The Night of Broken Glass

by Feroz Rather

  On a March afternoon, it finally stopped snowing and started raining. Arvind brought out tea to the veranda. He was twenty-two years old; a quiet, lean, dark, diminutive fellow with sad eyes and a feeble voice. He had joined the army a year before as a lance-naik but Major S had turned him into his sponge boy. His duty was to listen to Major S’s rants and absorb the dark syrup of anger that coursed through Major S’s veins. Arvind remained in the corridor, rooted to the major’s wooden shoe rack that held the innumerable pairs of lumberjack boots and leather shoes, the cleaning rag flung over his scrawny shoulder. Upon their arrival in Kashmir, something significant had happened. Something had changed and Major S had altered his role. He asked Arvind to cook for him, without finding it odd that the food he ate was touched, cleaned and kneaded by an outcaste.

  As soon as Major S finished his tea, he rose and tossed the stub of the burning cigarette into the slush. He grabbed Arvind’s wrist and said, with the earnestness of a pundit, ‘I want to show you something.’ He led him straight to his bedroom window and flung it open. He pointed to the Jhelum, swollen and flooded.

  ‘What do you see, Arvind?’ he asked.

  ‘Sir, a lot of muddy water,’ Arvind said.

  ‘You dumbass!’ Major S bellowed.

  ‘Sir, sir …’ Arvind stuttered.

  ‘Centuries ago this was all clear water, and not a bit of it was muddy. This entire fucking valley was serene water touched by the crystalline soles of Parvati floating over the lake. After salvaging it, a pious rishi asked the brahmins to settle here. But now, the water is gone. And what remains?’

  Arvind looked at him, unsure and terrified.

  ‘This fucking river remains. And everywhere, there is creepy vegetation. When the rains stop and the sun comes out, you will see the green invade the banks and those hills in the distance. Thousands of shrubs, creepers and disgusting grasses and nettles will sprout.’

  Arvind nodded, although he had never heard the story of Parvati. It was not his family’s folklore.

  ‘You don’t understand, you are an idiot,’ Major S snarled. ‘Get out of here!’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Arvind said, bowing and leaving the room.

  It continued to rain throughout the day. In the evening, as Major S walked into the courtyard, Arvind held an umbrella over him. He went around the camp once, checking on the soldiers, peering into the sheds on either side and the bunkers. He returned to the mansion and asked Arvind to give him dinner. After dinner, he retired to bed early.

  He dreamt of a sunny March morning. Bathed, shaved and clad in a clean uniform, he was seated on the veranda. The sunlight poured out on the courtyard. A smiling and placid Arvind emerged from the house.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ he said and placed the tea tray with cup, kettle and biscuits on the table.

  As Major S raised the cup to his lips, a flurry of shining grass blades sprouted in the ground before his amazed eyes. He glanced at Arvind and noticed that he didn’t seem alarmed.

  ‘Can’t you fucking see the mutiny in the making? The rishi had a reason for inviting only brahmins and not chamars to occupy the drying satisar.’

  Arvind vanished and Major S was thrown off the veranda. Beneath a dark, overcast sky, he was dragged naked and cold along the ground covered with sharp blades of grass.

  He woke up to the sound of his own terrified howls. He was covered in sweat and his heart and hands were shaking with a dark sense of foreboding. He came out into the corridor and kicked Arvind awake.

  ‘Get me a shovel, right now,’ he shouted.

  Arvind woke up and knuckled the sleep from his eyelids.

  ‘Get me a shovel,’ Major S repeated.

  Arvind sprang to his feet and ran out to the shed and returned with a shovel. Major S walked bare-footed into the courtyard. It was still raining. He struck the wet earth and overturned the soil. The soldiers slowly came out of their sheds and bunkers, lighting their torches, and watched in bewildered silence. Sunil brought another shovel and joined Major S. They dug up the entire courtyard. In the morning, Major S telephoned a man in the high command in New Delhi.

  ‘I want a truck of red sandstone now. This is urgent.’

  As soon as he fell asleep that night, the nightmare returned. He was thrown into a terrain of darkness, bristling with sabre-sharp blades of grass by an invisible hand that dragged him through a meadow, over a white wooden fence, and towards the spectre of a Mughal dismounting from a young, wailing concubine. The sparrows flew out of the absent willows in sharp gusts, cheeping in lament. Major S tore himself out of his sleep and telephoned the high command again.

  ‘Fuckers! Send it now or we lose the courtyard!’

  The truck arrived after two days and halted at the gate of the camp. Although it was still raining torrentially, Major S went out to welcome the driver in person. He told Arvind to make tea for him and give him sweets.

  In a matter of minutes, Major S rallied his soldiers who stood scattered around in the courtyard like a group of lost children, the rain dripping on their sagging heads and trickling down their wary faces, their hearts sullen, dull and confounded by the confinement of the camp.

  ‘I want every inch of the courtyard to be covered,’ Major S addressed them from the height of the veranda. ‘I don’t want even a single gap to allow even a single blade of grass to grow.’

  The courtyard was covered with sandstone inch by inch. Major S went into his room and took out a bottle of whiskey from the closet. He drank deeply. Then, taking a deep breath, he lay on his bed without removing his shoes. He thought of calling Arvind to untie his laces and take his shoes off, but then he let it go. He was feeling warm in his feet and light in his head. He stared fixedly at the small, tricolour that he had spread on the wall in front of the bed. He drank on and the flag expanded to extend from one end of the wall to the other, from the top to the bottom; the black circle in the middle enlarged and its spokes began to move. He recollected the rigorous training session at the Military Academy in Dehradun that he had attended two years ago at the end of which the flag had been awarded to him. He still remembered the words his officer had said: ‘Either we uphold this flag or come back shrouded in it.’ After a night of heavy drinking and his failure to spend the night with a young, slim girl with wide hips because a mole visible on her waist when he had undressed her looked disturbingly familiar, he had flown to New Delhi on the earliest flight the next morning, the flag tidily folded in the briefcase tucked under his arm. He had dozed during the flight and was woken an hour later, disoriented and groggy, by the announcement of the landing. He looked out through the window at the clump of green trees and cluster of brown box-like, flat-roofed houses caught in a cloud of hot, thick smoke. He had come to the city during his youth from a village in Bihar, fleeing an old, ailing, poor, landless father, who, at the end of his career as a meagre politician, had given himself to Nehruvian Fabianism. His father had irritated Major S beyond belief. During the initial days when he was adrift and restless in the city, Major S had met Radhika whom he knew he was going to marry the instant their eyes met.

  As he walked out of the airport and sat back in the black and yellow taxi, he thought about his empty apartment in Vasant Vihar. He felt strange and weak and was engulfed by an unexpected deluge of emotions. He pulled himself together, stretching his broad shoulders, his officer’s words resounding in his head. He clenched his hands to hold back the weak tears.

  In about twenty minutes he reached the apartment and, as he stepped out of the taxi, a fresh shiver of memory ran through him. He shook his head hard, slapping his cheek as he handed the fare to the cabbie who thought Major S had been bitten by a mosquito. He clutched the handle of his briefcase and ascended the staircase to the third floor of the quiet, grey-distempered building.

  Over the entrance door, the wall sported a wet stain around a deep fissure. He grunted at the cracks that branched off from the fissure in the middle into the paint dampened by the water. He entered the living room
where he was overpowered by the smell of dust and disuse. He sneezed as he walked into the bedroom. He put his briefcase on the bed before returning to the living room to switch on the lights and the ceiling fan.

  A huge cockroach awaited him in the kitchen sink. It lay on its back, its legs twitching. He squashed its head with a steel ladle and discarded the carcass in the trash-bin.

  As he switched on the fridge, he saw a picture pasted to the door. Megha, just three at the time, was on his lap, and Radhika stood leaning towards him. All three of them were smiling, their eyes reflecting the flashlight. He tore the picture from the fridge and threw it into the trash-bin.

  In the evening, when the house grew cooler and the smell of the dust had subsided, he poured himself a glass of brandy. He sat on the sofa and turned on the TV. They were showing Rope on Star Movies, the movie he had watched with Radhika, Megha and Megha’s boyfriend, Vijay, who had come to visit the previous year. Afterwards, when Radhika had told him about Megha’s wish to marry Vijay, a silence had overcome him. When she repeated the question, he stared at her blankly like a child unable to comprehend the question. And then he told her in a voice that would brook no arguments that the boy needed to be an army man which Vijay clearly was not. Intense arguments had ensued until he hit Radhika in a rage. She was shocked into silence.

  ‘I always believed that you’d never do that to me,’ she had whispered. ‘You have changed so much.’ She divorced him and went away with Megha to live at the faculty lounges of Delhi University. Major S’s father was dead but his mother was alive. He had rented a house for her in Patna and arranged for a servant to help around the house. He visited her regularly and paid her expenses with the same passion with which every time Major S had leaned towards his father in his childhood, she had flogged his palms and buttocks with a switch. She had been furious in evoking loyalty; she had punished her son because she felt her husband, with his empty rhetoric and socialist ideals, had betrayed and belied her expectations. Despite her senescence with cataracts in both the eyes that had witnessed her husband’s deterioration as he wilted away, she still held herself with the hauteur of an entitled brahmin, in the way she sat Zohra Sehgal style in a chair, draped in a white sari, her gold-bangled arms neatly folded in her lap. Just before he had left for Dehradun for the two-month-long training she had called him and told him that Megha had come to visit her before leaving to study in New York.

  During the commercial break, Major S fetched the whiskey bottle and a glass with ice cubes. He remembered Brandon. Not just for his blue suit and sharp tie, but Brandon’s ability to be calm and grinning while helping Phillip to place David in the chest. Major S was not very sure where the movie was set. He did not know that Megha lived in the same neighbourhood in Manhattan where the movie took place. Had he called her, he might have confessed that missing her frightened him. From her descriptions of the place, he might have wondered that she was lodging in one of the buildings visible from the wide window, from where the smoke spiralled out of the chimneys, as Brandon pulled the curtains open to dispel the dark and soothe Philip’s discomposure. But, as Brandon put the candle stands on the chest, Major S did wonder about the length of the chest. Six feet or less, he reckoned, since David’s legs had to be bent to fit inside.

  During the movie, Major S fell asleep. He was awoken when the bell buzzed and Rupert returned to the apartment. Major S watched the end bleary-eyed: Rupert emptying his gun, the police cars wailing and their lights flashing in the background.

  Major S saw the casket again in his dream that night. It was in the middle of his living room. Radhika was sitting on the sofa across from him, reading her students’ papers. She was lost in her own work and did not pay attention to what lay in front of her. But Major S did. He saw the chest. It was right there. How could she ignore it? He moved towards it and Radhika covered her face with her sari. Major S raised the lid.

  He saw Vijay’s naked back and Megha, equally naked, emerged from beneath him. He saw the mole on her waist. Their arms and legs entwined, as Megha moaned ecstatically, pouting her moist lips.

  Amazed, Major S looked up at Radhika, but she had vanished. Only her sob rose from the crumpled mound of her sari and the white litter of papers. With the dark syrup of rage pumping through his veins, his eyes bulged and his body trembled. He ran into the bedroom and grabbed his gun suspended from the ceiling by a white rope. He returned to the living room, but the chest had disappeared. He could not find it; where the hell did Brandon and Philip hide it? He ran from one room to the other, running headlong into Rupert.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ Rupert asked, kissing Mrs Atwater, whom he held in his arms. ‘No, no more Nietzsche. No more lessons in the art of the perfect murder.’

  Major S brushed past him and dashed into the bedroom. The chest was there, standing upright, facing away from him, gazing out through the window, like an erect walking coffin. It kept pacing back and forth agitatedly, its lid working loose.

  Major S was too terrified to peek inside: to see dead David or Megha and her fucking boyfriend. He stepped closer and fired at it, drilling six holes along its length, in one straight, vertical line.

  11

  Robin Polish

  I

  t dawned blue and gloomy. The shutters of the shops were rolled down and coated with a hoary dust. The only sound besides the sporadic birdsong was the whimpering from across the road. Gulam was familiar with the famished, brown dog. It squatted on the steps of Shirmal Bakery, its tongue lolling between its teeth. ‘Who gives a damn about you?’ Gulam grunted, sitting down on a torn gunny bag that was his seat and unlatched his worktable. He pulled out the pair of loafers that Jamshid had given him yesterday. He slipped his hand inside one of the shoes and raised it up like a miniature plane. Smelling and feeling the soft leather, he forgot about the dog’s whimpers.

  Shirmal Bakery was on the ground floor of the two-storeyed building of red, baked bricks cemented together with mud. It had a steep roof of bright, thin, corrugated tin. A picket door barred the dog from entering the stairwell. When someone clomped down the stairs heavily and pushed open the door, the dog took fright, sprang to its feet and tottered away before returning again to its usual spot.

  Nadim crossed the road and greeted Gulam, leaning forward to shake his hand. What brings Misreh’s boy here so early? Gulam wondered, studying his face. Nadim, a tall, hot-blooded youth, with an aura of fake genteelness, was a fake rebel. He wore blue, baggy jeans and white sneakers. He had upturned the wide collar of his buttoned shirt. He was not Pakistan-trained; he was not among those who braved the hunger, cold and exhaustion of a trek across the mountains and dared to venture near the death that awaited in the wooded slopes where beasts prowled in the silence of the jungle. The boys were led by the secret guide who carried a small sack of almonds and candies and kept a rope with him. The guide made sure to feed the boys but he also strangled the ones who got too tired and could not keep up with the rest of the group. He hung them from the branch of a tree to prevent any chance of them relaying information to the soldiers about the secret route taken across the Line of Control. Nadim too had disappeared for a while but rumour had it that he had trained in the sweet shade of the pasture across the Jhelum, carrying guns and water bottles for Showkat, the real commander. However, the instant Nadim was back in Bijbyor, he proclaimed himself a full-fledged rebel. To refute this, gangs of snickering children trailed after him, calling him, Pasture, Pasture, Pasture. ‘Bastards,’ he cursed, spitting and shooing them away by pretending to hurl a stone at them.

  ‘What have you boys been up to?’ Gulam asked Nadim.

  ‘We’re busy organizing the meetings of the Jammu Kashmir Students’ Front,’ he replied.

  ‘That I can see. Jamshid hardly has any time for me these days,’ Gulam complained.

  ‘For all your sarcasm one day you’ll see how wrong you were. One day when we bring independence to Kashmir and Jamshid becomes our first prime minister. He is marked for greatn
ess and is destined to make history.’

  ‘It’s too early to say that.’

  ‘Aazadi is around the corner.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. I don’t see it anywhere near me.’

  Nadim paused, lowering his voice. ‘You should meet Anzar Shah.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘To talk about Jamshid’s marriage.’

  If Jamshid marries, Gulam thought with a thrill of anticipation, he’ll leave Shah Manzil, build a separate house and ask me to live with him.