The witness states as under:
Sir, I am a baker. I had a shop at Rawalpora and used to supply bread to the army personnel from 1990–91. Then the situation in Kashmir deteriorated and the militants threatened me for supplying bread to army personnel. Since that was the only lifeline for my business, as such I closed down my bakery and went to my native village in Uri. After three months of my stay there militants started to victimize my wife. Not only this, they forcibly kidnapped my 15 years old sister and forced her to marry one of their companions. On this account I left my native village and returned to Srinagar where I stayed in a rented house in Magarmal Bagh. In some time militants of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) reached there and forced me to join their cadre. Later on during the mutual conflicts among different militant factions the militants of Al-Umar outfit picked me up and I got associated with it for two years. Then the security forces started troubling me and picked up my children. As such I surrendered before India Bravo IB and handed over my AK-47 rifle to them. I was kept in custody for 8 months in Baramulla and then released but was bound to report to IB every fifteen days. I did this for three months but then ran away on account of fear because if anybody would have seen me with IB it would have been fatal to my life. In Srinagar, one person, namely Ahmed Ali Bhat alias Cobra met me and introduced me to the DySP of Kothi Bagh police station who took me and sent me for work with the Special Operations Group SOG in the Rawalpora camp. Cobra and Parwaz Bhat were Ikhwanis and used to work in the camp along with Major Amrik Singh. They provoked Major Amrik Singh against me and told him I knew all the militants and should help him in their arrest. One day Major Amrik Singh took me along with him for purpose of raid on militants’ hideout at Wazir Bagh wherein two militants were captured and released after payment of Rs 40,000. I worked with Major Amrik Singh for many months and was witness to the elimination by him of the following people:
1. Ghulam Rasool Wani.
2. Basit Ahmed Khanday who was working in Century Hotel.
3. Abdul Hafeez Pir.
4. Ishfaq Waza.
5. One Sikh tailor whose name was Kuldeep Singh.
All they have been registered as disappeared since then.
Afterwards on one occasion in March 1995 Major Amrik Singh and his friend Salim Gojri who was also like me a surrendered militant and frequent visitor to the camp picked up one person who was wearing a coat, white shirt and tie and gray pant. At that time Sukhan Singh, Balbir Singh and Doctor were also there. The coat-pant man was a very learned person. He argued with them in the camp saying “Why did you got me arrested and brought me here?” Upon which Major Amrik Singh got furious and beat him ruthlessly and took him to a separate room. After confining him he came out and said, “Do you know that person is the famous advocate Jalib Qadri. We have arrested him because whosoever maligns the army and helps militants will not be spared whatever may be his status.” That evening I heard cries and shouting from the same room in which Jalib Qadri was confined. I further heard sounds of gunshots in that room. Later I observed one sack-bag was loaded into a vehicle.
Few days later when the dead body of Jalib Qadri was recovered and news were published in the papers in this regard, Major Amrik Singh in regret said to me that he did wrong, and that he should not have killed Jalib Qadri but he was helpless in this regard because other officers had entrusted that job to him and Salim Gojri. When he said this to me I felt a threat to my life.
Then Salim Gojri and his associates, Mohammed Ramzan who was illegal immigrant from Bangladesh, Muneer Nasser Hajam and Mohammed Akbar Laway, stopped coming to the camp. Major Amrik Singh sent me along with Sukhan Singh and Balbir Singh in vehicles to find them and bring them to the camp. We found Salim Gojri sitting in a shop in Budgam and asked him why he had not come to the camp for one week. He said he was busy with raids and he would come the next day. Next day he came with his three associates. They came in an Ambassador taxi. Their weapons were held at the gate. Major Amrik Singh told them this was due to the impending visit of the CO of the camp. After that Major Amrik Singh, Salim Gojri and his associates sat in chairs at the compound and started drinking. After two hours Major Amrik Singh took Salim Gojri and his associates to the dining room. I was in the verandah. Sukhan Singh, Balbir Singh, one Major Ashok and Doctor tied Salim Gojri and his associates with ropes and closed the door. The next day their bodies were recovered in a field in Pampore along with the body of the taxi driver Mumtaz Afzal Malik. Afterwards I moved my wife and children to the house of my friend who was residing at Bypass. Then I escaped to Jammu. Further I do not know.
TILO PUT THE FILES and the sachet of photographs back into the carton and left it on the table. They were legal papers and contained nothing incriminating.
She packed Musa’s “recoveries”—the gun, the knife, the phones, the passports, boarding passes and everything else—into airtight plastic food containers and stacked them in her freezer. Inside one of the containers she put Saddam Hussain’s visiting card, so that Musa would know where to come. Her refrigerator was an old one—the kind that iced up if it wasn’t regularly defrosted. She knew that if she turned the temperature down before she left, the incriminating evidence would turn into a block of ice. Her reasoning was that Recoveries that had survived a devastating flood surely had special powers. They would survive a mini-blizzard too.
She packed a small bag. Clothes, books, baby things, computer, toothbrush. The pot with her mother’s ashes.
The only decision that remained to be made was what to do with the cake and the balloons.
—
She lay in her bed, fully dressed and ready to leave.
It was 3 a.m.
Still no sign (nor scent) of Saddam Hussain.
Reading the Otter papers was a mistake. A bad one. She felt as though she had been sealed into a barrel of tar, with him and all the people he had killed. She could smell him. And see his cold, flat eyes as he sat across from her on the boat and stared at her. She could feel his hand on her scalp.
The bed she lay on wasn’t really a bed, just a mattress on the red cement floor. Ants hurried around with cake crumbs. The heat seeped through the mattress and the sheet felt coarse against her skin. A baby gecko walked unsteadily across the floor. It stopped a few feet away, lifted its big head and regarded her with bright, oversized eyes. She watched it back.
“Hide!” she whispered. “The vegetarians are coming.”
She offered it a dead mosquito from the pile of dead mosquitoes she had collected on a sheet of blank paper. She put the mosquito carcass down, halfway between herself and the gecko. The gecko ignored it at first, and then ate it in a flash, while she looked away.
What I should have been, she thought, is a gecko-feeder.
—
Harsh neon light masquerading as the moon streamed through the window. A few weeks ago, walking across a steep, over-lit flyover at night, she eavesdropped on a conversation between two men wheeling their bicycles: “Is sheher mein ab raat ka sahaara bhi nahin milta.” In this city we’ve even lost the shelter of the night.
She lay very still, like a corpse in a morgue.
Her hair was growing.
Her toenails too.
The hair on her head was dead white.
The triangle of hair between her legs was jet black.
What did that mean?
Was she old or still young?