“It just became one.”
“This stupidification…this idiotification…if and when we achieve it…will be our salvation. It will make us impossible to defeat. First it will be our salvation and then…after we win…it will be our nemesis. First Azadi. Then annihilation. That’s the pattern.”
Tilo said nothing.
“Are you listening?”
“Of course.”
“I’m being so profound and you’re not saying anything.”
She looked up at him and pressed her thumb into the tiny inverted “v” between his chipped front teeth. He held her hand and kissed her silver ring.
“It makes me happy that you still wear it.”
“It’s stuck. I can’t take it off even if I want to.”
Musa smiled. They smoked in silence and when they were done she took the ashtray to the window, dropped the stubs into the water to join the other floating stubs and looked up at the sky before she returned to bed.
“That was a filthy thing I just did. Sorry.”
Musa kissed her forehead and stood up.
“You’re leaving?”
“Yes. A boat’s coming for me. With a cargo of spinach and melons and carrots and lotus stems. I’ll be a Haenz…selling my produce in the floating market. I’ll undercut the competition, bargain ruthlessly with housewives. And through the chaos I’ll make my exit.”
“When will I see you?”
“Someone will come for you—a woman called Khadija. Trust her. Go with her. You’ll be traveling. I want you to see everything, know everything. You’ll be safe.”
“When will I see you?”
“Sooner than you think. I’ll find you. Khuda Hafiz, Babajaana.”
And he was gone.
—
In the morning Gulrez gave her a Kashmiri breakfast. Chewy lavasa rotis with butter and honey. Kahwa with no sugar, but with shredded almonds that she had to scoop up from the bottom of her cup. Agha and Khanum displayed deplorable manners, skittering up and down the dining table, knocking around the cutlery, spilling the salt. At ten sharp, Khadija arrived with her two young sons. They crossed the lake in a shikara and drove downtown in a red Maruti 800.
For the next ten days Tilo traveled through the Kashmir Valley, each day accompanied by a different set of companions, sometimes men, sometimes women, sometimes families with children. It was the first of many trips she made over several years. She traveled by bus, in shared taxis, and sometimes by car. She visited the tourist spots made famous by Hindi cinema—Gulmarg, Sonmarg, Pahalgam and the Betaab Valley, which was actually named after the film that was shot there. The hotels where film stars used to stay were empty, the honeymoon cottages (where, her traveling companions joked, their oppressors had been conceived) were abandoned. She trekked through the meadow from where, a year ago, six tourists, American, British, German and Norwegian, had been kidnapped by Al-Faran, a newly formed militant outfit that not many people knew about. Five of the six were murdered, one escaped. The young Norwegian, a poet and dancer, had been beheaded, his body left in the Pahalgam meadow. Before he died, as his kidnappers moved him from place to place, he left a trail of poetry on scraps of paper that he secretly managed to give to people he encountered on the way.
She traveled to the Lolab Valley, considered the most beautiful and dangerous place in all of Kashmir, its forest teeming with militants, soldiers and rogue Ikhwanis. She walked on little-known forest paths near Rafiabad that ran close to the Line of Control, along the grassy banks of mountain streams from which she would drop down on all fours and drink the clear water like a thirsty animal, her lips turning blue with cold. She visited villages ringed by orchards and graveyards; she stayed in villagers’ homes. Musa would appear and leave without notice. They sat around a fire in an empty stone hut high up in the mountains that was used by Gujjar shepherds in the summer when they brought their sheep up from the plains. Musa pointed out a route that was often used by militants to cross the Line of Control:
“Berlin had a wall. We have the highest mountain range in the world. It won’t fall, but it will be scaled.”
In a home in Kupwara, Tilo met the older sister of Mumtaz Afzal Malik, the young man who happened to be driving the taxi that took Amrik Singh’s accomplice Salim Gojri to the camp the day they were murdered. She described how, when her brother’s body was found in a field and brought home, his fists, clenched in rigor mortis, were full of earth and yellow mustard flowers grew from between his fingers.
—
Tilo returned to HB Shaheen from her excursions in the Valley, alone. She and Musa had said their goodbyes, casually, just in case. Tilo learned quickly that, in these matters, casualness and jokes were strictly serious, and seriousness was usually communicated as a joke. They spoke in code even when they didn’t need to. That was how Amrik Singh “Spotter” got his code name: Otter. (There hadn’t been a formal convocation, but the degree they had jested about had been conferred and accepted. Even though Tilo was nothing less than irreverent about the slogan Azadi ka matlab kya? La ilaha illallah, she could now certainly, and correctly, be described as an Enemy of the State.) The day after she returned, when she saw Gulrez laying the table for two, she knew Musa would come.
He came late in the night, looking preoccupied. He said there had been serious trouble in the city. They switched on the radio:
A group of Ikhwanis had killed a boy and “disappeared” his body. In the protests that followed fourteen people had been shot dead. Three militants had been killed in an encounter. Three police stations burned. The toll for the day was eighteen.
Musa ate quickly and stood up to leave. He murmured a gruff goodbye to Gulrez. He kissed Tilo on her forehead.
“Khuda Hafiz, Babajaana. Travel safe.”
He asked her to stay inside, not to come out to see him off. She didn’t listen. She walked out with him to the rickety, makeshift dock where a small wooden rowboat was waiting. Musa climbed in and lay flat on the floor of the boat. The boatman covered him with a woven grass mat and artfully arranged empty baskets and a few sacks of vegetables over him. Tilo watched the boat row away with its beloved cargo. Not across the lake to the boulevard, but along the endless line of houseboats, into the distance.
The thought of Musa lying at the bottom of a boat, covered with empty baskets, did something to her. Her heart felt like a gray pebble in a mountain stream—something icy rushed over it.
She went to bed, setting her alarm to be up in time to catch her bus to Jammu. Fortunately she followed Kashmiri protocol, not because she meant to, but because she was too tired to undress. She could hear Gul-kak pottering around, humming.
—
She woke less than an hour later—not suddenly, but gradually, swimming through layers of sleep—first to sound and then to the absence of it. First to the hum of engines that seemed to come from every direction. Then, when they were switched off, to the sudden silence.
Motor boats. Many of them.
The HB Shaheen pitched and rolled. Not much, just a little.
—
She was already on her feet, braced for trouble, when the door of her carved, embroidered, filigreed bedroom was kicked down and the room was full of soldiers with guns.
What happened over the next few hours happened either very quickly or very slowly. She couldn’t tell which. The picture was clear and the sound precise, but somehow distant. Feelings lagged far behind. She was gagged, her hands were tied, and the room was searched. They hustled her down the corridor into the dining room where she passed Gul-kak on the floor, being kicked and beaten by at least ten men.
Where is he?
I don’t know.
Who are you?
Gulrez. Gulrez. Gulrez Abroo. Gulrez Abroo.
—