Room in our Hearts and Other Stories

by K L Chowdhury

  ‘I was. It is a miracle that I am alive. But I wish I had not survived that night! It would have been better than living with the wounds that neither heal nor kill. I seem to be running away all the time, in my dreams and while awake.’

  ‘Running away from what?’ I asked

  ‘From the terrors of that night.’

  ‘How come the details of that massacre are not known?

  ‘Because the people in the corridors of power do not want to know the truth. Probably, they know it too well but do not want to own it. No inquiry commissions were ever appointed. Our statements were briefly recorded the morning after, but we saw no follow-up. Not a single official ever came to ask for details. One feels strange even talking about it now, even to one’s own kin, most of whom have moved on in life and settled in different places. People have forgotten the hurt and the trauma. It seems they have become immune to violence and are not touched by death. They do not shudder any longer on hearing of mass murders.’

  ‘Everyone has suffered in some way or the other and Nadimarg is lost somewhere under the debris of the shattered lives of Pandits. I feel sorry for you.’

  ‘You do not have to, sir. Sometimes I wonder if it really happened. I feel as if my life before the massacre was lived by someone else and that I am a different person who took birth while running wild in the fields on that dark night.’

  He stopped awhile and waited for me to respond.

  ‘I know how it must feel. Your past experience comes to haunt you. That is why you suffer these attacks.’

  ‘It is not the past, but the fear of the future that I am seized with,’ he corrected me.

  ‘The two are linked—the past and the future—and your thought process is the chain that links them. Tell me how it happened. Sometimes recounting a gruesome tragedy is cathartic and helps to ease the burden.’ I was impatient to get the details, now that I found him stable and responsive.

  Satish paused, took a deep breath, and resumed, ‘It must have been around 11.30 at night. I was trying to sleep, sharing the room with my wife and older son, when I heard loud banging at the window that faced the front yard. I must have hardly gotten off the bed when the window was shattered and four masked men broke in. They were in khaki, guns in hand, and desperate. They ordered all three of us to come out.

  ‘We are looking for militants hiding in your house,’ one of them said, and hustled us out of the room, marching us towards the chinar tree near the village temple. As we moved out, the other intruders started breaking open our trunks, rummaging through our cupboards and closets. Soon, I saw members of other Pandit families being herded to the same spot near the tree by more masked men in military fatigues. They did a head count of the assembled victims.

  ‘We have 13 of them; there have to be more,’ one of them, who was probably the leader, spoke to others. Then, pointing towards me, he ordered two of his associates, ‘Take him along to guide you to the lady constable’s house.’

  ‘They spoke in Urdu and Kashmiri and, by now, it was clear that they were not Indian soldiers but terrorists in military outfits hunting for Pandits. The two men gripped my arms, one on either side, and asked me to lead them. My legs refused to carry me. One of them kicked me hard. ‘If you act paralysed, we might as well break your legs,’ he threatened. I led them to Rajini’s house. That was her name. They broke in through the door. Her father, with an amputated leg, started shouting for help. They hit him hard. That brought more cries from the old man.

  They shouted at him, ‘Where is your daughter hiding, old rascal?’

  ‘He cursed them and one of them kicked him harder till he was knocked down, while the other ran inside the house. Suddenly, I realised that I was free; both my captors were looking for Rajini. Without any thought for the consequences, I started running. I ran and ran, and ran for my life. I ran over the fences and through the fields, without looking back. The night was dark and wild. I could hardly see anything. I ran through bush and bramble; I stumbled against stones and mounds of rubbish; I jumped over mud walls and fences. I ran and ran and ran as if chased by hounds about to tear me into pieces. I fell down a couple of times but stood up to run again, without looking back even once, till I reached a small hamlet near Yaripora, about three kilometres from Nadimarg. I knew the tailor, Mohammad Jamal. He used to stitch my shirts. I knocked at his door. He woke up. I pleaded for shelter. He was kind and concerned. When I related my story, he said I should not worry, Allah was merciful. He gave me a room for the night, offered me a glass of water, a mattress that he spread on the floor and a blanket. I sat up all night, agonising about the fate of my family, feeling terribly guilty for escaping to safety and leaving people behind with the terrorists.’

  The narrative was gripping. I did not want to intervene. But I could not hold myself from asking, ‘What about the other members of your family?’

  ‘That night, my two-month-old younger son, Rahul, was sharing the bed with my mother and sister in another room, while my elder brother’s wife and her son were sharing another room with my father.’

  ‘What about the elder brother; where was he?’

  ‘He was in Jammu; that is where he was posted. Our wives happened to be sisters.’

  Did he lose his entire family? I shuddered at the thought and looked at his face.

  He understood my concern and continued, ‘It is a miracle how some of us survived. I came to learn about it after I returned to Nadimarg next morning.’

  I must have sighed in relief that the entire family had not been wiped out, for there was a glimmer of smile on his face.

  ‘While the terrorists were busy herding my wife Suman, my older son Sonu and me outside, my mother and little sister in the next room had escaped through the back door, carrying Rahul with them. They hid in the haystacks behind the house. Mother is a courageous woman. She asked my sister to stay quiet with the baby, and then ran to the police station. The police were dismissive, “Don’t be frightened, old lady; there is nothing to worry about. Go return to your home. We will follow shortly.” She went back to hide in the hay, and the three of them held their breath, ears cocked, mouths dry, temples throbbing, hearts racing. By dawn, the heart-wrenching wails and cries of the victims had been silenced and snuffed out by the deafening barrage of gunshots and there was dead silence when they emerged from their hiding place to face the devastation wrought by the savages.’

  He drew a deep breath and paused for a while.

  ‘When I walked back early the next morning, I heard from a distance the hum of human voices emanating from the village. As I got closer, our quiet and quaint hamlet wore the sinister look of a major tragedy. There was a convoy of vehicles and a crowd of policemen, officials, and stunned village folk. I could smell death in the air. Through the gaps between the legs of the crowd, I caught a glimpse of the corpses shrouded in white on the ground slightly away from the chinar where we had been herded the previous night. I dared not go near, fearing that my whole family might be among the dead.

  ‘I walked rapidly towards my home and went inside. My heart gave a loud thud of gratitude to find my mother and sister sitting on the kitchen floor huddled together, sobbing, wiping tears, trying to comfort each other. They must have taken me for dead. When they saw me, they jumped as if they had seen a ghost. Mother had visibly aged overnight and sister looked like a wilted flower. My hopes soared for a while for the other family members. I rushed frantically to look for them in the rooms. A sepulchral silence greeted me everywhere. There was no one else in the house. I returned to the kitchen. Mother pointed at the cot in the parlour. Rahul was sleeping like an angel, unaware of the dance of death that had played out during the night. I picked him in my arms and kissed him madly. He was frightened and started crying.

  ‘Where is his mother,’ I croaked; ‘where are the others?’ The two looked at each other and burst into the most sorrowful wail.

  ‘We are ruined! They have killed every one—Suman and Sonu, Girija and Monu, and your father
,’ mother started weeping bitterly.

  ‘I rushed out like one possessed, and my sister ran after me. ‘Don’t go out, brother. You will not be able to take it!’

  ‘I must; I have to see them,’ I yelled at her.

  ‘Please don’t,’ she pleaded, crying hoarse.

  ‘I pushed her aside, walked towards the crowd, squeezed my way through the ring of people, and shuffled towards the shrouded corpses. They had been laid on the ground in a row, shrouded in white, nameless and unrecognisable. It was a long line. Who amongst them were my family members, I wondered, as I went through the most excruciating exercise of my life to identify my kin among the torn, blood-spattered bodies and mangled faces. Even the gender was not easy to determine on some of the dead. There were two small shrouded bodies at one end of the line and I knew they were our children. I rushed to that side and gently removed the shroud from one, to find Sonu, my older son. His chest was a sieve from the holes the bullets had made; his entrails had come out from the gaping wounds in his abdomen. The face wore a mangled expression that has haunted me ever since. My nephew, Monu, had a broken neck and a bullet wound in the chest near the heart, his face frozen in fear. I had to uncover four bodies before I found my father. He wore a severe look on his face that I had never witnessed when he was alive. His heart and lungs had been pierced by bullets. My wife Suman’s face was shattered and unrecognisable, and I was able to identify her only from my name tattooed on her arm. Her sister, Girija, was laid by her side, with multiple bullet holes in her stomach and chest. That completed my family dead.’

  ‘Gruesome!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Blood had soaked the earth under the chinar and congealed in eerie shapes. The place was littered with the caps and mufflers, torn shirts and frocks, pyjamas and pullovers, and shoes and slippers of the victims. The tree, a mute testimony to the carnage, was riddled with bullet holes. Shards of its thick bark were strewn on the ground among the torn remnants of the humans.

  ‘I was stunned and could not move. An official held my arm in sympathy but I wanted none of it. I stood up and walked away like in a terrible dream. I did not cry; I have not cried all these years.’

  Satish paused like a person who rests awhile on the way to an arduous climb. I was stupefied by the horror of his story. I just looked at his face, not knowing how to react. He drank a glass of water offered by the nurse and took a deep breath before he resumed.

  ‘I did not join the mass cremation that was conducted in haste by the officials without waiting for the next of kin of the massacred. In fact, there were few survivors to claim the bodies. The terrorists had wiped out nearly all the Pandits who were in the village that night. We were not allowed to take the bodies for private cremations. When my brother arrived in the evening from Jammu, all I could show him was the mound of ash at the cremation site, still warm.

  ‘Pick your portion of the ashes of your son and wife,’ I told him when he looked at me in horror. He was stupefied and fell down in a swoon. When he came to, he did not care to look at the ashes again, and walked back home in a dazed state. He did not sleep or eat for two days, and returned to Jammu soon after. He said there was no point staying back; he would prefer to perform the post-funeral rites at Jammu. There were no priests left in Nadimarg to help with the ceremonies.

  ‘They rubbed salt into our wounds by denying us private cremations of our dead. Mother and sister also refused to participate in the cremation. “Cremation without proper rituals is humiliating the dead,” said mother. In fact, it was not cremation but just a hasty disposal of the dead bodies.

  ‘We were dumb for a whole week. On the tenth day, she asked me to go to the river bank to perform the rites in the Hindu tradition and pray for the souls of my dead father and other family members. I got my head tonsured, collected a pot full of ashes and performed whatever I knew of the rituals, immersing a part of the ashes in the river, keeping some to be immersed in the Ganges at Haridwar on a later day, as she wished. The next day, we left for Jammu, leaving everything behind, never to look back at Nadimarg, never to return.’

  Satish stopped. It was clear he did not want to continue with the story. He had said that he had taken a new life that night; that he had broken with the past. But there was no doubt that he carried the past with him, and there were unanswered questions. For now, I tried to console him, arguing that he was less unfortunate than many others, for half his family members had miraculously escaped death while whole families had been wiped out in that massacre.

  ‘Yes, that is right, but they were lucky to be dead than to have seen their families murdered and left with wounds that would never heal. The images of the bullet-ridden bodies of my family members cause me terror. I cannot forget the mangled face of Suman under that shroud. When I think of Neena, fear grips my heart and I get forebodings of another tragedy. It is as if she will meet a similar fate. I see masked men in khaki dragging her towards the chinar and butchering her. That is when the panic spells start.’

  ‘I can understand your fears and feelings. Nevertheless, you need to rid yourself of them. Isn’t it a big consolation that your son, sister and mother survived what could have been certain death? There is a message in it. You have to build on the ruins of your life and move on. In fact, you are already moving on. That you have remarried proves it. All you need to do now is to shut your mind to these pervasive thoughts,’ I counselled him.

  ‘I will. In fact, I feel much better and have largely overcome my fears, thanks to your guidance. When do I see you again, sir?’

  ‘In a couple of months,’ I replied.

  He joined his hands in a namaskar and left with a smile.

  Two months later, when Satish saw me for the last time, he said he felt so much better that he was eager to stop the medications.

  ‘Should I take it that you have fully reconciled, recovered and decided to move on?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, sir, I am moving on. I am happy with my job. All I want now is for the ghost of that tragedy to stop chasing me. I want my wife Neena to be happy with me, my kids and my mother.’

  ‘When did you marry Neena?’ I asked.

  ‘In 2006, three years after Suman was killed. Mother persuaded me to get married and start life all over again. “I am not going to live for ever,” she said, “Rahul needs a mother, and you need a wife to look after the two of you.”’

  ‘She arranged the match. Neena’s family hails from Kupwara. They had fled their village during the great exodus of Pandits in 1990 and were living in the Purkhoo Camp for refugees.’

  ‘Is it a happy marriage?’

  ‘Under the circumstances, as happy as can be. Neena was widowed two years before she married me.’

  ‘Oh, I see. So she came with a bag of her own tragedies?’ I exclaimed, shocked at the new revelation.

  ‘Yes, sir, another tragedy that haunts her sometimes and causes me more grief. Then I curse my luck and she curses hers.’

  It was indeed another heart-rending tale. Neena’s first husband, Raju, was 14 when his family fled to Jammu in the exodus. The family of five—he, his parents and two unwed sisters—lived in a tent allotted to them by the Relief Department at the Muthi Migrant Camp. The meagre help doled out to each family could not sustain them. Raju was forced to abandon his studies and take up work. He started as a runner for a local drug distributor. Impressed with his hard work, his employer gave him a motorbike to commute. One day, while on an errand, a speeding truck hit him. He died on the spot. Neena saw his dead body in the hospital mortuary. It took her a year to recover from the shock. By then, they had been moved to another migrant camp at Purkhoo. The change of place, and a room in lieu of a tent, helped her gain some semblance of normality. Her parents knew Satish’s parents through a common family friend and that is how the alliance had come about.

  ‘Does Neena have children from her first marriage?’ I asked.

  ‘No sir, she had been married only two years and had never conceived. She gave birth to a baby girl a
year and a half after our wedding.’

  ‘Does she love Rahul, your son from the first wife?’

  ‘She does.’

  ‘Any change in her affection for Rahul after your daughter was born?’

  ‘Yes, she loves him even more. She feels happy our daughter has an older brother who will take care of her when they grow up.’

  ‘Does she like you, love you?’

  ‘Yes, we like each other, love each other.’

  I liked his forthright statement. The couple, ravaged by cruel destiny, had finally found each other to share their life, with two kids to engage them in parental duties. That was certainly going to be the bedrock of their mental and spiritual wellbeing. That was also going to be my chief counselling tool to treat the psychological problems that had plagued Satish’s life.

  ‘So you now have a wife whom you love and who loves you, a son and a daughter. Well, that is a wholesome family and you should not complain.’

  ‘I do not complain, sir,’ he replied.

  ‘Do you feel like returning to Nadimarg?’

  ‘Not really. It has nothing to give us except pain and bitter memories.’

  ‘Is there any Pandit left in Nadimarg?’

  ‘There were 51 families of Pandits before the insurgency. Only 11 were left after the carnage. I learned that whoever survived left the village for good. There is no Pandit left in the village. Twenty years down, the gory tales of the massacre of Pandits are forgotten, wiped out from the records. They sound like fiction even to the victims.’

  ‘Didn’t your Muslim neighbours stop you from leaving?’

  ‘The Muslim villagers felt terrible after that macabre night. They advised us not to leave. We had stayed back on their assurances when Pandits from everywhere in Kashmir were leaving in droves during the great exodus of 1990. That we stayed back was a blunder and our undoing.’

  ‘Do you mean all their assurances were false?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I feel they were genuine. We used to live like brothers. But the Muslims of our village could not have saved us from mischief-mongers from other villages, from militants, from rogue elements. Besides, the police is said to have been mixed up with the killers.’