It was a letter to Miss Jebeen.
Babajaana
Do you think I’m going to miss you? You are wrong. I will never miss you, because you will always be with me.
You wanted me to tell you real stories, but I don’t know what is real any more. What used to be real sounds like a silly fairy story now—the kind I used to tell you, the kind you wouldn’t tolerate. What I know for sure is only this: in our Kashmir the dead will live forever; and the living are only dead people, pretending.
Next week we were going to try and make you your own ID card. As you know, jaana, our cards are more important than we ourselves are now. That card is the most valuable thing anyone can have. It is more valuable than the most beautifully woven carpet, or the softest, warmest shawl, or the biggest garden, or all the cherries and all the walnuts from all the orchards in our Valley. Can you imagine that? My ID card number is M 108672J. You told me it was a lucky number because it has an M for Miss and a J for Jebeen. If it is, then it will bring me to you and your Ammijaan quickly. So get ready to do your homework in heaven. What sense would it make to you if I told you that there were a hundred thousand people at your funeral? You who could only count to fifty-nine? Count did I say? I meant shout—you who could only shout to fifty-nine. I hope that wherever you are you are not shouting. You must learn to talk softly, like a lady, at least sometimes. How shall I explain one hundred thousand to you? Such a huge number. Shall we try and think about it seasonally? In spring think of how many leaves there are on the trees, and how many pebbles you can see in the streams once the ice has melted. Think of how many red poppies blossom in the meadows. That should give you a rough idea of what a hundred thousand means in spring. In autumn it is as many Chinar leaves as crackled under our feet in the university campus the day I took you for a walk (and you were angry with the cat who wouldn’t trust you and refused the piece of bread you offered him. We’re all becoming a bit like that cat, jaana. We can’t trust anyone. The bread they offer us is dangerous because it turns us into slaves and fawning servants. You’d probably be angry with us all). Anyway. We were talking about a number. One hundred thousand. In winter we’ll have to think of the snowflakes falling from the sky. Remember how we used to count them? How you used to try and catch them? That many people is a hundred thousand. At your funeral the crowd covered the ground like snow. Can you picture it now? Good. And that’s only the people. I’m not going to tell you about the sloth bear that came down the mountain, the hangul that watched from the woods, the snow leopard that left its tracks in the snow and the kites that circled in the sky, supervising everything. On the whole, it was quite a spectacle. You’d have been happy, you love crowds, I know. You were always going to be a city girl. That much was clear from the beginning. Now it’s your turn. Tell me about—
Mid-sentence he lost the race against the cold. He stopped writing, folded the letter and put it in his pocket. He never completed it, but he always carried it with him.
He knew he didn’t have much time. He would have to pre-empt Amrik Singh’s next move, and quickly. Life as he once knew it was over. He knew that Kashmir had swallowed him and he was now part of its entrails.
He spent the day settling what affairs he could—paying the cigarette bills he had accumulated, destroying papers, taking the few things he loved or needed. The next morning when the Yeswi household woke up to its grief, Musa was gone. He had left a note for one of his sisters about the beaten boy he had seen in the Shiraz with his mother’s name and address.
Thus began his life underground. A life that lasted precisely nine months—like a pregnancy. Except that in a manner of speaking at least, its consequence was the opposite of a pregnancy. It ended in a kind of death, instead of a kind of life.
—
During his days as a fugitive, Musa moved from place to place, never the same place on consecutive nights. There were always people around him—in forest hideouts, in businessmen’s plush homes, in shops, in dungeons, in storerooms—wherever the tehreek was welcomed with love and solidarity. He learned everything about weapons, where to buy them, how to move them, where to hide them, how to use them. He developed real calluses in the places where his father had imagined phantom ones—on his knees and elbows, on his trigger finger. He carried a gun, but never used it. With his fellow travelers, who were all much younger than him, he shared the love that hot-blooded men who would gladly give their lives for each other share. Their lives were short. Many of them were killed, jailed or tortured until they lost their minds. Others took their place. Musa survived purge after purge. His ties to his old life were gradually (and deliberately) erased. Nobody knew who he really was. Nobody asked. His family did not know that. He did not belong to any one particular organization. In the heart of a filthy war, up against a bestiality that is hard to imagine, he did what he could to persuade his comrades to hold on to a semblance of humanity, to not turn into the very thing they abhorred and fought against. He did not always succeed. Nor did he always fail. He refined the art of merging into the background, of disappearing in a crowd, of mumbling and dissembling, of burying the secrets he knew so deep that he forgot he knew them. He learned the art of ennui, of enduring as well as inflicting boredom. He hardly ever spoke. At night, fed up with the regime of silence, his organs murmured to each other in the language of night crickets. His spleen contacted his kidney. His pancreas whispered across the silent void to his lungs:
Hello
Can you hear me?
Are you still there?
—
He grew colder, and quieter. The price on his head went up very quickly—from one lakh to three lakhs. When nine months had gone by, Tilo came to Kashmir.
TILO WAS WHERE SHE WAS most evenings, at a tea stall in one of the narrow lanes around the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, on her way back home from work, when a young man approached her, confirmed that her name was S. Tilottama, and handed her a note. It said: Ghat Number 33, HB Shaheen, Dal Lake. Please come 20th. There was no signature, only a tiny pencil sketch of a horse’s head in one corner. When she looked up, the messenger had vanished.
She took two weeks off from her job in an architecture firm in Nehru Place, caught a train to Jammu, and an early-morning bus from Jammu to Srinagar. Musa and she had not been in touch for a while. She went, because that was how it was between them.
She had never been to Kashmir.
It was late afternoon when the bus emerged from the long tunnel that bored through the mountains, the only link between India and Kashmir.