—
Those same opaque eyes now looked at Musa across a desk full of paperweights in the projection room of the Shiraz. It was an extraordinary sight—Amrik Singh sitting at a desk. It was clear that he had absolutely no idea what to do with it other than use it as a coffee table for mementoes. It was placed in such a way that he had only to lean back in his chair and peer through the tiny rectangular opening in the wall—once the projectionist’s viewing portal, now a spyhole—to keep an eye on whatever was happening in the main hall. The interrogation cells led off from there, through the doorways over which red, neon-lit signs said (and sometimes meant): EXIT. The screen still had an old-fashioned red velvet tasseled curtain—the kind that used to go up in the old days to piped music: “Popcorn” or “Baby Elephant Walk.” The cheaper seats in the stalls had been removed and piled up in a heap in a corner, to make space for an indoor badminton court where stressed-out soldiers could let off steam. Even at this hour, the faint thwack thwack of a shuttlecock meeting a racquet made its way into Amrik Singh’s office.
“I brought you here to offer my apologies and my deepest personal condolences for what has happened.”
The corrosion in Kashmir ran so deep that Amrik Singh was genuinely unaware of the irony of picking up a man whose wife and child had just been shot and bringing him forcibly, under armed guard, to an interrogation center at four in the morning, only in order to offer his commiseration.
Musa knew that Amrik Singh was a chameleon and that underneath his turban he was a “Mona”—he didn’t have the long hair of a Sikh. He had committed that ultimate sacrilege against the Sikh canon by cutting his hair many years ago. Musa had heard him boast to Godzilla about how when he was out on a counter-insurgency operation he could pass himself off as a Hindu, a Sikh or a Punjabi-speaking Pakistani Muslim, depending on what the operation demanded. He guffawed as he described how, in order to identify and flush out “sympathizers,” he and his men dressed in salwar kameez—“Khan Suits”—and knocked on villagers’ doors in the dead of night, pretending to be militants from Pakistan asking for shelter. If they were welcomed, the next day the villagers would be arrested as OGWs (overground workers).
“How are unarmed villagers supposed to turn away a group of men with guns who knock on their doors in the middle of the night? Regardless of whether they are militants or military?” Musa could not help asking.
“Oh, we have ways of assessing the warmth of the welcome,” Amrik Singh said. “We have our own thermometers.”
Maybe. But you have no understanding of the depths of Kashmiri duplicity, Musa thought but did not say. You have no idea how a people like us, who have survived a history and a geography such as ours, have learned to drive our pride underground. Duplicity is the only weapon we have. You don’t know how radiantly we smile when our hearts are broken. How ferociously we can turn on those we love while we graciously embrace those whom we despise. You have no idea how warmly we can welcome you when all we really want is for you to go away. Your thermometer is quite useless here.
That was one way of looking at it. On the other hand, it may have been Musa who was, at that point in time, the naive one. Because Amrik Singh certainly had the full measure of the dystopia he operated in—one whose populace had no borders, no loyalties and no limits to the depths to which it would fall. As for the Kashmiri psyche, if there was indeed such a thing, Amrik Singh was seeking neither understanding nor insight. For him it was a game, a hunt, in which his quarry’s wits were pitted against his own. He saw himself more as a sportsman than a soldier. Which made for a sunny soul. Major Amrik Singh was a gambler, a daredevil officer, a deadly interrogator and a cheery, cold-blooded killer. He greatly enjoyed his work and was constantly on the lookout for ways to up the entertainment. He was in touch with certain militants who would occasionally tune into his wireless frequency, or he into theirs, and they would taunt each other like schoolboys. “Arre yaar, what am I but a humble travel agent?” he liked to say to them. “For you jihadis Kashmir is just a transit point, isn’t it? Your real destination is jannat where your houris are waiting for you. I’m only here to facilitate your journey.” He referred to himself as Jannat Express. And if he was speaking English (which usually meant he was drunk), he translated that as Paradise Express.
One of his legendary lines was: Dekho mian, mein Bharat Sarkar ka lund hoon, aur mera kaam hai chodna.
Look, brother, I am the Government of India’s dick and it’s my job to fuck people.
In his relentless quest for amusement, he was known to have released a militant whom he had tracked down and captured with the greatest difficulty, only because he wanted to relive the exhilaration of recapturing him. It was in keeping with that spirit, with the perverse rubric of his personal hunting manual, that he had summoned Musa to the Shiraz to apologize to him. Over the last few months Amrik Singh had, correctly perhaps, identified Musa as a potentially worthy antagonist, someone who was his polar opposite and yet had the nerve and the intelligence to raise the stakes and perhaps change the nature of the hunt to a point where it would be hard to tell who was the hunter and who the hunted. For this reason Amrik Singh was extremely upset when he learned of the death of Musa’s wife and daughter. He wanted Musa to know that he had nothing to do with it. That it was an unexpected and, as far as he was concerned, below-the-belt blow, never part of his plan. In order for the hunt to go on, he needed to clarify this to his quarry.