I was up late that night finalizing my daily report for His Excellency’s morning briefing. The volume on my old Sony player was turned low. Rasoolan Bai was singing a Chaiti, “Yahin thaiyan motiya hiraee gaeli Rama.” Kesar Bai was undoubtedly our most accomplished female Hindustani vocalist, but Rasoolan was surely our most erotic. She had a deep, gravelly, masculine voice, quite unlike the high-pitched, virginal, permanently adolescent voice that has come to dominate our collective imagination through Bollywood soundtracks. (My father, a scholar of Hindustani classical music, thought Rasoolan was profane. It remained one of our many unresolved differences.) I could picture the string of pearls she sang about being broken in the urgency of lovemaking, her voice languorously following the beads as they skittered around the bedroom floor. (Ah yes, there was a time when a Muslim courtesan could so hauntingly invoke a Hindu deity.)
There had been serious trouble in the city that morning. The government had announced elections in a few months’ time. They would be the first in almost nine years. The militants had announced a boycott. It was pretty clear then (unlike now when the queues at the voting booths are unmanageable) that people were not going to come out and vote without some serious persuasion on our part. The “free” press would be there in all its glorious idiocy, so we would have to be careful. Our Ace of Spades was to be the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimoon, the Muslim Brotherhood, our counter-insurgency force, an opportunistic militant group that had surrendered as a group—lock, stock and barrel. Gradually its ranks were expanded by other disaggregated individuals who began to surrender (“cylinder” as Kashmiris called it) in droves. We had regrouped and rearmed them, and returned them to the fray. The Ikhwanis were rough men, mostly extortionists and petty criminals who had joined the militancy when they saw profit in that endeavor, and were the first to cylinder when the going got rough. They had the kind of access to local intelligence that we could never hope for, and once they had been turned around, they had the advantage of an ambiguous provenance that allowed them to carry out operations that were outside the mandate of our regular forces. At first they had proved to be an invaluable asset, but then had become increasingly hard to control. The most feared of them all, the Prince of Darkness himself, was a man known locally as Papa, who had once been nothing more than a factory watchman. In his illustrious career as an Ikhwan he had killed scores of people. (I think the number now stands at one hundred and three.) The terror he evoked did, at first, weigh the balance in our favor, but by ’96 he had begun to outlive his usefulness and we were considering reining him in. (He’s in prison now.) In March that year, without instructions from us, Papa had bumped off the well-known editor of an Urdu daily—an irresponsible Urdu daily, I have to say. (Irresponsible, virulently anti-India dailies that exaggerated body counts and got their facts wrong had their uses too—they undermined the local media in general and made it easier for us to tar them all with the same brush. To tell you the truth, we even funded some of them.) In May Papa had enclosed a community graveyard in Pulwama, claiming it was his ancestral property. Then he killed a much-loved village schoolteacher in a border village and threw his body into a no man’s land that had been mined with IEDs. So the body couldn’t be approached, there could be no funeral prayers, and the dead man’s students had to watch the corpse of their teacher being picked at by kites and vultures.
Impressed by Papa’s gains, other Ikhwanis had begun to follow his example.
That morning a group of them had stopped an old Kashmiri couple at a security barrier in downtown Srinagar. When the man refused to hand over his wallet they abducted him and drove away. People gathered and chased them all the way to the camp the Ikhwanis shared with the Border Security Force. The old man was thrown out of the Gypsy just outside the camp. Once they were inside they—how should I put it—they completely lost their marbles. They lobbed a grenade over the walls and then fired into the crowd with a machine gun. A boy was killed and a dozen or so people injured, half of them seriously. The Ikhwanis then went to the police station, threatened the police and prevented them from lodging a report. In the afternoon they ambushed the boy’s funeral procession and made off with the coffin. Which meant there was no body, and therefore there could be no murder charge. By evening public protests had turned violent. Three police stations were burned down. The security forces fired at the crowds and killed fourteen more people. Curfew was declared in all the larger towns—Sopore, Baramulla and Srinagar of course.
When I heard the phone ring and His Excellency’s aide-de-camp answer it, I assumed the trouble had got out of hand and they were calling to ask for fresh orders. That did not turn out to be the case.
The caller said he was speaking from the Joint Interrogation Center, the JIC, which functioned out of the Shiraz Cinema.
It isn’t what it sounds like. We hadn’t shut down a functioning cinema hall and turned it into an interrogation center. The Shiraz had been shut down years ago by an outfit called the Allah Tigers. It ordered the closing of all cinema halls, liquor shops and bars as being un-Islamic and “vehicles of India’s cultural aggression.” The proclamation was signed by an Air Marshal Noor Khan. The Tigers plastered the city with threatening posters and put bombs in bars. When the Air Marshal was finally captured he turned out to be a barely literate peasant from a remote mountain village who had probably never set eyes on an airplane. I was a junior member of a team of interrogators (it was before my Srinagar posting) who visited him and several other senior militants in prison in the hope of turning them around. He answered our questions with slogans, which he shouted out as though he was addressing a mass rally: Jis Kashmir ko khoon se seencha, woh Kashmir hamara hai! The Kashmir we have irrigated with our blood, that Kashmir is ours! Or the war cry of the Allah Tigers: La Sharakeya wa La Garabeya, Islamia, Islamia!—roughly: Neither East nor West, Islam is best!
The Air Marshal was a brave man and I almost envied him his clear-hearted, simple-minded fervor. He remained impenitent, even after a stint in Cargo. He’s out now, after serving a long sentence. We still keep an eye on him and others like him. He seems to have stayed out of trouble. He earns a meager living selling stamps outside a district court in Srinagar. I’m told he is not in his right mind, although I cannot confirm that. Cargo could be a pretty rough place.
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