In another plastic packet there were mud-crusted credit cards with names that matched the passports, boarding passes and a few airline tickets—relics from the days when airline tickets existed. There were old telephone diaries, with names, addresses and numbers crammed into them. Diagonally, across the back of one of them, Musa had scrawled a fragment of a song:
Dark to light and light to dark
Three black carriages, three white carts,
What brings us together is what pulls us apart,
Gone our brother, gone our heart.
Who was he mourning? She didn’t know. A whole generation maybe.
There was a half-written letter, on a blue inland letter-form. It wasn’t addressed to anybody. Perhaps he was writing it to himself…or to her, because it began with an Urdu poem that he had tried to translate, something he often did for her:
Duniya ki mehfilon se ukta gaya hoon ya Rab
Kya lutf anjuman ka, jab dil hi bujh gaya ho
Shorish se bhagta hoon, dil dhoondta hai mera
Aisa sukoot jis pe taqreer bhi fida ho
I am weary of worldly gatherings, O Lord
What pleasure in them, when the light in my heart is gone?
From the clamor of crowds I flee, my heart seeks
The kind of silence that would mesmerize speech itself
Underneath he had written:
I don’t know where to stop, or how to go on. I stop when I shouldn’t. I go on when I should stop. There is weariness. But there is also defiance. Together they define me these days. Together they steal my sleep, and together they restore my soul. There are plenty of problems with no solutions in sight. Friends turn into foes. If not vocal ones, then silent, reticent ones. But I’ve yet to see a foe turning into a friend. There seems to be no hope. But pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have…
She didn’t know which friends he meant.
She knew that it was nothing short of a miracle that Musa was still alive. In the eighteen years that had gone by since 1996, he had lived a life in which every night was potentially the night of the long knives. “How can they kill me again?” he would say if he sensed worry on Tilo’s part. “You’ve already been to my funeral. You’ve already laid flowers on my grave. What more can they do to me? I’m a shadow at high noon. I don’t exist.” The last time she met him he said something to her, casually, jokingly, but with heartbreak in his eyes. It made her blood freeze.
“These days in Kashmir, you can be killed for surviving.”
In battle, Musa told Tilo, enemies can’t break your spirit, only friends can.
—
In another carton there was a hunting knife and nine mobile phones—a lot, for a man who did not use mobiles—old ones the size of small bricks, tiny Nokia ones, a Samsung smartphone and two iPhones. When they were delivered, covered in mud, they looked like slabs of fossilized chocolate. Now, minus the mud, they just looked old and unusable. There was a sheaf of stiff, yellowed newspaper clippings, the first of which contained a statement made by the then Chief Minister of Kashmir. Someone had underlined it:
We can’t just go on digging all the graveyards up. We need at least general directions from the relatives of the Missing, if not pointedly specific information. Where could be the greater possibility of their disappeared kin being buried?
A third carton contained a pistol, a few loose bullets, a vial of pills (she didn’t know what pills, but was in a position to make an educated guess—something beginning with C) and a notebook that seemed not to have suffered the depredations of the flood. Tilo recognized the book and the writing in it as hers, but she read through its contents curiously, as though it had been written by someone else. These days her brain felt like a “recovery”—encased in mud. It wasn’t just her brain, she herself, all of her, felt like a recovery—an accumulation of muddy recoveries, randomly assembled.
Long before she became stenographer to her mother and to Dr. Azad Bhartiya, Tilo had been a weird, part-time stenographer to a full-time military occupation. After the episode at the Shiraz, after she came back to Delhi and married Naga, she had traveled back to Kashmir obsessively, month after month, year after year, as though she was searching for something she had left behind. She and Musa seldom met on those trips (when they met, they met in Delhi, mostly). But while she was in Kashmir, he watched over her from his hidden perch. She knew that the friendly souls that appeared as if from nowhere, to hang about with her, to travel with her, to invite her to their homes, were Musa’s people. They welcomed her and told her things they would hardly tell themselves, only because they loved Musa—or at least their idea of him, the man whom they knew as a shadow among shadows. Musa didn’t know what she was searching for, neither did she. Yet she spent almost all the money she earned from her design and typography assignments on these trips. Sometimes she took odd pictures. She wrote strange things down. She collected scraps of stories and inexplicable memorabilia that appeared to have no purpose. There seemed to be no pattern or theme to her interest. She had no set task, no project. She was not writing for a newspaper or magazine, she was not writing a book or making a film. She paid no attention to things that most people would have considered important. Over the years, her peculiar, ragged archive grew peculiarly dangerous. It was an archive of recoveries, not from a flood, but from another kind of disaster. Instinctively she kept it hidden from Naga, and ordered it according to some elaborate logic of her own that she intuited but did not understand. None of it amounted to anything in the cut and thrust of real argument in the real world. But that didn’t matter.
The truth is that she traveled back to Kashmir to still her troubled heart, and to atone for a crime she hadn’t committed.
And to put fresh flowers on Commander Gulrez’s grave.
The notebook that Musa sent back with his “recoveries” was hers. She must have left it behind on one of her trips. The first few pages were filled with her writing, the rest were blank. She grinned when she saw the opening page:
The Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children
By
S. Tilottama
She got herself an ashtray, settled down cross-legged on the floor, and chain-smoked her way to the end of her book. It contained stories, press clippings and some diary entries:
THE OLD MAN & HIS SON
When Manzoor Ahmed Ganai became a militant, soldiers went to his home and picked up his father, the handsome, always dapper Aziz Ganai. He was kept in the Haider Baig Interrogation Center. Manzoor Ahmed Ganai worked as a militant for one and a half years. His father remained imprisoned for one and a half years.
On the day Manzoor Ahmed Ganai was killed, smiling soldiers opened the door of his father’s cell. “Jenaab, you wanted Azadi? Mubarak ho aapko. Congratulations! Today your wish has come true. Your freedom has come.”
The people of the village cried more for the shambling wreck who came running through the orchard in rags with wild eyes and a beard and hair that hadn’t been cut in a year and a half than they did for the boy who had been murdered.
The shambling wreck was just in time to be able to lift the shroud and kiss his son’s face before they buried him.
Q 1: Why did the villagers cry more for the shambling wreck?
Q 2: Why did the wreck shamble?
NEWS
Kashmir Guideline News Service
Dozens of Cattle Cross Line of Control (LoC) in Rajouri
At least 33 cattle including 29 buffaloes have crossed over to Pakistan side in Nowshera sector of Rajouri district in Jammu and Kashmir.
According to KGNS, the cattle crossed the LoC in Kalsian sub-sector. “The cattle which belong to Ram Saroop, Ashok Kumar, Charan Das, Ved Prakash and others were grazing near LoC when they crossed over to other side,” locals told KGNS.
Tick the Box:
Q 1: Why did the cattle cross the LoC?
(a) For training
(b) For sneak-in ops
(c) Neither of the above
THE PERFECT MURDER (J’s story)