Bandipora 27 September: Today was an important day in the life of 17 girls of village Erin and Dardpora of Bandipora district when their 13 days SADHBHAVANA Tour to Agra, Delhi and Chandigarh was flagged off by Mrs. Sonya Mehra and Brigadier Anil Mehra, Commander, 81 Mountain Brigade from Fishery grounds of Erin Village. These girls accompanied by two elderly women and two panches from the area along with officials of 14 Rashtriya Rifles. They will visit places of historical and educational interest at Agra, Delhi and Chandigarh. They would have a privilege of interacting with Governor of Punjab and of their own state.
Brig Anil Mehra, Commander 81 Mountain Brigade, while addressing the tour participants, told them to make full use of the excellent opportunity provided to them. He also asked them to keenly observe the progress made by other states and to see themselves as ambassadors of peace. Also present on the occasion to give a warm send off were Colonel Prakash Singh Negi, Commanding Officer, 14 Rashtriya Rifles, elected sarpanches of the two villages and parents of all the participants along with a gathering of local populace.
The Reader’s Digest Book of English Grammar and Comprehension for Very Young Children was two beedis and four cigarettes long. Adjusting of course for reading/smoking speed, both of which are variables.
Tilo smiled to herself, remembering another Good Will excursion like the one described in the press release that the army had very kindly organized for the boys from Muskaan, the army orphanage in Srinagar. Musa had sent a message asking her to meet him at the Red Fort. It must have been about ten years ago. She was still living with Naga at the time.
On that occasion, Musa, at his most audacious, was one of the civilian escorts to the group. They were passing through Delhi on their way to Agra to see the Taj Mahal. While they were in Delhi the orphans were taken to see the Qutb Minar, Red Fort, India Gate, Rashtrapati Bhavan, Parliament House, Birla House (where Gandhi was shot), Teen Murti (where Nehru had lived) and 1 Safdarjung Road (where Indira Gandhi was shot by her Sikh bodyguards). Musa was unrecognizable. He called himself Zahoor Ahmed, smiled more often than he needed to and had cultivated a bent, slightly oafish, obsequious air.
He and Tilo met as strangers who sat next to each other by chance, on a bench in the dark at the Sound and Light Show at the Red Fort. Most of the rest of the audience were foreign tourists. “This is a collaborative venture between us and the Security Forces,” Musa whispered to her. “Sometimes, in these kinds of collaborations, the partners don’t know that they are partners. The army thinks it is teaching the children love for their Motherland. And we think we are teaching them to know their Enemy, so that when it is their generation’s turn to fight, they won’t end up behaving like Hassan Lone.”
One of the orphans, a tiny boy with huge ears, climbed on to Musa’s lap, gave him a thousand kisses and then sat very still, regarding Tilo from a distance of about three inches, with intense, expressionless eyes. Musa was gruff with him, unresponsive. But Tilo saw his face muscles twitch and, for a moment, his eyes grow bright. She let the moment pass.
“Who’s Hassan Lone?”
“He was my neighbor. Great guy. A brother.”
“Brother” was Musa’s highest form of praise.
“He wanted to join the militancy, but on his first trip to India, to Bombay, he saw the crowds at VT station and he gave up. When he returned he said, ‘Brothers, have you seen how many of them there are? We have no chance! I surrender.’ He actually gave up! He’s doing some small textile business now.”
Musa, smiling broadly in the dark, gave the child on his lap a smacking kiss on his head in memory of his friend Hassan Lone. The little fellow stared straight ahead, glowing like a lamp.
On the soundtrack the year was 1739. Emperor Mohammed Shah Rangeela had been on the Peacock Throne in Delhi for almost thirty years. He was an interesting emperor. He watched elephant fights dressed in ladies’ clothes and jeweled slippers. Under his patronage a new school of miniature painting depicting explicit sex and bucolic landscapes was born. But it wasn’t all sex and debauchery. Great kathak dancers and qawwals performed in his court. The scholar-mystic Shah Waliullah translated the Quran into Persian. Khwaja Mir Dard and Mir Taqi Mir recited their verse in the teahouses of Chandni Chowk:
Le saans bhi ahista ki nazuk hai bahut kaam
Afaq ki iss kargah-e-shishagari ka
Breathe gently here, for with fragility all is fraught,
Here, in this workshop of the world, where wares of glass are wrought
But then, the sound of horses’ hooves. The tiny boy stood up on Musa’s lap and turned around to see where the sound was coming from. It was Nadir Shah’s cavalry galloping from Persia to Delhi, pillaging cities that lay on its route. The Emperor on the Peacock Throne was unperturbed. Poetry, music and literature, he believed, ought not to be interrupted by the banality of war. The lights in the Diwan-e-Khas changed color. Purple, red, green. On the soundtrack the laughter of women in the zenana. Bells on the ankles of dancing girls. The unmistakable, deep, coquettish giggle of a court eunuch.
After the show the orphans and their escorts spent the night in a dormitory in the Vishwa Yuvak Kendra in Diplomatic Enclave. It happened to be just down the road from Tilo’s (and Naga’s) home.
When Tilo got home, Naga was asleep with the TV on. She switched it off and lay down next to him. That night she dreamed of a winding desert road that had no reason to wind. She and Musa were walking down it. There were buses parked along one side and shipping containers on the other—each with an entrance door and a tattered, gauze curtain. There were whores in some of the doorways and soldiers in the others. Long Somali soldiers. Badly harmed people were being brought out and chained people taken in. Musa stopped to speak to a man in white. He seemed to be an old friend. Musa followed him into a shipping container while Tilo waited outside. When he didn’t come out she went in looking for him. The light in the room was red. A man and woman were having sex on a bed in a corner of the container. There was a big dressing table with a mirror. Musa wasn’t in the room, but his image was reflected in the mirror. He was hanging from the roof by his arms, swinging around and around. There was a lot of talcum powder in the room, including in Musa’s armpits.
Tilo woke up wondering how she came to be on a boat. She looked at Naga for a long time and was briefly overcome by something that felt like love. She didn’t understand it and didn’t do anything about it.
SHE CALCULATED that it had been thirty years since all of them—Naga, Garson Hobart, Musa and she—had first met on the set of Norman, Is That You? And still they continued to circle around each other in these peculiar ways.