The Mountain Mist still Exists

 

Dal Lake is indeed the pride of Srinagar. During the winters when the temperature goes below zero, its waters freeze allowing the children to play on the slippery playfield. The quayside along the road circuiting the famous lake gets buried under thick snowflakes. The frozen lake appears like a huge runway cradled in the lap of mountains. The boulevard facing the frozen water body is wet and muddy under squelching shoes and skidding vehicle tyres.

The surrounding hills appear like huge snowy tents floating in the skies to shelter humanity from the tough weather elements. The weather-beaten chinars defy these snowy diktats. The higher mountains shine feebly in the background of greyish haze. Their tops lost in the misty maze of clouds. The slopes appear as if flour has been sprinkled over them.

Here on the icy playground the dwarf played. Then one day the ice cracked a few paces from him. He saw a child being drawn into the water. His small, stunted, robust figure lunged forward showing surprising agility. Although he got hold of the child’s hand, the congenital challenge to his physicality prevented him from applying bodily force matching his soul’s will. The child drowned. Anguish whiplashed his face as a chilly wind hit his puffy features.

In Kashmir people wear a type of great coat, a long coat of wool or tweed, called Pheran, during the winters. But he was so endowed with his particular faculty concerning height that even during the summers the smallest of shirts kissed his heels.

The next day, the authorities forbade everybody from playing on the precarious snowfield.  The shikaras stood like ships stranded on treacherous sandbanks. Little icicles were lying here and there waiting for the children to be picked up, kicked, thrown at someone’s woolly cloak or to be hit with a piece of wood. But death lay in waiting somewhere below some weakness of frozen molecules, where some playful foot might get into the chancy snare. The leafless trees bordered the lake in a continuous blackish zigzag like a peculiar barcode of winter.

****

In a shivering frenzy, the winter had unsheathed its icy fury that was symbolized by the sword-like icicles hanging down the eaves. The snow-sabred foliage of chinars stood like greyish spectres in countless swathes of white. The snowfall had been so heavy that the accumulation outraced the slip-off from the slanting roofs. As a result, many roofs looked painted in white. The soil on the palm of mother earth seemed replaced by the snowflakes. The ice becomes the soil in winters. Shivering bones, drooping figures and chattering teeth was all that we could make of the phenomenon of being human. The people tried to carry on with life hidden under as much wool and animal skin as possible.

Still the religious festivity and fervour pumped up warmth in the soul. The spiritual warmth, fraternity and soulful hilarity seemed to defy the cold, frigid dictates of life on the eve of Bakr-Eid falling in the second week of January. The arrival of the holy day suffused the marketplaces with new energy. The finely carved, pillared balconies and the ornate arches above the ground level shops witnessed a fine spectacle below. The uppermost balconies crowned by the overhanging ice from the roof top patronisingly loomed over the busy marketplace. The people were excitedly busy in shopping for the festival. The excited voices of the vendors flaunting heaps and heaps of exquisite bakery and meat items spiced with the soul of Kashmiriyat made it up for the lack of sunshine.

Eid is the festival of fraternity. Its charm is multiplied when the weather gods shower snowflakes as gifts. The Hazratbal shrine, its precincts clothed in cottony snowflakes, has a special charm during the Eid prayers.

Passing through or rather letting the people overtake him, for he had very short strides, he hastened to add his low, gruffly voice to the undercurrents of the teeming faithful.

There were women in cloaks. They wore the traditional hijab, a black cloak from head to ankles with its face flap (having eye slits). Some had a black cloth tied as a hood over the face and the head leaving only the eyes open. However, now the tradition seemed adapting to the newer times. Brightly coloured—yellow, red, green, chequered—headscarves could also be seen. Though tied in all protection, these colours left at least half of the face open. The burqas also had minimal embroidery around neck and cuffs.

A woman in a multi-coloured scarf and a long brown jacket over her cloak passed him and he was struck by her beauty. But she was too tall for him. The feeling of his short stature hit him really hard at such times. After all, he had the full heart of a man. A heart is seldom crippled by any physical shortcoming in the body. It’s its own master.

From a distance he saw the women praying, their arms stretched in front, the palms cupped out to beseech love, joy and prosperity in life. He too bowed his large head, contemplating over the Almighty, and prayed for peace and normalcy to return to this place. After all, it was once known as the ‘heaven on earth’.

****

It was a snowy Sunday. The National Highway had been closed due to snowfall leaving the valley isolated—even the Srinagar-bound flights had been cancelled—in its white icy cradle. The valley would now survive on the stocks of essential commodities, kerosene and LPG. The snowfall continued till afternoon on this Sunday; then it stopped leaving alleys, side-alleys, main streets and the cross lanes in Srinagar under a thick layer of snow.

In this quaint alley, boasting three-storeyed buildings having glass fronted wooden-framed windows overlooking the street, a rut had just been created by a cumbersomely driven pony cart. There was snow everywhere, snow on the fencing grills encircling the open fronts of the ground level shops, snow on the roofs, snow on the leafless chinar branches in front of houses, on a hand-pulled cart lying almost abandoned in a pile of snow. Only the electricity poles and wires seemed to escape the icy onslaught. Pigeons in hundreds were flocking out. Many flying, flapping mid air, others sitting lined on the wires stoically, some sitting and walking on the whitened ground, and many others cooed from the projecting ledges over the upper most balconies.

****

Like weeds and pests, the insurgents threatened the agriculture painstakingly nurtured by the Indian State for almost six decades. Hence these needed to be eliminated. After all, no hardworking farmer would like his hard work to go in vain and won’t dither from using poison to do away with the nuisance. The army was fraught with the tough task of neutralising the terror capabilities of the militant organisations.

The LeT with its parallel cells (functioning independently) was a big menace for the security forces. Its stealthy structure was expertly funnelling funds to the parallel cells through informants operating so disguisedly that even their family members had no clue to their deeds. So the snow kept on falling, the army busy in cracking codes; the messengers and informants busy in whisking away secrets to and fro; the code names cracking over the radio call with its tick tick ‘Cheetah 786’ and many more.

It was a gruesome thaw in the snow. The mentors across the border kept busy in expertly pumping intrigue. Shady characters with blooded hands zealously engaged in jihad and organised terror attacks as per their version of service to God. The army going, as a result, overenthusiastic in countering the threats.

The army top brass was nudging their heads in puzzlement about this commander having the authority to issue Lashkar communiqué. The faceless man was known under a different identity to the over-ground cadre. There were various alias about him. His operational secrecy was impeccable. Even the long-standing operatives were not too sure about the real identity of this planning, guiding force.

The public relations chief of the outfit, working under a covert identity, himself had vague ideas about this inspirational figure, as he sneaked threats and fatwas to the newspaper offices and expected the said great man to be hidden somewhere in the command bunkers in the hills. In the cadre itself, there was a talk that ‘the chilli in the Indian eyes’ had been spotted giving a hell-raising speech against the Indians. Some said he organized a training camp in Sumblar forests. There were also talks of his movements in the forests of Bandipora mountains.

****

The dwarf didn’t remember his parents. As his short, stubby limbs grew in their stunted roundness, he realised his status and put himself in a world distant and apart from the rapidly, furiously, long-striding mundane life. To the latter, he was just a show-casing object to be laughed at and ogled at with mocking muse while with his short, stubby legs he put up an effort to catch up with the fleeting scene around him. But Srinagar on the eve of the new millennium was running away still faster. Terrorism was at its peak and so was counter-terrorism. Attacks, counter-attacks, gun smoke, rattling shots pulsed in the throbbing veins of this once majestic capital of the heaven on earth.

Dwarfism is a unique effort by the God to make Himself understand the ideas and persona in the cramped self inside the tiniest of a cell. Here soul is ever hitting against the body’s narrow confines. It’s a tragedy while the society finds something fit for some leery, jesting moments as in a circus. But then these days, even the circuses were vanishing rapidly.

He was aware of this fact that his mere presence somehow enlivened people’s spirit, as if they forgot their bigger worries after looking at someone so different and sidelined. Sometimes they felt pity and pity being a sublime emotion made them feel better. Usually, the people were amused directly and as amusement lightens the mind instantly, its effect could be seen in their easier spirits.

He was doubly unfortunate. One, he was a dwarf; second, he was homeless and all alone. Whatever care that could have been spared for him was robbed by the panicked environs of this worst decade in Kashmir’s history.

In the busy big bazaars having gun-totting security personnel, in the lanes and bylanes smelling of intrigues, in schools, offices, houses and shops the life overall chugged ahead with a scratching, itching ambiguity. Who will come out to be who could never be guessed. So people went hurriedly, guarding their innermost feelings to themselves.

Then a corner-side tea stall operator took fancy to this trundling, slogging character and gave him the job of tea-boy. Across the square, the military picket found it a bit refreshing to get tea from this circus item but not before he would take a cup himself from the kettle. These battle hardened soldiers wearing bullet-proof vests, clad in intimidating fatigues and crowning helmets certainly eased their pent-up tension while joking with this ‘aflatoon’—as they called him—while his employer, so gentle in manners and words, looked on with certain satisfaction from across the square.

One day, suddenly even this new-found niche of some stability and dull dignity was robbed. The military intelligence had spotted the amicable tea-shopper as a highly suspected cog in the underground network of the mysterious Lashkar commander.

Before they could pinpoint him, he brought out a pistol from almost nowhere and fired, hitting a young soldier in the face before he himself was riddled with bullets. His body was now lying sprawled in a most horrid manner. Around him the gun-totting security men stared with mechanical, emotionless eyes; the urgency of the operation robbing them even of the few moments left to the colleague with whom they had spent many moments of their imperilled life in the valley. The last pulse gone and the dam of patience and control was broken. A friend soldier ran and fired a volley into the militant’s dead body. Others scampered to take control of him. After all, the military is all about discipline.

Aflatoon stood paralysed. In one strike, the destiny had snatched away the two human beings whom he had come to like the most, the dead soldier and the tea-shop owner. Both of them spoke to him without the least glint of mock and entertainment in their eyes. They saw him exactly like any other human being around. The eyes of the tea seller and the young, ever-smiling soldier carried a comfortable openness for his dwarfed self wherein he never felt pitiable or an object of jest. He could feel it. It made him feel so normal. Whenever they looked at him, he felt like a normal human being. He had lost two friends. Both were two helpless cogs in two different countries and set-ups.

The very same friendly Sikh soldier, who earlier jested and bantered with him, now prodded him with his deadly gun.

‘You too owe some answers, for you aren’t as much above earth as you are under it! You pygmy Muslim, you never gave any hint of the suspicious nature of your master!’

He was tortured; though in its milder form because the interrogators themselves took fancy to the jibing game of interrogation with this unusual suspect. He created ripples of laughter as he winced with pain to slaps and cigarette butts on his skin or pull of ears and hair and kicks. It was over all good fun to the soldiers. 

As he came out beaten, ashamed and humiliated, the locals spat at him, suspecting him to have played truant in complicity with the military.

He had been taught a bitter lesson:

‘I’m a dwarf, but more than the punishment of God, it is the inflated egos on both sides that squeeze life out of me. My Kashmir also bears the same fate, being grounded between these two heavy millstones! God was far less punishing in throwing my life in this little bodily cage than hurling me in this corridor of uncertainty and making me a suspect in all eyes. I’ve become an eyesore to all. One can hope to survive by taking sides but I’ve been robbed even of that!’