness, he took control in the pitch-dark of the room; he did not bother to even pull out the torch from the top drawer of the cabinet. In a combat zone, where everything was in surreptitious motion, a slim shaft of light could be shattered by a barrage of bullets. He grabbed his gun from under his pillow and threw himself off the bed. He crawled towards the rear wall and positioned himself between the heater and the window. He was ready to shoot now. He waited for the slightest stirring, waited for it to come at him again, but the sound had vanished into the dead of the night.
Major S touched the cylindrical heater with the tip of his gun. It made a hollow sound; at the bottom, the embers of coal had turned into a mound of ash. His legs and feet were cold and he realized that he was clad only in underpants. He rolled back on the wooden floor, his forefinger curled around the trigger. Although he wanted to immediately summon Arvind who was dozing in the corridor, he decided to put on some clothes first.
As he sat on the bed, it came again. This time the impact was so great that the entire roof shuddered. A bull, it seemed, had butted its horned head onto the thin corrugated tin. Angry and charged, he heard the roar of the waking soldiers in the other rooms of the mansion and in the tents in the courtyard. He stood up, kicked the window open and knelt by the windowsill. He fired in the direction of the river and the willows beyond the water. He raised his gun and fired it into the vast silent sky trailed with snowflakes. As soon as he had used up all his bullets, he dipped to the floor, lest the rebels, following the sparks, should rip his head open. Just then, the door behind him opened. He spun around so quickly, he could have thrown his gun with force and precision at the forehead of the person entering had he not cried: ‘It’s me, Arvind, sir.’ And to clear Major S’s confusion, added with haste, ‘The rebellious weather of this place! The snow is so heavy that it’s breaking the branches of the sycamore.’
Major S sighed in relief. Then realizing it was Arvind, he said, ‘Get out of here!’
When the day broke, it stopped snowing. Major S burst into the adjacent bedroom. ‘Cut the fucking tree down, Sunil,’ he said to the subedar, walked out onto the veranda and sat cross-legged on a chair with his customary scowl. Past the torments of the nightmare, which seemed distant after a spell of deep sleep, he became grimly serene. He called to Arvind to pour him a cup of tea from the kettle that he had placed on the table.
Sunil emerged from the house and saluted Major S. He was tall and hefty, and prompt to jump blindly to his officer’s bidding. He walked into the tent besides the courtyard and reappeared with an axe. Under the gigantic, grey-trunked tree with it monstrously large white branches, Sunil looked like an ant. Major S nodded at him and raised his cup. ‘Cut the bastard down!’ he commanded.
Sunil attacked the trunk, strikin
g forcefully, sending the pieces of white and reddish pulp flying about the courtyard.
As the winter deepened, Major S consolidated his camp, imposing an order of harsh solidity. To fortify the walls of the discoloured and dilapidated colonial mansion, the rotting wooden planks were sawed off and the gaps were filled with shingle and cement. The rugs and round pillows filled with hardened rat shit were replaced with iron beds with spring mattresses and thick bed sheets patterned with swirling, olive-green leaves. On the kitchen shelves the dusty shards of English crockery, the remains of cups, demitasses and blue porcelain vases, were replaced with steel mugs. The place received a thorough spring cleaning destroying cobwebs and the nests of bats and swallows hanging from the ceiling. The doors and windows were rehinged; they swung swiftly to the beat of the new militarized time.
The courtyard and the surrounding lawns were overgrown with willows that had not been cut down since the time of the exodus of the Mughals from Kashmir. The generations of sparrows nesting in them carried the burden and guilt of witnessing the concubines – Muslim, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Christian – getting raped, their shrieks during the assaults rising and lingering above the leaves. Beneath, the slothful kings and pot-headed princes reclined on their elbows, relishing the reek of cum. In the beginning, even Major S was astonished at where he was, at the concubine’s screams that entered and further disrupted the discordant logic of his recurring nightmares. So, he summoned the imam of the mosque that the mansion faced across the highway. Syed Anzar Shah was the only man in town who was conscious of the magnitude of his power and expected the major to address him with the conviviality of a friend. However, he was denied even the acknowledgement of eye contact. Major S told him in a cold voice to summon all Bijbyor’s young men before showing the imam to the door. Syed Anzar Shah nevertheless made the announcement from his pulpit, his voice bruised and booming through the loudspeaker fitted to the spire of the mosque. Within minutes, young men queued outside what would become the camp. The photographs and names on the identity cards were matched with their real faces and the names they uttered were matched with the letters that formed their names on their identity cards. If the interrogating soldier thought there was a mismatch, the men were slapped, kicked, harassed and held accountable for a crime that more than an act of conscious deception evoked the classical breach between the signifier and the signified which the French semioticians after Saussure would be fondly attracted to explore. The ones that passed the test were registered with precision, under the gaze of the soldier, on a long ledger with an impenetrable green cover. Each individual’s existence, reduced to a name and number, was caged in complex tables. Along with the men of military, the young men were then directed to cut down the willow – the very same willows under whose twilit canopy they had met their sweethearts and their hearts, secretly rebelling against the social codes of religion, had palpitated with the possibilities of stealing inside the mansion into the blissful dark for a kiss – and dig pits where the iron pillars were to be erected into the ground. Sitting in a chair on the veranda, smoking his cigarette, Major S oversaw the snow and earth being flung about by the shovels as the rain-proof sheets of tarpaulin were hung over the pillars. A gun tower was erected where the sycamore had stood. Four bunkers were set up at each of the four corners of the camp. Empty flour bags were stuffed with sand of bullet-stopping density and the bunkers were joined with high walls of the most obdurate concrete, their tops whorled with barbed wire that looped high in the air, entangling the skies.