Hunting was not Amrik Singh’s only passion. He had expensive tastes and a lifestyle that he couldn’t support on his salary. So he exploited other avenues of entrepreneurial potential that being on the winning side of a military occupation offered. In addition to his kidnapping and extortion concerns, he owned (in his wife’s name) a sawmill in the mountains and a furniture business in the Valley. He was as impetuously generous as he was violent, and distributed extravagant gifts of carved coffee tables and walnut-wood chairs to people he liked or needed. (Godzilla had a pair of bedside tables pressed on him.) Amrik Singh’s wife, Loveleen Kaur, was the fourth of five sisters—Tavleen, Harpreet, Gurpreet, Loveleen and Dimple—famous for their beauty—and two younger brothers. They belonged to the small community of Sikhs who had settled in the Valley centuries ago. Their father was a small farmer with little or no means to feed his large family. It was said that the family was so poor that when one of the girls tripped on her way to school and dropped the tiffin carrier that contained their packed lunch, the hungry sisters ate the spilled food straight off the pavement. As the girls grew up, all manner of men began to circle around them like hornets, with all manner of proposals, none of them for marriage. So their parents were more than delighted to be able to give away one of their daughters (for no dowry) to a Sikh from the mainland—an army officer, no less. After they were married Loveleen did not move into Amrik Singh’s officer’s quarters in the various camps he was posted to in and around Srinagar. Because, it was said (rumored), at work he had another woman, another “wife,” a colleague from the Central Reserve Police, an ACP Pinky who usually partnered him in field operations as well as in interrogation sessions at the camps. On weekends, when Amrik Singh visited his wife and their infant son in their first-floor flat in Jawahar Nagar, the little Sikh enclave in Srinagar, neighbors whispered about domestic violence and her muffled screams for help. Nobody dared to intervene.
Though Amrik Singh hunted down and eliminated militants ruthlessly, he actually regarded them—the best of them at least—with a sort of grudging admiration. He had been known to pay his respects at the graves of some, including a few whom he himself had killed. (One even got an unofficial gun salute.) The people he didn’t just disrespect but truly despised were human rights activists—mostly lawyers, journalists and newspaper editors. To him, they were vermin who spoiled and distorted the rules of engagement of the great game with their constant complaints and whining. Whenever Amrik Singh was given permission to pick one of them up or “neutralize” them (these “permissions” never came in the form of orders to kill, but usually as an absence of orders not to kill) he was never less than enthusiastic in carrying out his duties. The case of Jalib Qadri was different. His orders had been merely to intimidate and detain the man. Things had gone wrong. Jalib Qadri had made the mistake of being unafraid. Of talking back. Amrik Singh regretted having lost control of himself and regretted even more that he had had to eliminate his friend and fellow traveler, the Ikhwan Salim Gojri, as a consequence of that. They had shared good times and many grand escapades, he and Salim Gojri. He knew that had things been the other way around, Salim would surely have done the same thing. And he, Amrik Singh, would surely have understood. Or so he told himself. Of all the things he had done, killing Salim Gojri was the one thing that had given him pause. Salim Gojri was the only person in the world, his wife Loveleen included, for whom Amrik Singh had felt something that vaguely resembled love. In acknowledgment of this, when the moment came, he pulled the trigger on his friend himself.
He was not a brooder though, and got over things quickly. Sitting across the table from Musa, the Major was his usual self, cocky and sure of himself. He had been pulled out of the field and given a desk job, yes, but things had not begun to unravel for him yet. He did still go out on field trips occasionally, on operations in which he was familiar with the particular case history of a militant or OGW. He was reasonably sure he had contained the damage, and was out of the woods.
The “officers’ biscuits” and tea arrived. Musa heard the faint rattle of teacups on a metal tray before the bearer of the biscuits appeared from behind him. Musa and the bearer recognized each other at once, but their expressions remained passive and opaque. Amrik Singh watched them closely. The room ran out of air. Breathing became impossible. It had to be simulated.
Junaid Ahmed Shah was an Area Commander of the Hizb-ul-Mujahideen who had been captured a few months ago when he made that most common, but fatal, mistake of paying a midnight visit to his wife and infant son at their home in Sopore where soldiers lay in wait for him. He was a tall, lithe man, well known, much loved for his good looks and for his real, as well as apocryphal, acts of bravery. He had once had shoulder-length hair and a thick black beard. He was clean-shaven now, his hair close-cropped, Indian Army–style. His dull, sunken eyes looked out from deep, gray hollows. He was wearing worn tracksuit bottoms that ended halfway down his shins, woolen socks, army-issue canvas Keds and a scarlet, moth-eaten waiter’s jacket with brass buttons that was too small for him and made him look comical. The tremor in his hands caused the crockery to dance on the tray.
“All right, get lost now. What are you hanging around for?” Amrik Singh said to Junaid.
“Ji Jenaab! Jai Hind!”
Yes sir! Victory to India!
Junaid saluted and left the room. Amrik Singh turned to Musa, the picture of commiseration.
“What happened to you is something that ought not to happen to any human being. You must be in shock. Here, have a Krackjack. It’s very good for you. Fifty-fifty. Fifty percent sugar, fifty percent salt.”
Musa did not reply.
Amrik Singh finished his tea. Musa left his untouched.
“You have an engineering degree, is that not so?”
“No. Architecture.”
“I want to help you. You know the army is always looking for engineers. There is a lot of work. Very well paid. Border fencing, orphanage building, they are planning some recreation centers, gyms for young people, even this place needs doing up…I can get you some good contracts. We owe you that much at least.”
Musa, not looking up, tested the spike of a seashell with the tip of his index finger.
“Am I under arrest, or do I have your permission to leave?”
Since he wasn’t looking up, he did not see the translucent film of anger that dropped across Amrik Singh’s eyes, as quietly and quickly as a cat jumping off a low wall.
“You can go.”
Amrik Singh remained seated as Musa stood up and left the room. He rang a bell and told the man who answered it to escort Musa out.
—
Downstairs in the cinema lobby there was a torture-break. Tea was being served to the soldiers, poured out from big steaming kettles. There were cold samosas in iron buckets, two per head. Musa crossed the lobby, this time holding the gaze of one of the bound, beaten, bleeding boys whom he knew well. He knew the boy’s mother had been going from camp to camp, police station to police station, desperately looking for her son. That could have lasted a whole lifetime. At least some horrible good has come of this night, Musa thought.
He had almost walked out of the door when Amrik Singh appeared at the head of the stairs, beaming, exuding bonhomie, an entirely different person from the one Musa had left in the projection room. His voice boomed across the lobby.
“Arre huzoor! Ek cheez main bilkul bhool gaya tha!”
There’s something I completely forgot!
Everybody—torturers and torturees alike—turned their gaze on him. Wholly aware that he had the attention of his audience, Amrik Singh trotted athletically down the steps, like a joyful host saying goodbye to a guest whose visit he has greatly enjoyed. He hugged Musa affectionately and pressed on him a package he was carrying.
“This is for your father. Tell him I ordered it especially for him.”
It was a bottle of Red Stag whiskey.
The lobby fell silent. Everybody, the audience as well as the protagonists of the play that was unfolding, understood the script. If Musa spurned the gift, it would be a public declaration of war with Amrik Singh—which made him, Musa, as good as dead. If he accepted it, Amrik Singh would have outsourced the death sentence to the militants. Because he knew that the news would get out, and that every militant group, whatever else they disagreed about, agreed that death was the punishment for collaborators and friends of the Occupation. And whiskey-drinking—even by non-collaborators—was a declared un-Islamic activity.
Musa walked over to the snack bar and put the bottle of whiskey down on it.
“My father does not drink.”
“Arre, what is there to hide? There’s no shame in it. Of course your father drinks! You know that very well. I bought this bottle especially for him. Never mind, I’ll give it to him myself.”
Amrik Singh, still smiling, ordered his men to follow Musa and see that he got home safe. He was pleased with the way things had turned out.
DAWN WAS BREAKING. A hint of rose in a pigeon-gray sky. Musa walked home through the dead streets. The Gypsy followed him at a safe distance, the driver instructing checkpost after checkpost on his walkie-talkie to let Musa through.
He entered his home with snow on his shoulders. The cold of that was nothing compared to the cold that was gathering inside him. When they saw his face his parents and sisters knew better than to approach him or ask what had happened. He went straight back to his desk and resumed the letter he had been writing before the soldiers came for him. He wrote in Urdu. He wrote quickly, as though it was his last task, as though he was racing against the cold and had to finish it before the warmth seeped out of his body, perhaps forever.