“Boi!”
Firdaus’s shrill call to her brother breaks the rumble of the river.
Hanif shoots a glance at her. She is holding the net high above the water for him to see. It wiggles with the struggle of a trapped trout. What a fat catch. Hanif beams back at the sunny splash of victory on Firdaus’ face and exhales slowly with relief.
In the two hours here, Hanif filled his green hip-bag many times with trout. And till now, each time Firdaus threw the circular net into the brook, he would note her disappointment. It would fall on the foaming water, then she would step on the pebbled riverbed to check with her soles for the slithery feel of a trapped trout in its netted squares and then pull the net out of the water.
Hanif would egg her on. “Try again, Beni. Takes both patience and luck,” he would repeat. “And you know I’ve at least one of the two.” With his net raised, he would step closer. “See, don’t just throw this net anywhere. Divide its rim into three parts . . . like this.”
She would squint in the sun and try to concentrate on his instructions.
“Now grip one part in your teeth, the other two in your two hands and then brace yourself. And throw it like this in a perfect circle. Just where you’d expect a shoal of trout to halt.”
Firdaus would nod, but so far, at each attempt she faltered on at least one step stipulated by her wise twenty-five-year-old elder brother.
◆
This is just a day before he leaves for Riyadh, a sunny spring day in the Buran valley in 1996, on the Indian side of Kashmir, along the Pakistan border—border to the world, home for them. Hanif understood her distraction. He could almost hear the heavy background score that hectored her head: Tomorrow, Boi will be gone to faraway Saudi Arabia to fend for us dependents. All day, he’d watched her inexperienced seventeen-year-old hands struggling with the fishing net. As always, the net seemed out of place. Her soft hands are so unlike those of most village girls here whose fingers are stumps of cuticles and cracks that come from scrubbing the numerous utensils Kashmiri cooking demands, and red from washing the many layers of clothing Kashmiri weather demands, and even scratched from carrying firewood, pine cones, and fetching water in urns over slopes.
Now Firdaus’s unused hands are florid with the moderate weight of the net. She stands unsteadily, periodically ouching in the rushing water, and Hanif hovers protectively. To him, a day before his departure, this picture of her in the water, has frozen like a video turned into a still.
Hanif edges closer. Whenever he looks at her, the consuming wild tumult of the Buran river somehow seems greater. He wonders if this is Allah’s way of reminding him of his family’s vulnerability in his absence. His teeth rattle a bit. Firdaus shoots a glance at him. “No, it’s nothing,” he says. He holds her steady while she deals with the trout in her net.
In nearly chest high water that’s hurtling past, they’re like two planted half-drowned poles some five feet apart, she, still in her plain white school uniform shalwar kameez, her face cupped in her blue dupatta long scarf with stray strands of wet hair stuck on her face, and he in a gray shalwar kameez, buttons open nearly half way down his broad wet hairy chest. He is quite at home in the river, but she navigates it with breathless panic.
The Buran is no joke. As it treacherously splashes downstream, it drowns the screeches of crows wheeling overhead under its deepthroated gush. The shouts of children playing in its wide valley of round white stones sound distant, high pitched, far flung. Barely rising above its chaos, they sound so much like cries for help, that real cries of help, if any, face the grim prospect of being ignored. The depth of the Buran, like its width, varies dramatically every few feet, so where the current is fast and the bed uneven, he takes her hand. Firdaus gingerly follows in his approximate steps. Hanif is particularly careful with her. When you take Firdaus out, you must return her home in original condition. Even a small scratch on her wrist can have you responding to a gathering bunch of raised eyebrows. And now her feet are already bruised on the sharp slippery stones on the river bed. He’ll have to explain this at home, about how her rubber slippers got carried away in the torrent. When they’d moved upstream, she gasped as the cold water besieged her, rose higher and higher, threatened to lift her off and carry her away in its maelstrom. Its cold bothers her less now than when she’d hitched her shalwar up and stepped in barefoot. She’d screamed then. That’s Sonth, Spring, for you. The freezing water of snowmelt in the higher reaches and the valley sun, warm. Hanif knew that in two minutes, the water’s cold would give way to her other terrors—the slippery river bed, the sheer force of the Buran, and the sharp stones stabbing her bare feet, which, like her hands, are famous for being the prettiest, daintiest. Not the feet that go net-fishing in the Buran. Hanif has those feet—hard, broad, bony, with knotted toes and poking ankles. Her feet are unlike the other girls here whose mountain feet have cracked heels and blisters hidden in the soles. Their noses and ears are visibly chilblained from time to time. But Firdaus is weatherproof. She is a haloed version of the Kashmiri country girl. Her untouched-up self is like an advertising model of the real Kashmiri girl naturally tweaked to perfection.
Hanif is certain that more than this sight of her, it is that other image of Firdaus which will stay printed in his head when he is away in Saudi Arabia. A picture of her radiantly filling the April page of the Jammu & Kashmir Tourism calendar, titled ‘Kashmir in Spring’. Hanif cannot take that calendar with him because it sits like a trophy at home. No one advances that April ’95 page. As though Firdaus is a permanent spring in Kashmir. It also serves as a memory of that day when Firdaus suddenly turned into a local legend.
While passing Kailan village, a photographer had chanced upon her. He asked her elders for permission and took her pictures. No make-up, no trick of light. She stood by a hairpin bend on Mughal Road, the moist grassy hillside sprayed with wild flowers on its rising side, with a crowd of emerald green deodar pines on the other. With her seraphic face cupped out of a colored scarf, she stood with the temperamental Pir Panjal range glistening silver-white behind her, also posing perfectly for the occasion, not playing hide and seek for a change. Word spread fast, and in minutes, the whole village came bounding down the terraces to witness this different kind of ‘shooting’. They repeatedly asked when and where the calendar would be available. They gaped at the city-bred Kashmiri photographer in Pepe jeans and a hoodie sweatshirt, his fostered Popeye arms tight against the fabric. They gossiped silly about his big high-tech camera. “It’s called Canon because it shoots,” somebody said aloud as though to impress the jamboree that he knew the English word for things that shoot. And everybody laughed. To show they knew it too. By evening, Firdaus’s fame had crossed their village Kailan into the entire border district of Poonch. To her mother, the prospect of a well-off groom for her lovely koor, her sweet daughter, was now in the realm of possibility. Soon, young girls began to cite Firdaus this and Firdaus that examples. Slowly Firdaus began to epitomize the vulnerable Kashmiri girl. The village folk noticed her more now and felt like protecting her from strangers, especially from men visiting from other places, or army sepoys here—mousy yokels turned into a wolfpack in uniform. They noted how these desperate soldiers singled her out, and so they began to tacitly harbor an intuitive sense of tragedy where she was concerned. Perhaps it is even a rule, a law or sorts, the sleight of hand of destiny maybe, or simply just a plot we’re conditioned to create, one where Tragedy follows Beauty as a logical consequence and artless happiness sits naturally with crude gurgling laughter and grotesque buck teeth. And who could be better than Hanif at conceiving a whole new fear with a superstition to match.
Earlier this morning, while they were fishing, many local boys had gathered. Hanif sensed Firdaus was the cause. They joked and tried striking a conversation with Hanif and Firdaus, their shy eyes shooting frisky glances at her, chatting as though they met Hanif every other day. Firdaus laughed sunnily, strangely unmindful of the effect she had on the young boys in their hormonal prime. At first, Hanif sportingly joined in with some feeble jokes, though in his characteristic deadpan way. Then suddenly, as Firdaus pulled her kameez into the water to stop it from going up, Hanif realized his little sister had grown up. Her loose shalwar kameez was wet. Now whenever she moved to shallower waters, it accentuated the curve of her hips; it hung transparently from the mounds of her young breasts in a way that must have been newsy enough, he surmised, to carry from one male ear to the other across the white boulders of the river valley. When more boys started arriving, Hanif ignored their banter and finally, somewhat brusquely, he sent the excited boys packing. Off with you, he mock-barked at them and they skipped off on the glistening round white stones, with cheery good-byes.
She is growing up, Hanif thought, as he’d looked at her, her face stunning as always, her mouth, her cheekbones, her soft features perfectly etched, her famous hazel-topaz eyes, happy. He’d rather archive this happy picture of hers after catching the fish than before, when her desperate and dogged determination had cast shadows on her face. But now she speaks in her usual laughing voice, the dimples lighting up on her cheeks, going off and on as she jabbers in her trademark chipper. Hanif helps her shove the trembling still-alive trout in the green hip-bag around her waist. The fish launches a futile agitation in her hip-bag. In its struggle, Hanif sees a bit of himself. He senses a trail of sweat on his brow. He wonders if this new strain of trepidation is just fanciful despondency but he fears it could rouse his fatalistic second nature. Two people have been making his departure difficult and neither of them are his parents. First, Firdaus. Even her damn name is all wrong. Because just as some places are like some women, some women are also like some places. Firdaus and Kashmir are more than mere synonyms. No matter how hard they try, they cannot underplay themselves to stall the manic desire they effortlessly evoke. Does Firdaus share both inseparable realities of Kashmir—its sheer beauty and the tragic vulnerability that directly results from it? No, no, he quavers. In these mountains, they say that to give words to a tragic thought is to open the door to it in reality. But they don’t follow their own superstitions here! Everybody talks about Firdaus’s beauty. Everybody. Only, he, Hanif, doesn’t. Because that would liken his beloved beni, his adorable sister, to Kashmir, the Jannat or heaven-on-earth, Paradise, especially since it is also called Firdaus. Will sharing her name with a beautiful place also manacle her moira to its calamitous kismet? He keeps this superstition private though. It is too feminine to openly confess. But he knows there is someone who is aware of his secret superstition. This is the second person apart from Firdaus, who barges into Hanif’s head whenever the thought of leaving Kashmir dries his mouth. Like right now when the thought of a Khuda Hafiz to Firdaus, who wears the badge of their family’s vulnerability, subsumes the pain of leaving his assaulted homeland.
Faraaz.
Hardy Faraaz. Wiry Faraaz. Semi-silent, violent Faraaz. The aspiring militant of their family. Their fifteen-year-old mettlesome cousin, nearly a mujahid, a terrorist in India’s eyes. Craving to fight for the forbidden fruit, Azadi. Freedom. Only Angry Faraaz understands Peacenik Hanif’s superstitious nature. Thankfully, Hanif can be sure that Faraaz will never let out Hanif’s little secret. In fact if Hanif had ever voiced his superstitions, it was only to Faraaz. Faraaz quietly countered him once by saying that what Hanif was carrying in the guise of superstitions was just premonitory grief. Damn Faraaz. Young, observant and intuitive. Does Faraaz even know that when Hanif had rushed him to 29 Field Hospital in a delirious state, and had glanced at his watch, he’d discovered it had stopped? Hanif panicked if watches stopped. In watches he saw heartbeats. Suddenly he slaps his wrist—now where is my watch?—but exhales slowly when he realizes it is where he’d left it, on the rocks with their things. He guides Firdaus slowly down the river to where their things are.
Hmm. Faraaz should also know that Hanif’s job offer from Riyadh came immediately after his Jumu’ah prayers. He looks at the sky and mumbles Shukar hai, Allah. Thank God. Another couple of months without this job and they would have lost a parcel of their land, the debt burden has mounted so much. But from his nearly unbroken attendance record in the Friday prayers, people infer he is highly religious. Only one man—because after fourteen, Faraaz was never a boy—knows better. That superstition takes Hanif to the mosque, not religion—
“Boi,” Firdaus breaks his idle thoughts. “You missed the Friday prayers today, no?”
He is routinely amazed at how she reads him without even looking at him. “Yes, but I went to the mosque mid-week,” he says.
Her eyes penetrate his, but thankfully she looks away. They wade through the water.
He knows she caught his lie. Of course he missed the Friday prayers. He could have only done one thing at a time, no? Either go to the mosque to attend the prayers and pray for their safety in his absence. Or fish for trout so that they do not blow a small fortune on an elaborate farewell dinner for him—
“Boi,” Firdaus turns to him.
Now what? This telepathy is irritating “What Beni?” he says, through clenched teeth.
She is blinking rapidly. “Boi, how much fish do we have in all?”
Good god, Beni. Just when he had started tapping his hip-bag to count. “Enough for dinner,” he says.
“Sure?”
“Yes, after this giant trout you caught. Yes.”
She breaks into open laughter. “Let me check again,” she squeals with delight and he steps over to hold her while she pulls it out of her hip-bag. Hanif wasn’t exaggerating. Her single trout is fleshier than each of his. When she holds it up in the spring sun, her soft fingers are hemic with its weight.
Hanif is relieved Firdaus finally caught a trout. In her unending grin and happy jump-steps, he can see her desperate need to contribute to the kitchen. He puts his arm around her and they chortle silly for a bit, his angular face forming ruddy laugh lines. He guesses she might have overheard him in the morning when he said to their mother, “Mouj, we won’t be long. Cook the trout, okay? I love it. No need to cook anything else.” His mother had given him that look which mothers give when they say to their child through their eyes—you think I don’t know you?
Anyway. Now they have the fish.
Done.
◆
The sun is up high. The paddy fields skirting the edges of the river valley are dotted with women squatting and working. Firdaus and he have been a long time in the water. High time they get out and head home. He’s been postponing it till Firdaus landed at least one catch. They thrust themselves out of the river and tip-toe from one stone to another, careful not to muddy their wet feet in the small patches of soaked sand in between. They gather their things into a tote bag that Hanif slips over his shoulder. With hand towels, they wipe their wet faces and try to soak up the water on their clothes the best they can, and then recline on the rocks for a while, waiting for the not-so-warm sun to dry them up at least a bit. The last thing Hanif wants is to go past the Rashtriya Rifles or RR counter-insurgency army unit with Firdaus in wet clothes.
Minutes later, he discreetly checks her clothes. Still so wet. “We leave in a bit?” he says. She tilts her head diagonally in agreement. Hanif cringes at this reminder of Faraaz. One of the many mannerisms she shares with him. Although they are cousins, Faraaz and Firdaus look like siblings. Not so much in looks, as in mannerisms. For Faraaz however, often just those expressions suffice. Add words and laughter to these and you get a Firdaus. Their laughter is similar too, or rather was, till Faraaz was fourteen after which he seldom laughed. Now when he does laugh, it is only at political ironies and the army. No sarcasm there. Faraaz genuinely sees them both as living jokes. That’s not so bad. What baffles Hanif more is how Firdaus, otherwise deceptively headstrong, treats Faraaz. Like he is an older brother although he is nearly two years younger. Hanif knows why but it still baffles him how these mujahid types assume a wisdom and domain beyond their years. It seems Faraaz is always watching over Firdaus. Quietly. Everyone knows it. Faraaz’s sister—is how they refer to her, the words forming a security cordon around Firdaus, the beautiful in a way nothing else can. Hanif’s sister would sound so bland, no? Won’t make the cut. And this, when Faraaz hasn’t yet crossed over uss paar, that side, to Azad Kashmir, to Pakistan. But my dear friends—Hanif would love to ask them all if he could—would we fear the Indian army so much if it wasn’t for Faraaz?
Hanif nudges Firdaus, whose clothes have still not dried, and they rise to leave. Still wet, they dust the sand off their backsides and begin to cross the expanse of rocks.
◆
The RR unit, 420 RR, is set just above the flattish paddy terraces by the rocky valley in one twisting expanse just below, and along the length of the road. The leafy hill of the timeworn town of Burankote is set in terraces on the other side of the road. And somewhere beyond the soaring slopes of dense forest that rise behind the town, is the LoC, the Line of Control border with Pakistan. This place that they call home, was recently endorsed by Bill Clinton as ‘the world’s most dangerous place’, for which America’s ally and arms buyer Pakistan, must be at least partly responsible. The LoC here runs across jagged peaks and ranges of rocky ground and jungle at over 12,000 feet above sea level.
◆
On the narrow edges of the paddy terraces, they walk along catwalk style toward the RR unit at the bottom of the hill. The roar of the Buran begins to sound distant. Moody unsure shadows are nudging the reluctant morning warmth out. Hanif cranes his neck up to the sky like men tend to do here when they sniff a change in the air; they all fancy themselves to be weathermen. There is a disjointed jumble of downy clouds, some white, some graying with age, others glowering cholerically, unwilling to let the spasmodic, pushy breeze dislodge them. The sun is giving up.
“It’ll rain, if not soon, then tomorrow,” he says to Firdaus who keeps pace right behind on the mud skirting of the paddy field. “I might miss the hailstones,” he says in a forlorn voice. Hailstones here are often nearly as large as golf balls. She concentrates on keeping balance. The ambient sounds of the river are broken by the squatting women, huddled in twos and threes, bunches of stirring flowing pherans and scarves working in the paddy terraces, singing in chorus in the semi-sun, their voices and melody filling the fruity air with ripe jollity. They wave out to Hanif and Firdaus who cheerfully hail them back.
Closer to the hill, the gentle breeze is funneled with the fragrance of sonth, of ripe apricots and plums inadvertently crushed underfoot in the orchards. Now on the grassy path, they wave away dragonflies that hover to peer into their pupils. Here, Hanif breathes in peace, to absorb the still lingering sounds and fragrances of childhood. He can hear the whispered swaying of the trees lining the hill broken by the springtime cacophony of a multitude of passerines—from the sharp long whistles of bulbuls to the jittery singing of thrushes on the Chinar trees, and the chirp of mynahs from branches—another giveaway that rain may well be on its way. Just as they are about to step on the dirt track along the Rashtriya Rifles unit, a man, old and mangy, squatting by the fields beside clumps of fodder in the distance, calls in high pitched Kashmiri. Hanif turns. “That’s Abu Chaach’a,” Hanif points. Firdaus glances in that direction but quickly looks away. Hanif politely waves out to Abu Chaach’a as they bend to take the rising path along the fence of the RR unit.
Abu Chaach’a is from Burankote. His son Shahid, Faraaz’s best friend, was taken for army “interrogation” and tortured, and has subsequently disappeared. Abu Chaach’a is suffering from lung cancer. He’s biding his time. After Shahid disappeared, they say, Abu Chaach’a would visit the nearby graveyards and in their cloistered verdancy, he would stare at the new unnamed graves. Mysteriously, he stopped doing this some days ago, giving rise to speculation that Shahid was alive and in militant fatigues.
Abu Chaacha’s loss of prosperity and the death of his wife, Nur, is narrated like a love story. Many liken Firdaus’s beauty to Nur’s. Nur refused to go to an army hospital till it was too late. No Kashmiri woman should be anywhere near these soldiers, she had said. Now sleepless and alone in his gloomy homestead, perched on a cloudy mountain terrace overlooking the RR unit, Abu Chaach’a smoked his jajeer, his potbellied hookah through the night. That did him in. He compressed a lifetime of jajeer smoke into his windpipe.
Firdaus always cringes at the very mention of Abu Chaach’a. Hanif finds this confounding. How a kindly Firdaus is so unaffected by poor Chaacha’s misery. Now as they walk, Hanif summarizes his story again. She listens, but perhaps only because his eyes have welled up while narrating the parts about Nur.
Firdaus touches his arm. “Boi,” she says. “Only tell me what Nur aunty said about the soldiers.”
And he does. It strikes him that Firdaus was so taken aback by Abu Chaacha’s appearance that she paid no heed to the old man’s warning a while ago. Abu Chaach’a was saying that in view of Firdaus’s clinging clothes, they must not to go this way. But the other route is much longer, stony, and steep. And Firdaus’s feet are hurt. Moreover, Hanif finds this route, his cherished childhood trail, irresistible. He must walk it one last time before leaving for Riyadh.
The memories of that long gone Kashmir are fresh as pine. Ten years ago, as recently as 1986, on this very trail they would hold apart two barbed wires and actually go right through into the unit. Hanif was fifteen then, as old as Faraaz is today. No one called Kashmir a “conflict zone” then; it was only negotiating Azadi. This very place was occupied by 29 Field Hospital. The epaulettes the men wore here read “AMC”—Army Medical Corps. Doctors. Softer features. Rounder. Less soldierly, more benign. Uncle, they would call them. As children, they never realized when the situation started deteriorating. This army hospital would even treat a Kashmiri injured by Indian army bullets. It was confusing for a while. No longer. Now it’s an accepted irony even for peaceniks like Hanif. That Kashmir is an ‘integral part of India’ in the same breath as it is the land of katuas, of circumcised manhood, Muslims minions in derogatory terms, pro Pakistan traitors, gaddaar, the enemy. But back then this was a field hospital commanded by a kindly Kashmiri Pandit Lieutenant Colonel Sapru, a Hindu brahmin by caste, who they got to know and like. Through Babu Khan, an old family friend, who was a gardener in the hospital, they made friends with Colonel Sapru’s son and other children of the army doctors posted here that one summer and the next, when those army families came over to this “field area” as per their month-long entitlement. Those kids, the army brats, were fans of Babu Khan. One of them, Bobby, used to call the handsome Babu Khan, Richard Burton Uncle. Babu Khan would take them trout fishing, just the way Hanif took Firdaus. The trout would then be cooked in the Officers’ Mess kitchen, under the culinary supervision of Mrs. Sapru, Colonel Sapru’s wife. And she would give some to Babu Khan “for the village.”
In those days, that army unit was not out of bounds. In fact, it was where local Kashmiris and the nomadic goatherds—Gujjars and Bakarwals, got free medical treatment and even medicines. It is like a slowly rolling film in Hanif’s mind. The village folk entering the hospital gate in twos and threes, without an iota of hesitation, in gray-brown pherans, from the road under a half raised olive green barrier of log wood that went up at exactly ten am. They’d head in, take a left turn on the gravel path to a group of tin-roofed hutments and finally enter the single open door at the end of one such ‘hut’ with a large painted red cross. The Out-Patient Department of 29 Field Hospital. Once inside this cavernous rectangular hut, they sat patiently, at peace with the stink of their own unwashed bodies, unchanged sweat-soaked clothes, illnesses, open wounds and gashes, the disinfectants only making the air thicker. But it didn’t seem to bother the doctors and male medical assistants one bit. They strutted about busily in olive green uniforms and white medical coats, gaily greeting some of the patients who they recognized.
In the dingy waiting area lit by naked bulbs, the locals were like one crowd of uniformly blurred bearded beings with weather-beaten faces and gaunt physiques filling the length of those long straight-backed wooden benches. They kept their feet planted consciously on the ground, resisting the bucolic urge to pull them out of their lace-less gurgabi shoes or phulharoo grass shoes or sometimes broken, worn boots and large dull socks, and curl them on the side, on the seat. Their feet looked stiff and out of place, hanging down from the bench seat on to the unremarkable gray cement floor. Their bodies looked slumped with hard work and clothes worn with the agrarian futility of it. They looked like good-looking refugees, but they were not—not refugees that is. The Indian economy’s liberal thrust from Delhi in the late eighties lost steam by the time it reached the Hindu city of Jammu, the gateway to Muslim Kashmir.
◆
“This was where Faraaz was born,” Hanif says.
Firdaus chooses not to smile this time at his oft repeated refrain that “Faraaz was brought to life by the Indian army.” Hanif understands. She will not discuss Faraaz with him. Period. But this time he means it literally. He recalls the maternity ward right behind the OPD, the distraught and torn faces of family elders, and Bano Begum’s repeated shaking of head and indignant eyes when the suggestion to abort came up. And how she’d said, “Baby, not me” with quivering lips, wagging an anemic finger when she was wheeled in for a cesarean section, and realized only one of them would survive. Then the unforgettable surprise and joy they felt when both baby and mother survived. How the hell can Hanif not feel an intimacy with this place? He was just ten but he was playing courier between home and hospital. It was he who ferried the sweets that they distributed liberally, thankfully, tearfully, in the hospital. Faraaz was a ball of ten pounds at birth. How sweet of all the army doctors to come and look him up—a baby from a poor Kashmiri family. They could never forget that hospital. Every year, on Faraaz’s birthday, Bano Begum would come to the Officers’ Mess with a large tiffin carrier with its multistoried tin containers filled with the celebratory pounded batth rice and mutton Harissa, and hand it over to the Commanding Officer’s wife. This continued even after Col. and Mrs. Sapru left 29 Field Hospital and were replaced by two successors. Only when the Field Hospital turned into the dreaded RR unit did Bano Begum stop. Perhaps Faraaz’s birth amid these army barracks was merely a ploy of destiny to make the story of his life theatrical.
“Allah reham,” Hanif says, as they go past. Have mercy, God.
Now they can’t even go through this place. It is no longer that army hospital that birthed Faraaz. It is now an RR unit, one of the many specialist counterinsurgency units, that in fact could kill the same Faraaz. Hanif has heard they have targets; their performance is measured in “kills.” They kill on mere suspicion; kill the same people who once entered their gate with relief, left with gratitude, and showered blessings.
Hanif can’t help but peep through the wire fence and the trees and hedges as they walk past. That old incessant call of shogga parrots pecking on unripe fruit in the orchards still breaks the morning. He remembers the orchard inside. He looks for traces of the old easygoing hospital. Similar building structures. Only, the comforting red cross is missing. He can still sight some of the tree lined gravelly red pathways, patches of mixed orchards of plums, apricots, cherries and almonds, the neatly arranged groups of olive green army barrack tin sheds and buildings. He can imagine the odd camouflage netted vehicle enclosure, the unit temple at the far end of a football field where they went to eat the delicious milk cake prasad offering. Suddenly he wants to forget it all, but there is no eraser for these memories: the patches of lawn amid trees laden with ripe and falling fruit, spangled with colorful flowerbeds that Babu Khan used to be so proud of back then in 1986. It was two times in a row that 29 Field Hospital won the prize for the best garden in the Mountain Division. The General Officer Commanding of the division, a handsome Sikh General whose name Hanif forgets, was the sole judge who Col. Sapru accompanied, with Babu Khan in tow. And they, the little tots, with Hanif as the senior most, restraining them, peeped through the hedges. He can smell it all still, he can even hear that past, minus the noise of children and women in colorful mufti.
Sad. That clocks move in only one direction. Forward.
And the times, downhill.
It still seems like yesterday, although it was a year before it all went seriously wrong.
◆
They near the end of the dirt track T-crossed by the main highway and pass the second gate of the unit. Hanif sees four armed soldiers on sentry duty. There must be more.
A Bakarwal Mastiff growls from inside, then barks. Wah. Kashmiri Bakarwal Mastiffs trained to warn against Kashmiris. There used be Tiger and Peter here, the Bakarwal Mastiffs in the Field Hospital; they were pets, playthings and mascots. Then they had Ali, the newborn puppy; oh, he could still be alive?
But now from his peripheral vision Hanif catches two soldiers approaching the fence to consider them. Through clenched teeth he hisses to Firdaus to not to look that side. He prods her in the side and they quicken their steps. A startled shiver runs down his neck like a length of freezing water when he hears their familiar boorish accents, the words indecipherable. A throaty sneer breaks over the screechy din of parrots. A soldier belts out a crass, sexually loaded Bollywood musical adaptation for eve teasing; his goon-gang jeers.
“Bheega badan jalne laga . . .
Mausam badalne laga . . .”
The wet body is on fire.
The weather is changing.
Hanif looks straight ahead but guesses they might even be rubbing their balls. He knows Firdaus’s face is flushed. He clutches her hand in a cinch. She’s beetroot red. And not from the uphill climb. He knows she’s desperate to cover her clinging shalwar kameez. The leering, kindled by their speedy departure, now reaches a pitch. Firdaus must be feeling their eyes on her hips, along the length of her back, so instead of heading in a straight line to the bus stand, Hanif leads her uphill into a cover of trees. He halts. She’s breathing fast. Her lips are dry and bloodless. Her eyes are flooded. Hanif buries her head in his shoulder.
He pats her back. “They aren’t coming after us.” he says.
But Firdaus is shaking her head, gasping for breath. She reminds him of the trout when it fell into her hip-bag.
“Let’s take the bus,” he says. It will distract her, the people in it. He knows what works in Beni’s case.
◆
The moment they enter, the bus fills with whispers. All eyes are on Firdaus, Hanif notes. He studies her face. The sight of people has done to it, what it seems to have done to them. The bus has cackled to life. My sister, he half smiles. They walk through the aisle to their seat and he is happy to fade behind her, but people are noticing him as well for a change. Word on his departure must have gotten around. As they take their seat, some reconfirmations come his way.
“Haan, I’m leaving tomorrow,” he says in his usual sparing way, so they now turn to Firdaus. So does he.
She already seems to have forgotten the RR gate. She’s infecting the bus with such mood-altering verve, that even Hanif, morose Hanif, boring Hanif, gloomy Hanif, grins. How easily she recouped, he marvels. Her face is aglow, her eyes twinkle, her laughing voice, her small girl’s voice, is back. Again, she is the cynosure of a gathering, this time of these fellow travelers bussing it on Friday, from mosques or from shopping to home or vice versa. How many of them does she know? Hanif knows none. Of course he’s so relieved but he can’t stop wondering what an antidote she is to the mood in Kashmir. Do these people wonder too? He searches their faces. Do they discuss her behind her back; how blissfully ignorant she seems to be of her bewailing surroundings, its foggy future? No they don’t. But all eyes are glued to her. He tries to see her through their eyes. Afresh. Her incandescent hazel-topaz eyes radiate happiness. So much so that they force giggles of nonage from such a varied age group. Even the elderly are chippering. He shifts as two girls arrive in the aisle by his seat to stand and chat with Firdaus. No, it’s not for some pressing issue. It is just desperation for banter. The epicenter of life has just entered their lifeless bus and crumpled their collective gloom. She may only be a local idol, but the combination of her naivete and sensuality is starry. And because she is right here in flesh and blood, they have these protective, clannish feelings. That’s why they tend to form a ring around her, he infers.
They are taking her in, and Hanif can see that unlike those lecherous soldiers, these people are scanning her for her fragility. Her slender neck, the tiny wrists as she gesticulates, her small feet which flap childishly when she laughs, her imperceptibly upturned nose, the small baby-pink mouth. They had even craned their necks to peer at her lissome balletic gait when she had walked in. He has heard so many say, Firdaus is beautiful and it always sounds like an avowal that borders on polling in her favor, as though, if she wins, they win and if she loses, they lose. When people come home to look up Firdaus, it is not to offload their misery, only to pilfer some of her merriment, or maybe just to check, to confirm that all is well, as though by implication it means that if Firdaus stopped laughing, all laughter would die in Kashmir. Now they are laughing even at her silly jokes as though to say—hang the joke, let’s just laugh. She’s burbling about her slippery, hazardous fishing battle in the Buran. Just look at her. She never joked about this with Hanif.
Understandable.
He knows he has reached manhood by treating laughter as an impediment and shedding it off. His laughter is not only rare, but odd. Sometimes it is at something that is barely funny. But he cracks up then and goes on for long, as though purging it all in one go, or, as if he is breaking a self-imposed reticence before it becomes permanent the way a rusted lock freezes when unopened for long. His extended laugh then ends in watery eyes. After which he abruptly resumes whatever he was doing earlier, as though he hadn’t laughed at all. Like he is suddenly guilty of breaching a long held private resolution. But how nice it is when people laugh. He laments his tardy realization. And suddenly he stands up in that rare moment of abandon and adds his bit.
Firdaus is only half-surprised. She watches Boi imitate her fishing in the Buran.
“See,” he says. “Beni was like this.” She chuckles as he cavorts and contorts, and ouches and exaggerates her horror and terror. He skips in the aisle as though hurt on extra tender feet by the extra cruel stones in the Buran. The girls are in splits, but more for his facetious attempt than for any waggishness in his performance. And the boys are winking at his strenuous attempt to be funny. But his sweet sister is laughing away. Till her eyes are flooded and everyone is mopey. Boi will be gone tomorrow. She stands and rests her head on his shoulder. Then they return to their seats and the bus goes silent, and all that is now heard is its struggle up the climb with its load of encumbered Kashmiris.
On the hairpin bend up, high above the RR unit. Hanif shuts his eyes and leans back.
Firdaus watches him resting his head back on the cold metal frame of his seat. His one forefinger taps his right knee in languid rhythm. His eyes are shut. His lips silently hum what she guesses is some sad song. She knows he mistakenly believes that she is okay now. He doesn’t really fathom her fear, its deep roots and sheer extent. And of course, its secret cause. How it paralyzes her, this burden she has no business to be carrying alone. He’s her brother all right, but he is just another male who will never understand how a woman’s bodily pain has excruciating roots in her feelings. Its causes invoke such shame that sometimes the mind decides to shed memories of it. But then that shame is transferred in the form of pain that surfaces when the subconscious mind is reminded of its cause in infancy. The pain then begins to inhabit such intimately personal zones that the laughing world outside has no inkling of its existence. Men, in particular, are blind to the fragility of feminine feelings and how these are yoked with the body. They have to be told everything in black and white. But to bare it all right now, just when he’s leaving for Riyadh would be so selfish. And what can he do about it anyway?
So.
Might as well accept reality than hide from it. She takes a deep breath and peers out of the window, deep down to the terraces by the Buran, dotted with tin rooftops of the RR unit structures that once bore red crosses. Now there is only one. It must be the Medical Inspection Room where Nur was pronounced dead.
Nur. Who epitomized Kashmir.
Firdaus feels that secret pain creeping up in that secret place.