“Our in-house poetry…” Ashfaq Mir threw his head back and guffawed.
Either the tea—or the script—made him talkative. Oblivious to the disquiet (as well as the quiet) of his audience he chattered amiably about his college days, his politics, his job. He had been a student leader, he said, and like most young men of his generation, a hard-core Separatist. But having lived through the bloodshed of the early 1990s, having lost a cousin and five close friends, he had come to see the light. He now believed Kashmir’s struggle for Azadi had lost its way and that nothing could be achieved without the “Rule of Law.” And so he joined the Jammu and Kashmir Police and had been deputed to the SOG, the Special Operations Group. Holding a biscuit in the air, delicately between his thumb and forefinger, he recited a poem by Habib Jalib that he said had simply come to him—at the very moment of his change of heart:
Mohabbat goliyon se bo rahe ho
Watan ka chehra khoon se dho rahe ho
Gumaan tum ko ke rasta katt raha hai
Yaqeen mujhko ke manzil kho rahe ho
Bullets you sow instead of love
Our homeland you wash with blood
You imagine you’re showing the way
But I believe you’ve gone astray
Without waiting for a reaction he switched from his declamatory tone to a conspiratorial one:
“And after Azadi? Has anyone thought? What will majority do to the minority? Kashmiri Pandits have already gone. Only us Muslims remain. What will we do to each other? What will Salafis do to Barelvis? What will Sunnis do to Shias? They say they will go to Jannat more surely if they kill a Shia than if they kill a Hindu. What will be the fate of Ladakhi Buddhists? Jammu Hindus? J&K is not just Kashmir. It’s Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. Has any Separatist thought of this? The answer, I can tell you, is a big ‘No.’?”
Naga agreed with what Ashfaq Mir said, and he knew how carefully this seed of self-doubt had been sown by an administration that had clawed its way back into control from the brink of utter chaos. Listening to Ashfaq Mir was like watching the season change and the crop mature. It gave Naga a momentary rush, a cultish sense of omniscience. But he didn’t want to do anything that would prolong the meeting. So he said nothing. He made a show of craning his neck to read the list of the “Most Wanted”—about twenty-five names—written with green Magic Marker on the whiteboard behind the desk. Next to more than half the names it said (killed) (killed) (killed).
“They are all Pakistanis and Afghanis,” Ashfaq Mir said, not turning around, keeping his gaze on Naga. “Their shelf-life is not more than six months. By the year-end they will all be eliminated. But we never kill Kashmiri boys. NEVER. Never unless they are hard-core.”
The barefaced lie hung in the air unchallenged. That was its purpose—to test the air.
Ashfaq Mir sipped his tea, continuing to stare at Naga with those amazed, unblinking eyes. Suddenly—or perhaps not so suddenly—an idea seemed to occur to him. “Would you like to see a milton? I have a wounded one with me here in custody. A Kashmiri. Shall I order for him?”
He rang the bell once again. Within seconds a man answered it and took the “order” as though it were an additional snack that was being ordered with the tea.
Ashfaq Mir grinned mischievously. “Don’t tell my boss, please. He will scold me. This type of thing is not allowed. But you—and Ma’am—will find it very interesting.”
While he waited for the new snack to be served he turned his attention to the papers on his desk, signing his name rapidly on several of them, with an air of cheerful triumph, the scratch of his pen on paper amplified by the silence. Tilo, who had been sitting on a chair at the back of the room, stood up and walked to the window that looked out on to a bleak parking lot full of military trucks. She didn’t want to be the audience for Ashfaq Mir’s show. It was an instinctive gesture of solidarity with a prisoner against a jailer—regardless of the reasons that had made the prisoner a prisoner and the jailer a jailer.
From being someone who had been trying to turn her presence in the room into an absence, her unpresent form now turned thermal, emitting a flux that both the men in the room were acutely aware of, although in very different ways.
In a few minutes a burly policeman entered, carrying a thin boy in his arms. One leg of the boy’s trousers was rolled up, exposing a matchstick-thin calf held together by a splint from ankle to knee. His arm was in a plaster cast and his neck was bandaged. Though his face was drawn with pain, he didn’t grimace when the soldier deposited him on the floor.
To refuse to show pain was a pact the boy had made with himself. It was a desolate act of defiance that he had conjured up in the teeth of absolute, abject defeat. And that made it majestic. Except that nobody noticed. He stayed very still, a broken bird, half sitting, half lying, propped up on one elbow, his breath shallow, his gaze directed inward, his expression giving nothing away. He showed no curiosity about his surroundings or the people in the room.
And Tilo, with her back to the room, in an equally desolate act of defiance, refused to show curiosity about him.
Ashfaq Mir broke up the tableau with the same declamatory tone in which he had recited his poem. What he said this time was a kind of recital too:
“The average age of a milton is between seventeen and twenty years. He is brainwashed, indoctrinated and given a gun. They are mostly poor, low-caste boys—yes, for your kind information even we Muslims happily practice caste. They don’t know what they want. They are simply being used by Pakistan to bleed India. It’s what we can call their ‘Prick and Bleed’ policy. This boy’s name is Aijaz. He was captured in an operation in an apple orchard near Pulwama. You can talk to him. Ask him any questions. He was with a new tanzeem that has recently started operations here. Lashkar-e-Taiba. His commander, Abu Hamza, was a Pakistani. He has been neutralized.”
The game became clear to Naga. He was being offered a deal in Kashmir’s special currency. An interview with a captured militant from a relatively new and—according to the intelligence reports he was privy to—deadly outfit, in exchange for peace over the night’s events—for whatever had happened with Tilo and whatever horror she might have witnessed.
Ashfaq Mir walked over to his quarry and spoke to him in Kashmiri, in a tone one might use for someone who was hard of hearing.