“Tell me the other story…the one that’s horrible and beautiful…the love story. Tell me the real story.”
Tilo did not understand why what she said made Musa hold her tighter and turned his eyes bright with what might have been tears. She didn’t know what he meant when he murmured “Akh daleela wann…”
And then, holding her as though his life depended on it, Musa told her about Jebeen, about how she insisted on being called Miss Jebeen, about her specific requirements from bedtime stories and all her other naughtinesses. He told her about Arifa and how he first met her—in a stationery shop in Srinagar:
“I’d had a huge fight with Godzie that day. Over my new boots. They were lovely boots—Gul-kak wears them now. Anyway…I was going out to buy some stationery, and I was wearing them. Godzie told me to take them off and wear normal shoes, because young men wearing good boots were often arrested as militants—those days that was evidence enough. Anyway, I refused to listen to him, so finally he said, ‘Do what you want, but mark my words, those boots will bring trouble.’ He was right…they did bring trouble—big trouble, but not the kind he was expecting. The stationery shop I used to go to, JK Stationery, was in Lal Chowk, the center of the city. I was inside when a grenade exploded on the street just outside. A militant had thrown it at a soldier. My eardrums nearly burst. Everything inside the shop shattered, there was glass everywhere, chaos in the market, everyone screaming. The soldiers went crazy—obviously. They smashed up all the shops, came in and beat everyone in sight. I was on the floor. They kicked me, beat me with rifle butts. I remember just lying there, trying to protect my skull, watching my blood spreading on the floor. I was hurt, not too badly, but I was too scared to move. A dog was staring at me. He seemed quite sympathetic. When I got over the initial shock, I felt a weight on my feet. I remembered my new boots and wondered if they were OK. As soon as I thought it was safe I lifted my head slowly, as carefully as I could, to take a look. And I saw this beautiful face resting on them. It was like waking up in hell and finding an angel on my shoe. It was Arifa. She too was frozen, too scared to move. But she was absolutely calm. She didn’t smile, didn’t move her head. She just looked at me and said, ‘Asal boot’—‘Nice boots’—I couldn’t believe the coolness of that. No wailing, screaming, sobbing, crying—just absolutely cool. We both laughed. She had just done a degree in veterinary medicine. My mother was shocked when I said I wanted to get married. She thought I never would. She had given up on me.”
It was possible for Tilo and Musa to have this strange conversation about a third loved one, because they were concurrently sweethearts and ex-sweethearts, lovers and ex-lovers, siblings and ex-siblings, classmates and ex-classmates. Because they trusted each other so peculiarly that they knew, even if they were hurt by it, that whoever it was that the other person loved had to be worth loving. In matters of the heart, they had a virtual forest of safety nets.
Musa showed Tilo a photograph of Miss Jebeen and Arifa that he carried in his wallet. Arifa wore a pearl-gray pheran with silver embroidery and a white hijab. Miss Jebeen was holding her mother’s hand. She was dressed in a denim jumpsuit with an embroidered heart on its pinafore. A white hijab was pinned around her smiling, apple-cheeked face. Tilo looked at the photograph for a long time before she gave it back. She saw Musa suddenly look drawn and haggard. But he recovered his poise in a while. He told her about how Arifa and Miss Jebeen had died. About Amrik Singh and the murder of Jalib Qadri, and the string of murders that followed. About his ominous apology at the Shiraz.
“I’ll never take what happened to my family personally. But I’ll never not take it personally. Because that is important too.”
They talked into the night. Hours later, Tilo circled back to the photograph.
“Did she like wearing a headscarf?”
“Arifa?”
“No, your daughter.”
Musa shrugged. “It’s the custom. Our custom.”
“I didn’t know you were such a customs man. So if I had agreed to marry you, you’d have wanted me to wear one?”
“No, Babajaana. If you had agreed to marry me, I’d have ended up wearing a hijab and you would have been running around the underground with a gun.”
Tilo laughed out loud.
“And who would have been in my army?”
“I don’t know. No humans for sure.”
“A moth squadron and a mongoose brigade…”
Tilo told Musa about her boring job and her exciting life in her storeroom near the Nizamuddin dargah. About the rooster she had drawn on her wall—“So weird. Maybe Sultan visited me telepathically—is that a word?” (It was the pre-mobile-phone era, so she didn’t have a photograph to show him.) She described her neighbor, the fake sex-hakim with waxed mustaches who had endless queues of patients outside his door, and her friends, the tramps and mendicants she drank tea with on the street every morning, who all believed she worked for a drug lord.
“I laugh, but I don’t deny it. I leave it ambiguous.”
“Why’s that? That’s dangerous.”
“No. Opposite. It’s free security for me. They think I have gangster protection. No one bothers me. Let’s read a poem before we sleep.” It was an old habit, from their college days. One of them would open the book at a random page. The other would read the poem. It often turned out to have uncanny significance for them and the particular moment they were living through. Poetry roulette. She scrambled out of bed and returned with a slim, worn volume of Osip Mandelstam. Musa opened the book. Tilo read:
I was washing at night in the courtyard,
Harsh stars shone in the sky.
Starlight, like salt on an ax-head—
The rain-butt was brim-full and frozen.
“What’s a rain-butt? Don’t know…must check.”
The gates are locked,
And the earth in all conscience is bleak.
There’s scarcely anything more basic and pure
Than truth’s clean canvas.
A star melts, like salt, in the barrel
And the freezing water is blacker,
Death cleaner, misfortune saltier,
And the earth more truthful, more awful.
“Another Kashmiri poet.”
“Russian Kashmiri,” Tilo said. “He died in a prison camp, during Stalin’s Gulag. His ode to Stalin wasn’t considered sincere enough.”
She regretted reading the poem.
—
They slept fitfully. Before dawn, still half asleep, Tilo heard Musa splashing in the bathroom again, washing, brushing his teeth (with her toothbrush of course). He came out with his hair slicked down and put on his cap and pheran. She watched him say his prayers. She had never seen him do that before. She sat up in bed. It did not distract him. When he was done he came to her and sat on the edge of the bed.
“Does it worry you?”
“Should it?”
“It’s a big change…”
“Yes. No. Just makes me…think.”
“We can’t win this with just our bodies. We have to recruit our souls too.”
She lit two more cigarettes.
“You know what the hardest thing for us is? The hardest thing to fight? Pity. It’s so easy for us to pity ourselves…such terrible things have happened to our people…in every single household something terrible has happened…but self-pity is so…so debilitating. So humiliating. More than Azadi, now it’s a fight for dignity. And the only way we can hold on to our dignity is to fight back. Even if we lose. Even if we die. But for that we as a people—as an ordinary people—have to become a fighting force…an army. To do that we have to simplify ourselves, standardize ourselves, reduce ourselves…everyone has to think the same way, want the same thing…we have to do away with our complexities, our differences, our absurdities, our nuances…we have to make ourselves as single-minded…as monolithic…as stupid…as the army we face. But they’re professionals, and we are just people. This is the worst part of the Occupation…what it makes us do to ourselves. This reduction, this standardization, this stupidification…Is that a word?”