Even if I did want to go to her, it wasn’t possible. I was in the middle of a jungle in the middle of the night. Moving out would have meant sirens, alarms, at least four jeeps and an armored vehicle. It would have meant taking along sixteen men at the very least. That was the minimum protocol. That kind of circus would not have helped Tilo. Or me. And it would have compromised His Excellency’s security in ways that could have led to unthinkable consequences. It could have been a trap to draw me out. After all, Musa knew about Garson Hobart. It was paranoid thinking, but in those days there wasn’t much daylight between caution and paranoia.
I was out of options. I dialed Ahdoos Hotel and asked for Naga. Fortunately he was there. He offered to go to the Shiraz immediately. The more concerned and helpful he sounded, the more annoyed I became. I could literally hear him growing into the role I was offering him, seizing with both hands the opportunity to do what he loved most—grandstand. His eagerness reassured and infuriated me at the same time.
I called Amrik Singh and told him to expect a journalist called Nagaraj Hariharan. Our man. I said that if they had nothing on the woman, they were to release her immediately and hand her over to him.
—
A few hours later Naga called to say Tilo was in the room next to his at Ahdoos. I suggested he put her on the morning flight to Delhi.
“She’s not freight, Das-Goose,” he said. “She says she’s going for this Commander Gulrez’s funeral. Whoever the hell that is.”
Das-Goose. He hadn’t called me that since college. In college, in his ultra-radical days, he would mockingly call me (for some reason always in a German accent) “Biplab Das-Goose-da”—his version of Biplab Dasgupta. The Revolutionary Brother Goose.
I never forgave my parents for naming me Biplab, after my paternal grandfather. Times had changed. By the time I was born the British were gone, we were a free country. How could they name a baby “Revolution”? How was anybody supposed to go through life with a name like that? At one point I did consider changing my name legally, to something a little more peaceful like Siddhartha or Gautam or something. I dropped the idea because I knew that with friends like Naga, the story would clatter behind me like a tin can tied to a cat’s tail. So there I was—here I am—a Biplab, in the innermost chamber of the secret heart of the establishment that calls itself the Government of India.
“Was it Musa?” I asked Naga.
“She won’t say. But who else could it have been?”
—
By Monday morning the weekend body count had risen to nineteen; the fourteen demonstrators killed in the firing, the boy the Ikhwanis had shot, Musa or Commander Gulrez or whatever the hell he called himself, and three bodies of militants killed in a shoot-out in Ganderbal. Hundreds of thousands of mourners had gathered to carry those nineteen coffins (which included an empty one for the boy whose body had been stolen) on their shoulders to the Martyrs’ Graveyard.
The Governor’s office called to say that it would not be advisable for us to attempt to return to the city until the following day. In the afternoon my secretary called:
“Sir, sun lijiye, please listen, sir…”
Sitting on the verandah of the Dachigam Forest Guest House, over birdsong and the sounds of crickets, I heard the reverberating boom of a hundred thousand or more voices raised together calling for freedom: Azadi! Azadi! Azadi! On and on and on. Even on the phone it was unnerving. Quite unlike hearing the Air Marshal shouting slogans in his prison cell. It was as though the city was breathing through a single pair of lungs, swelling like a throat with that urgent, keening cry. I had seen my share of demonstrations by then, and heard more than my share of slogan-shouting in other parts of the country. This was different, this Kashmiri chant. It was more than a political demand. It was an anthem, a hymn, a prayer. The irony was—is—that if you put four Kashmiris in a room and ask them to specify what exactly they mean by Azadi, what exactly are its ideological and geographic contours, they would probably end up slitting each other’s throats. And yet it would be a mistake to chalk this down to confusion. Their problem is not confusion, not really. It’s more like a terrible clarity that exists outside the language of modern geopolitics. All the protagonists on all sides of the conflict, especially us, exploited this fault line mercilessly. It made for a perfect war—a war that can never be won or lost, a war without end.
The chant that I heard on the phone that morning was condensed, distilled passion—and it was as blind and as futile as passion usually is. During those (fortunately short-lived) occasions when it was in full cry, it had the power to cut through the edifice of history and geography, of reason and politics. It had the power to make even the most hardened of us wonder, even if momentarily, what the hell we were doing in Kashmir, governing a people who hated us so viscerally.
The so-called martyrs’ funerals were always a game of nerves. The police and security forces had orders to remain alert, but out of sight. This was not just because on those occasions tempers naturally ran high and a confrontation would inevitably lead to another massacre—this we had learned from bitter experience. The thinking was that permitting the population to vent its feelings and shout its slogans from time to time would prevent that anger from accumulating and building into an unmanageable cliff of rage. So far, in this more than quarter-century-long conflict in Kashmir, it has paid off. Kashmiris mourned, wept, shouted their slogans, but in the end they always went back home. Gradually, over the years, as it grew into a habit, a predictable, acceptable cycle, they began to distrust and disrespect themselves, their sudden fervors and their easy capitulations. That was an unplanned benefit that accrued to us.
Nevertheless, to allow half a million, sometimes even a million, people to take to the streets in any situation, let alone during an insurgency, is a serious gamble.
—
The following morning, once the streets had been secured, we returned to the city. I drove straight to Ahdoos to find that Tilo and Naga had checked out. Naga didn’t return to Srinagar for a while. I was told he was on leave.
A few weeks later, I received an invitation for their wedding. I went of course, how could I not? I felt responsible for the travesty. For driving Tilo into the arms of a man I felt sure had been less than honest with her. I didn’t think she would have been made privy to the relationship between her soon-to-be husband and the Intelligence Bureau. She would have thought she was marrying a campaigning journalist, seeker of justice, scourge of the establishment that had killed the man she loved. The deception made me angry, but of course I couldn’t be the one to disabuse her of that notion.
—
The reception was on the moonlit lawns of Naga’s parents’ big white Art Deco house in Diplomatic Enclave. It was a small, exquisite affair, very unlike the overblown extravaganzas that have become so popular these days. There were white flowers everywhere, lilies, roses, cascading strings of jasmine, arranged in the most artful ways by Naga’s mother and older sister, neither of whom looked, or even pretended to look, happy. The driveway and the flower beds were lined with clay lamps. Japanese lanterns hung from trees. Fairy lights were threaded through the branches. Old-world bearers in liveried costumes with brass buttons, red-and-gold cummerbunds and starched white turbans rushed about with trays of food and drink. A posse of mop-haired dogs smelling of perfume and cigarette smoke ran amok among the guests, like a small army of yapping, motorized floor swabs.
On a raised platform covered with white sheets, a band of musicians from Barmer, in white dhotis and kurtas and bright, printed turbans, transported us to the Rajasthan desert. Muslim folk musicians were an odd choice for a wedding of this kind. But my friend Naga was eclectic and had discovered them on a trip he’d made to the desert. They were outstanding performers. Their raw, haunting music opened up the city sky and shook the dust off the stars. The greatest of them all, Bhungar Khan, sang of the coming of the monsoon. In his wild, high, almost-female voice he transformed a song about the parched desert’s ache for rain into a song about a woman yearning for the return of her lover. My memory of Tilo’s wedding has always been imbued with that song.