I don’t know what brought her and Musa together again all those years later, or how she came to be on that houseboat with him in Srinagar.
Given what I knew of him, I have never understood how that storm of dull, misguided vanity—the absurd notion that Kashmir could have “freedom”—swept him up as it did a whole generation of young Kashmiri men. It’s true that he suffered the kind of tragedy that nobody ever should—but Kashmir was a war zone then. I can put my hand on my heart and swear that, whatever the provocation, I would never contemplate doing what he did.
But then he wasn’t me, and I wasn’t him. He did what he did. And he paid the price for it. As ye sow, so shall ye reap.
Within weeks of Musa’s death, Tilo married Naga.
—
As for me, the least remarkable of us all—I loved her without pride. And without hope. Without hope, because I knew that even if by some remote chance she had reciprocated my feelings, my parents, my Brahmin parents, would never accept her—the girl without a past, without a caste—into the family. Had I persevered, it would have meant an upheaval of the sort that I simply did not have the stomach for. Even in the most uneventful of lives, we are called upon to choose our battles, and this one wasn’t mine.
Now, these years later, my parents are both dead. And I’m what’s known as a “family man.” My wife and I tolerate each other and adore our children. Chitra—Chittaroopa—my wife (yes, my Brahmin wife), is in the Foreign Service and is posted to Prague. Our daughters, Rabia and Ania, are seventeen and fifteen. They stay with their mother and attend the French School. Rabia hopes to study English literature and young Ania is dead set on a career in human rights law. It’s an unorthodox choice, and her determination, her refusal to even consider other options, is a little odd, especially for one so young. I was troubled about it at first. I wondered whether it was her way of staging a subtle version of a teenage rebellion against her father. But that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Over the last ten years or so the field of human rights has become a perfectly respectable and even lucrative profession. I have been nothing short of encouraging with her. In any case, a final decision is still a few years away. We’ll see what happens. Both the girls are good students. Chitra and I have been promised a joint posting soon—hopefully in the country where the girls will be at university.
I never imagined I would ever do anything to upset or harm my family in any way. But when Tilo walked back into my life, those legal ties, those lofty, moral principles, atrophied and even seemed a little absurd. As it turned out my anxiety was irrelevant—she did not seem to even notice my dilemma or discomfort.
By renting these rooms to her when she needed them, I told myself I was making up for my trespasses tactfully and unobtrusively. I say “trespasses” because I have always felt that I had failed her in a nebulous and yet fundamental way. She didn’t seem to see it like that at all—but then she wasn’t that sort of person.
—
I had only seen her on and off since she married Naga. Their wedding in Delhi remains burned into my memory, and not because of what might seem to be the obvious reasons—heartbreak or thwarted love. That, in fact, was the least of it. I was reasonably happy at the time. My own marriage was less than two years old; there was still some semblance of real affection between me and my wife, if not love. The sapping brittleness that marks my relationship with Chitra now had not set in yet.
By the time Tilo and he got married, Naga had already made the many transitions from an irreverent, iconoclastic student to an unemployable intellectual on the radical Left, to being a passionate advocate of the Palestinian cause (his hero at the time was George Habash), and then on to mainstream journalism. Like many noisy extremists, he has moved through a whole spectrum of extreme political opinion. What has remained consistent is only the decibel level. Now Naga has a handler—though he may not see it quite that way—in the Intelligence Bureau. With a senior position at his paper, he is a valuable asset for us.
His journey to the dark side, if that’s what you want to call it—I wouldn’t—began with the usual bit of quid pro quo. His beat was the Punjab. The insurgency had more or less been crushed by then. But Naga spent his time digging up old stories, providing ammunition for those farcical parodies called “People’s tribunals,” after which they brought out even more farcical “People’s charge-sheets” against the police and the paramilitary. An administration that was at war with a ruthless insurgency cannot be held to the same standards as one that is functioning in ordinary, peaceful conditions. But who was to explain that to a crusading journalist who wrote his copy with the sound of applause permanently ringing in his ears? On one of his vacations from this brand of performative radicalism, Naga went to Goa and, in typical Naga fashion, fell wildly in love and impulsively married a young Australian hippy. Lindy, I think she was called. (Or was it Charlotte? I’m not sure. It doesn’t matter. I’ll stay with Lindy.) Within a year of their marriage, Lindy was arrested in Goa for heroin trafficking. She faced the prospect of several years in prison. Naga was beside himself. His father was an influential man and could easily have helped, but Naga—a late arrival in his father’s life—had always had a troubled relationship with him and didn’t want him to know. So he called me and I pulled a few strings. The Director General of Police in Punjab spoke to his counterpart in Goa. We got Lindy out of custody and had the charges dropped. As soon as she was released, Lindy caught the first plane home to Perth. In a few months Naga and she were formally divorced. Naga continued his work in Punjab, needless to say, a considerably chastened man.
When we needed a journalist’s help on a small matter, a case that human rights activists were making a noise about, though as usual many of their facts needed correcting, I called Naga. He helped. And so it went. A collaboration was born.