Autumn in the Valley was the season of immodest abundance. The sun slanted down on the lavender haze of zaffran crocuses in bloom. Orchards were heavy with fruit, the Chinar trees were on fire. Tilo’s co-passengers, most of them Kashmiri, could disaggregate the breeze and tell not merely the scent of apples from the scent of pears and ripe paddy that wafted through the bus windows, but whose apples, whose pears and whose ripe paddy they were driving past. There was another scent they all knew well. The smell of dread. It soured the air and turned their bodies to stone.
As the noisy, rattling bus with its still, silent passengers drove deeper into the Valley the tension grew more tangible. Every fifty meters, on either side of the road, there was a heavily armed soldier, alert and dangerously tense. There were soldiers in the fields, deep inside orchards, on bridges and culverts, in shops and marketplaces, on rooftops, each covering the other, in a grid that stretched all the way up into the mountains. In every part of the legendary Valley of Kashmir, whatever people might be doing—walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home—they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier. And because they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier, whatever they might be doing—walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home—they were a legitimate target.
At every checkpoint the road was blocked with movable horizontal barriers mounted with iron spikes that could shred a tire to ribbons. At each checkpost the bus had to stop, all the passengers had to disembark and line up with their bags to be searched. Soldiers riffled through the luggage on the bus roof. The passengers kept their eyes lowered. At the sixth or perhaps the seventh checkpost, an armored Gypsy with slits for windows was parked on the side of the road. After conferring with a hidden person in the Gypsy, a gleaming, strutting young officer pulled three young men out of the passenger line-up—You, You and You. They were pushed into an army truck. They went without demur. The passengers kept their eyes lowered.
By the time the bus arrived in Srinagar, the light was dying.
In those days the little city of Srinagar died with the light. The shops closed, the streets emptied.
At the bus stop a man sidled up to Tilo and asked her her name. From then on, she was passed from hand to hand. An autorickshaw took her from the bus stand to the Boulevard. She crossed the lake in a shikara on which there was no sitting option, only a lounging one. So she lounged on the bright, floral cushions, a honeymooner without a husband. It was to make up for that, she thought, that the bright flanges of the boatman’s oars which pushed through the weeds were heart-shaped. The lake was deadly quiet. The rhythmic sound of oars in the water might well have been the uneasy heartbeat of the Valley.
Plif
Plif
Plif
—
The houseboats anchored next to each other cheek by jowl on the opposite shore—HB Shaheen, HB Jannat, HB Queen Victoria, HB Derbyshire, HB Snow View, HB Desert Breeze, HB Zam-Zam, HB Gulshan, HB New Gulshan, HB Gulshan Palace, HB Mandalay, HB Clifton, HB New Clifton—were dark and empty.
HB, the boatman told Tilo when she asked, stood for House Boat.
HB Shaheen was the smallest and shabbiest of them all. As the shikara drew up, a little man, lost inside his worn brown pheran that almost touched his ankles, came out to greet Tilo. Later she learned his name was Gulrez. He greeted her as though he knew her well, as though she had lived there all her life and had just returned from buying provisions in the market. His large head and oddly thin neck rested on broad, sturdy shoulders. As he led Tilo through the small dining room and down a narrow carpeted corridor to the bedroom, she heard kittens mewling. He threw a sparkling smile over his shoulder, like a proud father, his emerald, wizard eyes shining.
The cramped room was only slightly larger than the double bed covered with an embroidered counterpane. On the bedside table there was a flowered plastic tray with a filigreed bell-metal water jug, two colored glasses and a small CD player. The threadbare carpet on the floor was patterned, the cupboard doors were crudely carved, the wooden ceiling was honeycombed, the waste-paper bin was intricately patterned papier maché. Tilo looked for a space that was not patterned, embroidered, carved or filigreed, to rest her eyes on. When she didn’t find one, a tide of anxiety welled up in her. She opened the wooden windows but they looked directly on to the closed wooden windows of the next houseboat a few feet away. Empty cigarette packets and cigarette stubs floated in the few feet of water that separated them. She put her bag down and went out to the porch, lit a cigarette and watched the glassy surface of the lake turn silver as the first stars appeared in the sky. The snow on the mountains glowed for a while, like phosphorus, even after darkness had fallen.
She waited on the boat the whole of the next day, watching Gulrez dust the undusty furniture and talk to purple brinjals and big-leaved haakh in his vegetable garden on the bank just behind the boat. After clearing away a simple lunch, he showed her his collection of things that he kept in a big yellow airport duty-free shopping bag that said See! Buy! Fly! He laid them out on the dining table one by one. It was his version of a Visitors’ Book: an empty bottle of Polo aftershave lotion, a range of old airline boarding passes, a pair of small binoculars, a pair of sunglasses from which one lens had fallen out, a well-thumbed Lonely Planet guidebook, a Qantas toilet bag, a small torch, a bottle of herbal mosquito repellent, a bottle of suntan lotion, a silver-foil card of expired diarrhea pills, and a pair of blue Marks & Spencer ladies’ knickers stuffed into an old cigarette tin. He giggled and made his eyes sly as he rolled the knickers into a soft cigar and put them back in the tin. Tilo searched her sling bag and added a small strawberry-shaped eraser and a vial that used to contain clutch-pencil leads to the collection. Gulrez unscrewed the little cap of the vial and screwed it back on, thrilled. After contemplating the matter for a while, he put the eraser in the plastic bag and pocketed the vial. He went out of the room and came back with a postcard-sized print of a photograph of himself holding the kittens in the palms of his hands that the last visitor on the boat had given him. He gave it to Tilo formally, holding it out with both hands as though it were a certificate of merit being awarded to her. Tilo accepted it with a bow. Their barter was complete.
In a conversation in which her hesitant Hindi encountered his halting Urdu, Tilo figured out that the “Muzz-kak” that Gulrez kept referring to was Musa. He brought out a clipping of an Urdu newspaper which had published photographs of all those who had been shot on the same day as Miss Jebeen and her mother. He kissed the cutting several times over, pointing to a little girl and a young woman. Gradually Tilo pieced together the semblance of a narrative: the woman was Musa’s wife and the child was their daughter. The photos were so badly printed it was impossible to decipher their features and tell what they looked like. To make sure Tilo understood his meaning, Gulrez laid his head down on a pillow made of his palms, closed his eyes like a child and then pointed to the sky.
They’ve gone to heaven.
Tilo didn’t know that Musa was married.
He hadn’t told her.
Should he have?
Why should he have?
And why should she mind?
It was she who had walked away from him.
But she did mind.
Not because he was married, but because he hadn’t told her.
For the rest of the day a Malayalam nonsense rhyme looped endlessly in her head. It had been the monsoon anthem of an army of tiny, knickered children—she, one among them—who stomped in mud puddles and streaked down the creepered, overgreened riverbank in the pouring rain, shrieking it.
Dum! Dum! Pattalam
Saarinde veetil kalyanam
Aana pindam choru
Atta varthadu upperi
Kozhi theetam chamandi
Bang! Bang! Here’s the army band
A wedding in the house of the lord of the land
Elephant dung rice!
Fried millipedes, nice!
Minced hen-shit for spice!