Of all the sugar crystals carried by the ants that winter morning, the smallest crystal of course went by the name of Miss Jebeen.
Ants that were too nervous to join the procession lined the streets, standing on slippery banks of old brown snow, their arms crossed inside the warmth of their pherans, leaving their empty sleeves to flap in the breeze. Armless people at the heart of an armed insurrection. Those who were too scared to venture out watched from their windows and balconies (although they had been made acutely aware of the perils of that too). Each of them knew that they were being tracked in the gunsights of the soldiers who had taken position across the city—on roofs, bridges, boats, mosques, water towers. They had occupied hotels, schools, shops and even some homes.
It was cold that morning; for the first time in years the lake had frozen over and the forecast predicted more snow. Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.
In the graveyard, seventeen-plus-one graves had been readied. Neat, fresh, deep. The earth from each pit piled up next to it, a dark chocolate pyramid. An advance party had brought in the bloodstained metal stretchers on which the bodies had been returned to their families after the post-mortems. They were propped up, arranged around the trunks of trees, like bloodied steel petals of some gigantic flesh-eating mountain blossom.
As the procession turned in through the gates of the graveyard, a scrum of pressmen, quivering like athletes on their starting blocks, broke rank and rushed forward. The coffins were laid down, opened, arranged in a line on the icy earth. The crowd made room for the press respectfully. It knew that without the journalists and photographers the massacre would be erased and the dead would truly die. So the bodies were offered to them, in hope and anger. A banquet of death. Mourning relatives who had backed away were asked to return into frame. Their sorrow was to be archived. In the years to come, when the war became a way of life, there would be books and films and photo exhibitions curated around the theme of Kashmir’s grief and loss.
Musa would not be in any of those pictures.
On this occasion Miss Jebeen was by far the biggest draw. The cameras closed in on her, whirring and clicking like a worried bear. From that harvest of photographs, one emerged a local classic. For years it was reproduced in papers and magazines and on the covers of human rights reports that no one ever read, with captions like Blood in the Snow, Vale of Tears and Will the Sorrow Never End?
In the mainland, for obvious reasons, the photograph of Miss Jebeen was less popular. In the supermarket of sorrow, the Bhopal Boy, victim of the Union Carbide gas leak, remained well ahead of her in the charts. Several leading photographers claimed copyright of that famous photograph of the dead boy buried neck deep in a grave of debris, his staring, opaque eyes blinded by poison gas. Those eyes told the story of what had happened on that terrible night like nothing else could. They stared out of the pages of glossy magazines all over the world. In the end it didn’t matter of course. The story flared, then faded. The battle over the copyright of the photograph continued for years, almost as ferociously as the battle for compensation for the thousands of devastated victims of the gas leak.
—
The worried bear dispersed, and revealed Miss Jebeen intact, un-mauled, fast asleep. Her summer rose still in place.
As the bodies were lowered into their graves the crowd began to murmur its prayer.
Rabbish rahlee sadree; Wa yassir lee amri
Wahlul uqdatan min lisaanee; Yafqahoo qawlee
My Lord! Relieve my mind. And ease my task for me
And loose a knot from my tongue. That they may understand my saying
The smaller, hip-high children in the separate, segregated section for women, suffocated by the rough wool of their mothers’ garments, unable to see very much, barely able to breathe, conducted their own hip-level transactions: I’ll give you six bullet casings if you give me your dud grenade.
—
A lone woman’s voice climbed into the sky, eerily high, raw pain driven through it like a pike.
Ro rahi hai yeh zameen! Ro raha hai asmaan…
Another joined in and then another:
This earth, she weeps! The heavens too…
The birds stopped their twittering for a while and listened, beady-eyed, to humansong. Street dogs slouched past checkposts unchecked, their heartbeats rock steady. Kites and griffons circled the thermals, drifting lazily back and forth across the Line of Control, just to mock the tiny clot of humans gathered down below.
When the sky was full of keening, something ignited. Young men began to leap into the air, like flames kindled from smoldering embers. Higher and higher they jumped, as though the ground beneath their feet was sprung, a trampoline. They wore their anguish like armor, their anger slung across their bodies like ammunition belts. At that moment, perhaps because they were thus armed, or because they had decided to embrace a life of death, or because they knew they were already dead, they became invincible.
The soldiers who surrounded the Mazar-e-Shohadda had clear instructions to hold their fire, no matter what. Their informers (brothers, cousins, fathers, uncles, nephews), who mingled with the crowd and shouted slogans as passionately as everybody else (and even meant them), had clear instructions to submit photographs and if possible videos of each young man who, carried on the tide of fury, had leapt into the air and turned himself into a flame.
Soon each of them would hear a knock on his door, or be taken aside at a checkpoint.
Are you so-and-so? Son of so-and-so? Employed at such-and-such?
Often the threat went no further than that—just that bland, perfunctory inquiry. In Kashmir, throwing a man’s own bio-data at him was sometimes enough to change the course of his life.
And sometimes it wasn’t.
THEY CAME FOR MUSA at their customary visiting hour—four in the morning. He was awake, sitting at his desk writing a letter. His mother was in the next room. He could hear her crying and the comforting murmurs of her sisters and relatives. Miss Jebeen’s beloved stuffed (and leaking) green hippopotamus—with a V-shaped smile and a pink patchwork heart—was in his usual place, propped up against a bolster waiting for his little mother and his usual bedtime story. (Akh daleela wann…) Musa heard the vehicle approach. From his first-floor window he saw it turn into the lane and stop outside his house. He felt nothing, neither anger nor trepidation, as he watched the soldiers get out of the armored Gypsy. His father, Showkat Yeswi (Godzilla to Musa and his friends), was awake too, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the front room. He was a building contractor who worked closely with the Military Engineering Services, supplying building materials and doing turnkey projects for them. He had sent his son to Delhi to study architecture in the hope that he would help him expand his line of business. But when the tehreek began in 1990, and Godzilla continued to work with the army, Musa shunned him altogether. Torn between filial duty and the guilt of enjoying what he saw as the spoils of collaboration, Musa found it harder and harder to live under the same roof as his father.
Showkat Yeswi seemed to have been expecting the soldiers. He did not appear alarmed. “Amrik Singh called. He wants to talk to you. It’s nothing, don’t worry. He will release you before daylight.”
Musa did not reply. He did not even glance at Godzilla, his disgust apparent in the way he held his shoulders and in the erectness of his back. He walked out of the front door escorted by two armed men on either side of him and got into the vehicle. He was not handcuffed or headbagged. The Gypsy slid through the slick, frozen streets. It had begun to snow again.