This place is called Nawab Bazaar. See that public toilet? Where it says Roxy Photocopier? That’s where it happened. It was 2004. Must have been April. It was cold and raining heavily. We were sitting in my friend’s shop, New Electronics, right next to Rafiq Tailor Shop, drinking tea. Tariq and me. It was around eight at night. Suddenly we heard the screech of brakes. Across the road about four or five vehicles drove up and cordoned off the toilet. They were STF vehicles. STF, you know, is Special Task Force. Eight soldiers came to the shop and forced us to cross the street with them at gunpoint. When we reached the toilet they told us to go in and search it. They said an Afghan terrorist had escaped and had run into the toilet. They wanted us to go in and ask him to surrender. We didn’t want to go in because we thought that the mujahid would have a gun. The STF men put pistols to our heads. We went in. It was absolutely dark. We could see nothing. There was no person there. We came out and told them that there was nobody there. They asked us to go back in. They gave us a torch. We had never seen such a huge torch. One of them showed us how it works, switching it on and off on and off on and off. Another kept staring at us, clicking the safety catch of his gun on and off on and off on and off. They sent us back into the toilet with the torch. We flashed it around but found nobody. We called out, but nobody replied. We were completely drenched.
The STF soldiers had taken position in the next-door building. Two were on the first-floor balcony. They said they could see someone in the drain. How could that be? It was so dark, how could they see anything from so far away? I shone the torch down on the row of three manholes. I saw a man’s head. I was so afraid. I thought he had a gun, I moved away to one side. The soldiers asked me to ask him to come out. Tariq, who was standing behind me, whispered, “They’re making a film. Do what they say.” By “film” he did not mean really a “film” in that sense. He meant they were setting up the scene, to make a story.
I asked the man in the manhole to come out. He didn’t reply. I could tell he was a Kashmiri. Not an Afghan. He just stared back. He couldn’t speak. We stood around the man with the STF torch. It was still raining. The smell from the manhole was unbearable. Maybe an hour and a half went by. We did not dare to speak to each other. We switched the torch on and off. Then the man’s head fell sideways. He had died. Buried in shit.
The STF men gave us crowbars and spades. We had to break the concrete edges around the manhole to pull him out. All of us were wet, shivering, stinking. When we pulled out the body we found that his legs were tied together and weighted down with a rock.
Only later we learned what had happened earlier in the STF film.
First a few of them had come quietly in one car. They tied up the man and stuffed him into the manhole. He had been badly tortured and was about to die. When they came in they found another young man in one of the booths. They arrested him and took him away—maybe he refused to do what we agreed to do. Then they came back in their vehicles and staged the rest of the film in which there were roles for us too.
Their officer asked us to sign a paper. If we hadn’t signed they would have killed us. We signed as witnesses to an encounter in which the STF had tracked down and killed a dreaded Afghan terrorist who was cornered in a public toilet in Nawab Bazaar. It was in the news.
The man they killed was a laborer from Bandipora. The young man they arrested because he was pissing at a weird and inconvenient hour has disappeared.
And Tariq and I have lies and treachery on our conscience.
Those eyes that stared at us for one and a half hours—they were forgiving eyes, understanding eyes. We Kashmiris do not need to speak to each other any more in order to understand each other.
We do terrible things to each other, we wound and betray and kill each other, but we understand each other.
BAD STORY. Terrible actually. If it’s true, that is. How does one verify these things? People aren’t reliable. They’re forever exaggerating. Kashmiris especially. And then they begin to believe in their own exaggeration as if it’s God’s truth. I can’t imagine what Madam Tilottama is doing, collecting this pointless stuff. She should stick to her shampoo labels. Anyway, it isn’t a one-way street. The other side has its repertory of horror too. Some of those militants were maniacs. If one has to choose, then give me a Hindu fundamentalist any day over a Muslim one. It’s true we did—we do—some terrible things in Kashmir, but…I mean what the Pakistan Army did in East Pakistan—now that was a clear case of genocide. Open and shut. When the Indian Army liberated Bangladesh, the good old Kashmiris called it—still call it—the “Fall of Dhaka.” They aren’t very good at other people’s pain. But then, who is? The Baloch, who are being buggered by Pakistan, don’t care about Kashmiris. The Bangladeshis whom we liberated are hunting down Hindus. The good old communists call Stalin’s Gulag a “necessary part of revolution.” The Americans are currently lecturing the Vietnamese about human rights. What we have on our hands is a species problem. None of us is exempt. And then there’s that other business that’s become pretty big these days. People—communities, castes, races and even countries—carry their tragic histories and their misfortunes around like trophies, or like stock, to be bought and sold on the open market. Unfortunately, speaking for myself, on that count I have no stock to trade, I’m a tragedy-less man. The upper-caste, upper-class oppressor from every angle.
Cheers to that.
What else do we have here?
There’s an open carton, an old Hewlett-Packard printer cartridge carton lying open on the table. I’m relieved to see that its contents are somewhat sunnier—two yellow photo sachets, one labeled “Otter Pics” and the other “Otter Kills.” Nice. I had no idea that she had an interest in otters. It suddenly makes her less—how should I say it—less hazardous. The idea of her walking on a beach, or a riverbank, with the wind in her hair…relaxed, unguarded…looking for otters…makes me glad for her. I love otters. I think they might be my favorite creatures. I once spent a whole week watching them when we were on a family holiday, a Pacific cruise along the west coast of Canada. Even when it was stormy and the ocean was dangerously choppy, there they were, those cheeky little bastards, floating nonchalantly on their backs, looking for all the world as though they were reading the morning papers.
I tip the photos out of one of the sachets.
None of them are pictures of otters.