People loved the Less Strict Ones, but they feared and respected the Strict Ones. In the battle of attrition that took place between the two, hundreds lost their lives. Eventually the Less Strict Ones declared a ceasefire, came overground and vowed to continue their struggle as Gandhians. The Strict Ones continued the fight and over the years were hunted down man by man. For each one that was killed, another took his place.
A few months after the murder of Usman Abdullah, his assassin (the well-known UG) was captured and killed by the army. His body was handed over to his family, pockmarked with bullet-holes and cigarette burns. The Graveyard Committee, after discussing the matter at length, decided that he was a martyr too and deserved to be buried in the Martyrs’ Graveyard. They buried him at the opposite end of the cemetery, hoping perhaps that keeping Usman Abdullah and his assassin as far apart as possible would prevent them from quarreling in the afterlife.
As the war went on, in the Valley the soft line gradually hardened and the hard line further hardened. Each line begot more lines and sub-lines. The Strict Ones begot even Stricter Ones. Ordinary people managed, quite miraculously, to indulge them all, support them all, subvert them all, and go on with their old, supposedly addle-headed ways. The reign of the Moi-e-Muqaddas continued unabated. And even as they drifted on the quickening currents of Strictness, ever-larger numbers of people continued to flock to the shrines to weep and unburden their broken hearts.
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From the safety of their balcony, Miss Jebeen and her mother watched the funeral procession approach. Like the other women and children who were crowded into the wooden balconies of the old houses all the way down the street, Miss Jebeen and Arifa too had readied a bowl of fresh rose petals to shower on the body of Usman Abdullah as it passed below them. Miss Jebeen was bundled up against the cold in two sweaters and woolen mittens. On her head she wore a little white hijab made of wool. Thousands of people chanting Azadi! Azadi! funneled into the narrow lane. Miss Jebeen and her mother chanted it too. Although Miss Jebeen, always naughty, sometimes shouted Mataji! (Mother) instead of Azadi!—because the two words sounded the same, and because she knew that when she did that, her mother would look down at her and smile and kiss her.
The procession had to pass a large bunker of the 26th Battalion of the Border Security Force that was positioned less than a hundred feet from where Arifa and Miss Jebeen sat. The snouts of machine guns protruded through the steel mesh window of a dusty booth made up of tin sheets and wooden planks. The bunker was barricaded with sandbags and concertina wire. Empty bottles of army-issue Old Monk and Triple X Rum dangled in pairs from the razor wire, clinking against each other like bells—a primitive but effective alarm system. Any tinkering with the wire would set them off. Booze bottles in the service of the Nation. They came with the added benefit of being callously insulting to devout Muslims. The soldiers in the bunker fed the stray dogs that the local population shunned (as devout Muslims were meant to), so the dogs doubled as an additional ring of security. They sat around, watching the proceedings, alert, but not alarmed. As the procession approached the bunker, the men caged inside it fused into the shadows, cold sweat trickling down their backs underneath their winter uniforms and bulletproof vests.
Suddenly, an explosion. Not a very loud one, but loud enough and close enough to generate blind panic. The soldiers came out of the bunker, took position and fired their light machine guns straight into the unarmed crowd that was wedged into the narrow street. They shot to kill. Even after people turned to flee, the bullets pursued them, lodging themselves in receding backs and heads and legs. Some frightened soldiers turned their weapons on those watching from windows and balconies, and emptied their magazines into people and railings, walls and windowpanes. Into Miss Jebeen and her mother, Arifa.
Usman Abdullah’s coffin and coffin-bearers were hit. His coffin broke open and his re-slain corpse spilled on to the street, awkwardly folded, in a snow-white shroud, doubly dead among the dead and injured.
Some Kashmiris die twice too.
The shooting stopped only when the street was empty, and when all that remained were the bodies of the dead and wounded. And shoes. Thousands of shoes.
And the deafening slogan there was nobody left to chant:
Jis Kashmir ko khoon se seencha! Woh Kashmir hamara hai!
The Kashmir we have irrigated with our blood! That Kashmir is ours!
The post-massacre protocol was quick and efficient—perfected by practice. Within an hour the dead bodies had been removed to the morgue in the Police Control Room, and the wounded to hospital. The street was hosed down, the blood directed into the open drains. Shops reopened. Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)
Later it was established that the explosion had been caused by a car driving over an empty carton of Mango Frooti on the next street. Who was to blame? Who had left the packet of Mango Frooti (Fresh ’n’ Juicy) on the street? India or Kashmir? Or Pakistan? Who had driven over it? A tribunal was instituted to inquire into the causes of the massacre. The facts were never established. Nobody was blamed. This was Kashmir. It was Kashmir’s fault.
Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.
ALL THOSE WHO WATCHED Musa Yeswi bury his wife and daughter noticed how quiet he had been that day. He displayed no grief. He seemed withdrawn and distracted, as though he wasn’t really there. That could have been what eventually led to his arrest. Or it could have been his heartbeat. Perhaps it was too quick or too slow for an innocent civilian. At notorious checkposts soldiers sometimes put their ears to young men’s chests and listened to their heartbeats. There were rumors that some soldiers even carried stethoscopes. “This one’s heart is beating for Freedom,” they’d say, and that would be reason enough for the body that hosted the too-quick or too-slow heart to make a trip to Cargo, or Papa II, or the Shiraz Cinema—the most dreaded interrogation centers in the Valley.
Musa was not arrested at a checkpost. He was picked up from his home after the funeral. Over-quietness at the funeral of your wife and child would not have passed unnoticed in those days.
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At first of course everybody had been quiet, fearful. The funeral procession snaked its way through the drab, slushy little city in dead silence. The only sound was the slap-slap-slap of thousands of sockless shoes on the silver-wet road that led to the Mazar-e-Shohadda. Young men carried seventeen coffins on their shoulders. Seventeen plus one, that is, for the re-murdered Usman Abdullah, who obviously could not be entered twice in the books. So, seventeen-plus-one tin coffins wove through the streets, winking back at the winter sun. To someone looking down at the city from the ring of high mountains that surrounded it, the procession would have looked like a column of brown ants carrying seventeen-plus-one sugar crystals to their anthill to feed their queen. Perhaps to a student of history and human conflict, in relative terms that’s all the little procession really amounted to: a column of ants making off with some crumbs that had fallen from the high table. As wars go, this was only a small one. Nobody paid much attention. So it went on and on. So it folded and unfolded over decades, gathering people into its unhinged embrace. Its cruelties became as natural as the changing seasons, each came with its own unique range of scent and blossom, its own cycle of loss and renewal, disruption and normalcy, uprisings and elections.
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