She couldn’t understand. Could there be a more inappropriate response to what she had just learned? She hadn’t thought of this verse since she was five years old. Why now?
Perhaps it was raining inside her head. Perhaps it was the survival strategy of a mind that might shut down if it was foolish enough to attempt to make sense of the intricate fretwork that connected Musa’s nightmares to hers.
There was no tour guide on hand to tell her that in Kashmir nightmares were promiscuous. That they were unfaithful to their owners, they cartwheeled wantonly into other people’s dreams, they acknowledged no precincts, they were the greatest ambush artists of all. No fortification, no fence-building could keep them in check. In Kashmir the only thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage them like old enemies. She would learn that of course. Soon.
She sat on the upholstered, built-in bench in the entrance porch of the houseboat and watched her second sunset. A gloomy nightfish (no relative of the nightmare) rose from the bottom of the lake and swallowed the reflection of the mountains in the water. Whole. Gulrez was laying the table for dinner (for two, clearly he knew something) when Musa arrived suddenly, quietly, entering from the back of the boat.
“Salaam.”
“Salaam.”
“You came.”
“Of course.”
“How are you? How was the journey?”
“OK. You?”
“OK.”
The rhyme in Tilo’s head swelled into a symphony.
“I’m sorry I’m so late.”
He didn’t give any further explanation. Other than looking a little gaunt, he hadn’t changed very much, and yet he was almost unrecognizable. He had grown a stubble that was almost a beard. His eyes seemed to have lightened and darkened at once, as though they’d been washed, and one color had faded and the other had not. His browngreen irises were circumscribed with a ring of black that Tilo did not remember. She saw that his outline—the shape he made in the world—had grown indistinct, smudged, somehow. He merged into his surroundings even more than he used to. It had nothing to do with the ubiquitous brown Kashmiri pheran that flapped around him. When he took off his wool cap Tilo saw that his hair had thick streaks of silver. He noticed that she noticed and ran self-conscious fingers through his hair. Strong, horse-drawing fingers, with a callus on the trigger finger. He was the same age as her. Thirty-one.
The silence between them swelled and subsided like the bellows of an accordion playing a tune that only they could hear. He knew that she knew that he knew that she knew. That’s how it was between them.
—
Gulrez brought in a tray of tea. With him too, there was no great exchange of greetings, although it was clear that there was familiarity, even love. Musa called him Gul-kak and sometimes “Mout” and had brought him eardrops. The eardrops broke the ice as only eardrops can.
“He has an ear infection, and he’s scared. Terrified,” Musa explained.
“Is he in pain? He seemed fine all day.”
“Not of the pain, there’s no pain. Of being shot. He says he can’t hear properly and he’s worried that he might not hear them at the checkposts when they say ‘Stop!’ Sometimes they first let you go through and then stop you. So if you don’t hear that…”
Gulrez, sensing the strain (and the love) in the room and alert to the fact that he could play a part in easing it, knelt on the floor theatrically, and rested his cheek on Musa’s lap with a big cauliflower ear turned upwards to receive eardrops. After ministering to both cauliflowers and stopping them up with wads of cotton wool, Musa gave him the bottle.
“Keep it carefully. When I’m not here ask her, she’ll do it,” he said. “She’s my friend.”
Gulrez, much as he coveted the tiny bottle with its plastic nozzle, much as he felt its rightful place was in his See! Buy! Fly! Visitors’ Book, entrusted it to Tilo and beamed at her. For a moment they became a spontaneously constituted family. Father bear, mother bear, baby bear.
Baby bear was by far the happiest. For dinner he produced five meat dishes: gushtaba, rista, martzwangan korma, shami kebab, chicken yakhni.
“So much food…” Tilo said.
“Cow, goat, chicken, lamb…only slaves eat like this,” Musa said, heaping an impolite amount on to his plate. “Our stomachs are graveyards.”
Tilo would not believe that baby bear had cooked the feast single-handedly.
“He was talking to brinjals and playing with the kittens all day. I didn’t see him doing any cooking.”
“He must have done it before you came. He’s a wonderful cook. His father is a professional, a waza, from Godzilla’s village.”
“Why is he here all alone?”
“He’s not alone. There are eyes and ears and hearts around him. But he can’t live in the village…it’s too dangerous for him. Gul-kak is what we call a ‘mout’—he lives in his own world, with his own rules. A bit like you, in some ways.” Musa looked up at Tilo, serious, unsmiling.
“You mean a fool, a village fool?” Tilo looked back at him, not smiling either.
“I mean a special person. A blessed person.”
“Blessed by whom? Twisted fucking way to bless someone.”
“Blessed with a beautiful soul. Here we revere our maet.”
It had been a while since Musa had heard a laconic profanity of this nature, especially from a woman. It landed lightly, like a cricket on his constricted heart, and stirred the memory of why, and how and how much, he had loved Tilo. He tried to return that thought to the locked section of the archive it had come out of.
“We nearly lost him two years ago. There was a cordon-and-search operation in his village. The men were asked to come out and line up in the fields. Gul ran out to greet the soldiers, insisting they were the Pakistani army, come to liberate them. He was singing, shouting Jeevey! Jeevey! Pakistan! He wanted to kiss their hands. They shot him in his thigh, beat him with rifle butts and left him bleeding in the snow. After that incident he became hysterical, and would try to run away whenever he saw a soldier, which is of course the most dangerous thing to do. So I brought him to Srinagar to live with us. But now since there’s hardly anybody in our home—I don’t live there any more—he didn’t want to stay there either. I got him this job. This boat belongs to a friend; he’s safe here, he doesn’t need to go out. He just has to cook for the few visitors that come, hardly any do. Provisions are delivered to him. The only danger is that the boat is so old it might sink.”
“Seriously?”
Musa smiled.
“No. It’s quite safe.”
The house with “hardly anybody” in it took its place at the dinner table, a third guest, with the ravenous appetite of a slave.
“Almost all the maet in Kashmir have been killed. They were the first to be killed, because they don’t know how to obey orders. Maybe that’s why we need them. To teach us how to be free.”
“Or how to be killed?”
“Here it’s the same thing. Only the dead are free.”
Musa looked at Tilo’s hand resting on the table. He knew it better than he knew his own. She still wore the silver ring he had given her, years ago, when he was someone else. There was still ink on her middle finger.
—
Gulrez, keenly aware that he was being spoken about, hovered around the table, refilling glasses and plates, with a mewling kitten in each pocket of his pheran. During a break in the conversation, he introduced them as Agha and Khanum. The streaky gray one was Agha. The black-and-white harlequin was Khanum.
“And Sultan?” Musa asked him with a smile. “How is he?”
As if on cue, Gulrez’s face clouded over. His reply was a long profanity in a mixture of Kashmiri and Urdu. Tilo understood only the last sentence: Arre uss bewakoof ko agar yahan mintree ke saath rehna nahi aata tha, to phir woh saala is duniya mein aaya hi kyuun tha?
If that fool didn’t know how to live here with the military, why did he have to come into this world in the first place?