“Yi chui Nagaraj Hariharan Sahib. He is a famous journalist from India.” (Sedition was a contagion in Kashmir—sometimes it involuntarily slipped into the vocabulary of Loyalists too.) “He writes against us openly, but still we respect and admire him. This is the meaning of democracy. Some day you will understand what a beautiful thing it is.” He turned to address Naga, switching to English (which the boy understood, but could not speak). “After being with us and coming to know us well, this boy has seen the error of his ways. Now he thinks of us as his family. He has renounced his past and denounced his colleagues and those who forcibly indoctrinated him. He has himself requested us to keep him in custody for two years so that he can be safe from them. His parents are being allowed to visit him. In a few days he will be transferred to jail, to judicial custody. There are many boys like him who are with us here, ready to work with us. You can speak with him—ask him anything. It’s no problem. He will talk.”
Naga said nothing. Tilo remained at the window. It was cool outside, but the air rumbled and smelled of diesel. She watched soldiers escort a young woman with a baby in her arms through the maze of trucks and soldiers. The woman seemed reluctant to go. She kept turning around to look back at something. The soldiers deposited her outside the tall metal gates of the Shiraz, beyond the coiled razor-wire fence that barricaded the torture center from the main road. The woman remained standing where she had been deposited. A small, desperate, frightened figure, a traffic island on the crossroads to nowhere.
For a moment the silence in the room grew awkward.
“Oh I see I understand…you would like to speak with him one on one? Shall I go out? It’s no problem. I can easily go out.” Ashfaq Mir rang a bell. “I’m going out,” he informed the puzzled orderly who answered the bell. “We are going out. We will sit in the outside room.”
Having ordered himself out of his own office, he left and shut the door. Tilo turned around briefly to watch him leave. Through the gap between the bottom of the door and the floor she could see his brown shoes blocking the light. Within a second he came back in with a man who carried a blue plastic chair. It was positioned facing the boy on the floor.
“Please have a seat, sir. He will talk. You need not worry. He will not harm you. I’m going now, OK? You can speak in private.”
He left, closing the door behind him. He returned almost immediately.
“I forgot to tell you that his name is Aijaz. Ask him anything.” He looked at Aijaz and his tone became slightly peremptory. “Answer whatever he asks you. Urdu is no problem. You can speak in Urdu.”
“Ji, sir,” the boy said, not looking up.
“He’s a Kashmiri, I’m a Kashmiri, we’re brothers—and just look at us! OK. I’ll go out.”
Ashfaq Mir left the room once again. And once again his shoes paced up and down just outside the door.
—
“Would you like to say anything?” Naga asked Aijaz, ignoring the chair and crouching on the floor in front of him. “You don’t have to. Only if you want to. On or off the record.”
Aijaz held Naga’s gaze for a moment. The mortification of being described as a renegade clean outstripped the physical pain he was in. He knew who Naga was. He didn’t recognize his face, obviously, but Naga’s name was well known in militant circles as a fearless journalist—not a fellow traveler by any means, but someone who could be useful—a member of the “human right-wing,” as some militants jokingly called Indian journalists who wrote even-handedly and equally conscientiously about the excesses committed by the security forces as well as the militants. (Naga’s political shift had still not manifested itself as a discernible pattern, not even to himself.) Aijaz knew he had only moments within which to decide what to do. Like a goalkeeper in a penalty shoot-out, he had to commit himself one way or another. He was young—he chose the riskier option. He began to speak, quietly and clearly, in Kashmiri-accented Urdu. The incongruity between his appearance and his words was almost as shocking as the words themselves.
“I know who you are, sir. Struggling people, people fighting for their freedom and dignity, know Nagaraj Hariharan as an honest, upright journalist. If you write about me you must write the truth. It’s not true what he—Ashfaq Sahib—said. They tortured me, they gave me electric shocks and made me sign a blank sheet. This is what they do here with everybody. I don’t know what they wrote on it later. I don’t know what they have made me say in it. The truth is that I have not denounced anybody. The truth is that I honor those who trained me in jihad more than I honor my own parents. They didn’t force me to join them. It was I who went looking for them.”
Tilo turned around.
“I was in Class Twelve in a government school in Tangmarg. It took me one whole year to get recruited. They—Lashkar—were very suspicious of me because I didn’t have any family member who had been killed, tortured or made to disappear. I did it for Azadi and for Islam. They took one year to believe me, to check me out, to see if I was an army agent, or if my family would be left without a breadwinner if I became a militant. They are very careful about—”
Four policemen burst into the room with trays of omelettes, bread, kebabs, onion rings, chopped carrots and more tea. Ashfaq Mir appeared behind them like a charioteer driving his horses. He personally served the food on to the plates, taking his time to arrange the carrots on the outer rim, the onions inside, like an impenetrable military formation. The room fell silent. There were only two plates. Aijaz returned his gaze to the floor. Tilo turned back to the window. The trucks came and went. The woman with the baby was still standing in the middle of the road. The sky was a flaming rose. The mountains in the distance were ethereally beautiful, but it had been another terrible year for tourism.
“Please go ahead. Help yourself. Will you like kebab? Now or later? Please, keep talking. No problem. OK, I’m going.” And for the fourth time in ten minutes Ashfaq Mir left his office and stood outside the door.
Naga was pleased by what Aijaz had said about him and delighted that it had been said in front of Tilo. He could not resist a small performance.
“You crossed over? You were trained in Pakistan?” Naga asked Aijaz once he was sure Ashfaq Mir was out of earshot.
“No. I was trained here. In Kashmir. We have everything here now. Training, weapons…We buy our ammunition from the army. It’s twenty rupees for a bullet, nine hundred for—”
“From the army?”
“Yes. They don’t want the militancy to end. They don’t want to leave Kashmir. They are very happy with the situation as it is. Everybody on all sides is making money on the bodies of young Kashmiris. So many of the grenade blasts and massacres are done by them.”
“You’re a Kashmiri. Why did you choose the Lashkar instead of Hizb or JKLF?”
“Because even the Hizb has respect for certain political leaders in Kashmir. In Lashkar we have no respect for these leaders. I have no respect for any leader. They have cheated and betrayed us. They have made their political careers on the bodies of Kashmiris. They have no plan. I joined Lashkar because I wanted to die. I am supposed to be dead. I did not ever think I would be caught alive.”
“But first—before you died—you wanted to kill…?”
Aijaz looked Naga in the eye.
“Yes. I wanted to kill the murderers of my people. Is that wrong? You can write that.”
—
Ashfaq Mir burst in, smiling broadly, but his unsmiling eyes darted from person to person, trying to assess what had passed between them.
“Enough? Happy? Did he cooperate? Before publication you can please reconfirm with me any facts he gave you. He’s a terrorist, after all. My terrorist brother.”
And once again he guffawed happily and rang his bell. The burly policeman returned, gathered Aijaz in his arms and carried him away.
Once the snack had been cleared away on its burly tray, Naga and Tilo were given cheerful (but unspoken) permission to leave. The food on the plates remained untouched, the military formation unbreached.
—