Yusuf

I

The guns from other side had fallen silent as the dusk approached an ominously dark, moonless night. Yusuf, trying to conceal his heavy built behind a withering walnut tree, slid himself on the dry patch of grass. Despite his inexhaustible strength the day had been long and tough. The men hiding inside the two-storey house had proven to be much better trained and battle hardened than he had expected. 'Bloody Afghanis' he cursed, irritated at not being to find the pack of Gold Flake in the multiple pockets of his borrowed army fatigue jacket. For a fleeting moment he thought of Junaid, his cigarette buddy, it was Junaid who had made him take his first puff while walking back home from the riverbed after their daily game of cricket. He suppressed the urge to go back to those early days knowing well how vicious the storm of emotions that accompanied such memories could be. 

Major Venkat, the lean framed commander of the operation, was getting restless wanting to get over with it quickly. Even after spending three winters in Kashmir his south Indian skin hadn't managed to befriend the torturous cold here. A swig of rum from the steel grey hip flask would only keep him going for a while more. It had been a week since Reema had called. Today, he had decided, he would make a call to her and had even thought of an alibi if her father answered the call.

Like Yusuf he had also anticipated the operation to be short and quick one. The informer had pointed out the right house but the idiot had got the number wrong. Only two militants couldn't have held up the force for so many hours. The motherfuckers had even escaped the mortar shells that had brought down two houses and within minutes had started firing from a third house. Left to him Major Venkat would have the got the whole mohalla brought down. But now the orders were to avoid collateral damage, every operation had to incisive and clean. Things had changed in Kashmir.  

His eyes, bloodshot red with exhaustion and impatience, were now combing the house for any movement. Though he was certain that they had decimated them but his experience wouldn't let him take any chances. He looked towards Yusuf who had managed to light up a cigarette and seemed to be lost in the tiny rings of smoke. You could almost mistake it for non-chalance till you noticed the finger firmly on the trigger of his Ak47. Taking position behind the mud brick wall barely a few feet away from Yusuf, he motioned to him to move towards the bullet-pockmarked house. Yusuf ignored him and continued forming tiny circles of smoke. He didn't care. A thick air of unease and hostility surrounded the two but Yusuf knew he weighed higher in the equation. At least for now. Venkat was indignant but didn’t want to waste more time arguing with him. He will settle this by pumping a hundred bullets in his arse, he promised himself. For now he just wanted to get over with the damned operation. He now asked his two men to do the reece; both of them swiftly followed the orders and started moving towards the house. Major Venkat had also got the rest of his and Yusuf''s men to take positions. In this business you had to be prepared for the surprises. Unlike the pleasant ones that Reema would come up with these were morbid and annihilating. Death seemed to have a perverse liking for suddenness here. 

Yusuf took another long drag from the cigarette butt burning it up till the edge. The intense heat at the tip that seared his fingernails leaving a tiny black spot, gave him an unusual pleasure. It left him with strange sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.  The smoke had soothed his nerves and the whole day had started wearing off into a blurred background. Just then a sound of a single bullet shot pierced the uneasy quiet of evening. An identical one followed which was followed by two simultaneous loud screams. Both the soldiers had got hit when they were about to storm into the house. 'Behenchod maare nahin saale' shouted Venkat lunging ahead in rage and rushing towards the house opening a burst of gunfire. Yusuf who was standing a few steps ahead instinctively leapt on to him, a bullet whizzed past as they both fell on the ground. The unexpectedness of his act surprised Venkat and for a while he remained frozen to the ground. 

There was something about the accuracy, the measured precision of those three shots that disturbed Yusuf.  What made the whole act so familiar? Why did he know about it from the gut before it happened? Why did it feel as if he had known the script, as if he knew who had pulled the trigger? A volcano of emotions erupted in his heart. Could it be Junaid or Mushtaq inside the house?  The thought stifled him with its mercilessness. The volcano of emotions that had erupted inside him tore through his defenses. A flurry of vivid images, words, sounds, smells from the past swirled around him. He could see Ibrahim. He was there in front of him, pushing him, shouting at him, imploring him. The blot of blood growing bigger and bigger on his white kameez. Yusuf couldn't move, his limbs were numb. Could if be Ibrahim? No it can't be him. Ibhi, his friend, was dead. No not dead, martyred.

There is a reality, an uncomfortable truth that you dread to face. You evade it; deny its existence but it lives, parallel to your own reality like a shadow. It deprives you of yourself and enslaves you, slowly and quietly. You live in fear of it. And then there is a moment when it confronts you. It challenges you with all its nakedness. To conquer it you have it to acknowledge it, its power over you.  You have to face it, your soul unclothed and naked.  It was that moment for Yusuf. It unhinged him. Suddenly he started to run towards the damaged house, towards the injured soldiers. Their groans dying under the noise of the machine gun fire. There was desperation and a purpose to his run. Venkat asked his men to stop firing. From the other side too the guns went quiet, again. 

The Womb

It had started raining outside when Fahmeda woke up with a parched throat and a broken dream. A flash of lightening entered the room through the polythene wrapped window pane. It ruined the theatre of shadows orchestrated by a flickering candle. Fahmeda kept staring at the displaced shadows while trying to assemble pieces of her dream. Again, like last time, it had broken at the same moment. Again she had failed to reach out to Yusuf’s hand as he swirled away into a vacuum. The raindrops stumbling against the rusted tin roof disturbed the uneasy sleep of Qadir. He let out a groan and mumbled something imploring the saint whose shrine stood at the other end of the village. His years of hard toil as a gravedigger had left him with frail health and a meek will. The only support that he could give her was these supplications.

Eighteen days had passed since Yusuf had left for Srinagar from his  village. He hadn’t returned neither had anyone brought any news of him. Every evening Fahmeda would walk to the bus stop and fix her gaze on the dusty road till darkness covered everything and exposed her to the brutality of her own fears.  The void left by his absence would stretch itself into yet another long lonely night. Every morning she would wake up to a new hope of seeing him back.  Everything else in her life had come to a standstill as she walked through the daily routine like a ghost.  But only his memories, faded and forgotten, returned. It was like replaying old episodes of life in an unpredictable order. She would keep going back to the morning when she had seen him last, watching him cross the stream next to their house and then walk through the graveyard. She would remember the gentleness of his eyes and his bearded face, serene and calm. Sometimes she would rush to the corner room hoping to find him sleeping there, hoping he would have quietly slipped in, like he used to in his childhood. The emptiness there would defeat her, it would leave her despondent. The day Yusuf had left, she had found a red marble with a scuffed surface lying on the window sill. It was another tiny reminder of his childhood when he used to keep playing with his friends all day and win them. For her those small spherical balls in blue, orange, green, golden and every other colour were his small trophies. All these memories were abbreviated by a sudden agitation in heart; an oppressive paranoia would spread inside her like a poison.  

               When his friends would be busy playing, carefree and burden less of any demands from life, Yusuf would sit alone muddled with his own hypothesis about it. His transition to a quiet, mature adolescence had surprised everyone including Fahmeda. At home there was a strange proximity to death. He had found it difficult to deal with the dichotomy of his father providing for their lives through somebody’s loss. This had made him ask questions about life and death that boys of his age would normally be oblivious of.  Qadir would refer to the Quran, quote Hadiths and what imam sahib had said in the last Friday prayer.  For him death was just a departure from this world to the other, an end of tenure. He would tell him that Allah had blessed him by choosing him for this special job. ‘Then why despair and why this greed to live, when it was a transfer to a better world’ Yusuf would question, the complexity of it cushioned by his innocence. For him it was the physical act, the removal, the loss of a space that troubled him.  It was the frivolity of this existence that he wanted to reconcile with. Fahmeda would try to assure him with her native simplicity telling him that the earth was a womb to which all the souls will return one day. This was Allah’s way of maintaining equilibrium on earth, she believed. Yusuf often walked to mosque and intently listened to the sermons. Gradually he had assimilated himself into this paradox of life and closeted all discomforting questions that arose in his mind.He had also started assisting his father at the graveyard now.

But all this was when the sounds of birds, the chatter of kids filled the air. It was before they knew what gunfire sounded like; it was before the streets smelled of blood. It was before the epidemic had struck. The epidemic of rebellion, of hatred, of heroism, of fear, of hope, of death. Fahmeda had made Yusuf swear on the Quran that he will not join the mujahids. He too had never considered it.

At the graveyard more bodies had started flowing in. Even Qadir had found it difficult to cope with it. He was used to wrinkled bodies, properly washed and shrouded but now they were fresh, young faces with mutilated bodies. Sometimes bodies would be brought during the day, accompanied by slogans for freedom, for justice. Sometimes they would be brought in the dark, quietly and with no ceremony of slogans or tears.  Those that came during the day would get a marble stone with a poetic epitaph and the ones from the night would remain unknown, unmarked, buried into anonymity. Death had never been more so capricious before. If earlier it had made Yusuf uncomfortable, now it repelled him. But now he had the responsibility to provide for their survival and there was hardly anything else in the village for him to do. He needed the tips from the burials to live.

Gradually Yusuf had absorbed himself into his work. To escape the agony of his own questions, he had locked himself away. He was now living his life among the dead. He had gotten used to the metabolism of grief turning numb with every casket that came, letting the bile rising inside and then slowly returning to his weary soul. Sometimes he would  feel nothing, keeping himself busy with the arithmetic of counting the graves, figuring how many more could be accommodated in left over space. But sometimes he would wake up in the nights tortured by the images of mutilated bodies, frozen in half motion, unprepared for the journey to the other world. And then there were days he would  sleep beneath the walnut tree, peaceful like them. But his face was no longer calm and serene, it was grim and cold.

On that morning, like everyday he had prayed for a quiet day. But his heart had warned him with his restlessness growing, multiplying with every passing moment. It was late in the afternoon when somebody came to inform him about an eight year old boy who had been shot. A new wave of turmoil besieged him as he starting digging up the soft earth; every spade of moist soil felt heavier than the other. When they brought him Yusuf was trembling. Tears welled up in Yusuf’s eyes when he saw the boys face, contorted with pain and disbelief. Then something stung him, it pierced him like a dagger. It was a small red colour marble shinning in the boy’s hand. Blinded by the shining marble and his own tears he took it from hand and held it to his chest. On that day, at that moment he would not be able to reconcile with the frivolity of life and its injustice. A raw wound had been unstitched.  That evening he sat by the window silent and motionless, feeling the red marble in his hand and letting himself be enveloped by the stench of death. It stifled him. He wanted to run, to surrender, to escape. And then suddenly he picked up the lantern and walked through the darkness to the graveyard. For the next two hours he kept digging furiously as if he trying to purge himself. Tired and drained he lied down on the ground and wept aloud.

                                    Just when the drowsiness had started working as a palliative, Fahmeda was woken again by a knock on the door. She knew the sound; she had felt its trauma before. But this time it was more devastating, it crippled her. It was Qadir who got up to open the door, a neighbor stood there with two soldiers waiting behind him. The headlamps of their jeep had lit up the grave yard in the distance, covering the body lying on the ground like a halo. By now Fahmeda was trying not to hear anything, she was trying to shut herself, to get rid of the growing noise inside her. When she could bear it no more and ran outside pushing away the soldier blocking the door way. There was something pulling her back, wanting her to stop but she kept running with all the strength that she could pull till she crashed near him. From a distance she had known it was him, she had felt him leave her, abandon her. She wanted to reach for his hand, try and hold it and go back to her dream. And then she looked at his face; it was calm and serene again. That is when she let the marble slip away from her hand. That is when she knew he had already drifted away into the vacuum, to return his soul to the womb.

Dispossessed

‘He is omnipresent’ is how they would have described Him, when i was growing up. This indefinable prowess to transcend time and space had left an indelible stamp on my infant imagination. He was there in the unlit hidden part of the courtyard where my play mates couldn’t find me, He was also on the other side of the hill where the sun rested in the nights and while I slept He spent time playing with shadows. ‘He is there in your heart’ my grandmother would add. And yet whenever i wanted Him to intervene and help fructify my trivial desires and small dreams, i would always look skywards. That is where He lived keeping an eye on the universe, an estate that was entirely His.
Later, as i grew older, He had settled in a cosy corner my conscious. It was an intimate yet functional co-existence, whenever i was in need i would implore Him and at times plead to look the other way while i indulged in the vagaries of human nature. All along i was aware of His presence but perhaps never really felt it then. Now sometimes when I recede into the quiet and dark alleys of my heart i feel His presence around me. I have started feeling His presence often in some small and minuscle moments. When I saw the old beggar vainly trying to protect himself from sudden rains, i could feel Him in the hope on his smiling face. When the tiny little hands of my day old baby waved at me as she struggled to live, in my helpless state I felt Him right there giving strength to me. I felt Him on my father’s face in his silent prayer as he waited outside the hospital door for his son to come back and live again. When I see the urchin girl and her ugliness that surrounds her I feel Him in the optimism of her eyes.
Today again I feel He is amused at the absurdity of our collective avarice to claim His ownership, to deny Him to others, to confine Him to a few brick walls, to colour those walls. Perhaps today He feels abandoned, dispossessed by His own creation.Perhaps today instead of trying to own Him we need to belong to Him.

Farewell!

It is an image that will haunt me for years to come. A mother pressing her lips to her teenage son’s face, for one last time. Trying to hold him for a fraction more and not let him go, forever. You can almost see her soul, broken and dead. Her quiet, dry eyes create a façade of resilience. Perhaps she is staring at the vacuum, the black hole that has befriended her for life.

This one final look of his face would be one of the last memories of the infinite moments she will inherit from him. There aren’t going to be any new ones. Every time she will return to them to console herself and be torn apart by those very memories like a sharp edged knife. Yet she will come back to remember his beautiful smile, to the time when she had felt him for the first time in his womb, to the night when she had found happiness in his peaceful sleep, to the day when he had conjured up impossible dreams, to the time when he had refused to eat and go hungry in trifle protest, to the apple that she had hidden away for him, to the time when she had imagined him to be frail and weak than his friends, to the time when he was fairer to her than anyone in the world, to his stubborn demands, to his future. And return with nothing but emptiness from those corridors of the past.

I try to empathize, to feel her grief, to make it mine and shudder at the mere thought. What else could I do to solace her? Pray for her, but pray for what? Peace perhaps. Or maybe amnesia.

Sadly there is nothing, absolutely nothing that can bring Showkat back to her. Neither the superpower nation. Nor aazadi.

Random

"It is my insignificance that worries me. Nothing matters more to me than my own exaggerated relevance to things concerning the human race"

"Going back to my cocoon to hide in my sorrows..do shout for me when the spring returns, when you smell the peach and almond blossoms in full bloom again"

Shame

Those ominous grey clouds hanging low on the sky, threatened to shroud everything into an early darkness. The gloomy view reflected my mood too. An amorphous pain had been growing inside me ever since I saw the bandaged dead face of nine year old Sameer. The shrill cry of his mother had echoed inside me throughout the day as the splintered emotion spread through my body. I left work early trying to shut myself behind the silence of closed glass windows as I drove back home. The cacophony within continued to grow. The pain now condensed into a large black hole on my chest and the disquiet was slowing turning into anger and disgust.

As I stopped at the traffic light, I heard a familiar tap on the window. A small boy stood there with a few small flags in his hand pointing one towards me. I looked at the flag and felt a sharp conflict erupting in my mind as I turned my face towards the other side perhaps to hide my rancor. Oblivious to the acrimony I felt towards him, the boy persisted with another tap and a meek smile. This time I noticed his earnest eyes. And this time I detested myself. Perhaps my feelings were no different from the uniformed man who had beaten Sameer to death. Both had ascribed a status, an ideology to these little boys that they did not understand. The truth of this made me feel nauseated.

I looked at the boy again, at the torn pocket of his shirt, at this disheveled hair, at his ignorance of the bigger uglier world around him. Perhaps there was something common between him and Sameer. Perhaps he could have been Sameer and Sameer could have been him. Perhaps the names didn’t matter. Perhaps it was their lost innocence. Perhaps it was the mischief of their age. Perhaps it was the hypocrisy we had build around them. Perhaps it was their future that we claimed to decide for them. Perhaps it was the concept of freedom that they did not understand. Perhaps it was their carefree childhood. Perhaps it is our divisive hearts. Perhaps it was humanity. Perhaps the way it is strangulated at every street corner. Perhaps it is shame that we owe to them.

I felt a scream coming out of me letting go of a burden. I rolled down the window and spread out my hand letting a few drops of rain wash it. Now I felt clean again

The Contrarian View

Being a Kashmiri I do have a certain emotionally ‘entangled’ perspective but at the same time having lived outside the valley for a long time and having had several interactions at a broader level allows me a certain bit of objectivity. (This certainly does not imply that anyone outside the valley would not have any emotional attachment or those from the valley lack objectivity). It is just another viewpoint which needs to be dissected and judged on its merits and demerits. The discourse on Kashmir has largely been uni-dimensional (depending on where you stand) and ironically to a problem which is multi-dimensional, with each dimension feeding into the other.What do Kashmiri’s want? What is the way forward? The answers to these we get are mostly rhetorical. One of the common assertions is that this is another economic and governance related issue and therefore the solutions have to be derived from there. While these are as relevant to Kashmir’s as to anyone else on the planet however they fail to comprehend the problem in its entirety. The recent events have also negated this standpoint yet again.There is no denying the fact that the problem is politico-religious in nature. It is also true that the 'fundamentalist' Islam has made large inroads represented by Mr Geelani in the valley who is also seen to be the vanguard of the movement. The killings and displacement of Kashmiri Pandits in the early 90's also contribute towards giving it a 'jihadi' character. Given the current state of things in the subcontinent the apprehensions about the state turning into’anarchy’ and the consequent effects on the fabric of India in those circumstances do hold water.At the same time, I am tempted to step back and refrain from considering this just another 'Islamic' movement. In view of one of my close Indian 'Muslim' friends who has also lived in the valley if you go by the puritanical Islam 'most of the Kashmiri’s would be considered non-Muslims'. This drawing from the fact that the 'sufi' culture is deeply ingrained among the Kashmiri people. It is also a fact that ‘Jamaat Islami' ,which talked about Wahabi Islam, did not resonate with a large population for many years. It would be presumptuous to assume that in the last 2 decade things have overturned completely. At least on the ground it does not seem to be so. Perhaps it would not be wrong to assert that the militant movement lost its popularity because the average Kashmiri could not relate to the 'jihadi' nature of LeT and such. The overtly ‘Islamic’ slogans which tend to be seen as ‘communal’ therefore may not be so in truth and not to be taken at the face value.The political dimension of this problem is the one that has not only been neglected but abused also. It is one of the key things that an average Kashmiri feels he has always been deprived of. Right from the time when Sheikh Abdullah was imprisoned in 1953 till today the governments have virtually been 'installed' by the Centre. Please don’t read it as just another 'rigging' elsewhere. It has not been about supporting one or the other political equation, it has been about who suited the interests of the Centre and those interests did not match with those of the valley is an open secret. Article 370 which inherently recognized the need to address Kashmir in a 'unique' manner was trampled upon in its infancy itself by abrogating powers of the state that were intended in the original draft. The seeds of suspicion and distrust were sown with this among Kashmiri’s. Though subsequently a lot of provisions made have actually accorded more rights but the initial distrust remains. This is further aggravated by the constant demand for its abrogation by the right wing political parties. In all of this, Kashmiri’s have always felt vulnerable.Even in the current context, by the admission of Home Minister himself, the political process has been in a limbo. Despite the improvement in situation there was little progress in the last 2 years. This was an opportunity for the government to connect and build on its equation with the moderates. Unfortunately, the policy seems to have been again of overlooking the deep set sentiments and believing the elections have resolved the problem. In the process the moderates like Mirwaiz, Yasin Malik, Sajad Lone etc have been relegated to the margins, the stalling of the dialogue process meant that these people would also be accused of having sold out. Like it or not but these are the people who are going to help bring the 'peace' process back. These are the people GOI will have to talk to. Unfortunately, the ground seems have to been lost to the hardliners so far and government of India has compromised the ‘doves’It is also important to understand the full import of 'aazadi' and time for the proponents to define its contours. What does 'aazadi' entail and how will you benefit from it. The answers to this even by those who are shouting the loudest would be nebulous. If it just separation from India what about the rest of the J&K what about the rest of the constituents Pandits, Ladhakhis, Jammuites. I think it the onus is on Hurriyat(both factions) to come together and give a definite shape to their 'vision' Similarly the onus is on the mainstream political parties specially NC to reflect and come out with an alternate way forward that they think would be acceptable to people. It is also imperative for the Centre to stop living in denial mode and have a Kashmir policy in place apart from buying time and hoping that it will solve itself with the influx of tourists. Sadly that is not the case.As far as human rights are concerned, I think this is where all of us have failed. And it is not just 'bullets' but the 'attitude' that has been bringing back the protestors to the streets. The silence of Manmohan Singh is as gross as the inferences that these are sponsored acts. The statements from the leadership are taken seriously, they can help alleviate the pain as much as they can alienate. Of late the media and the civil society have started taking note and this should go a long way in putting a balm on the fresh wounds of Kashmir.Therefore what is the solution? Unfortunately there are no straight answers. The way forward has to obviously look at the problem in totality. It can’t be started by “First Stop this and First Start that’ stances. It does not lie in the past; it has to be found in the ‘future’. On one hand the GOI has to take a hard look at how it wishes to engage with Kashmiris in times to come, on the other the Kashmiri leadership, intelligentsia and civil society need to ponder on how they envisage the future for their next generation.