The Platform

Platforms—they are somebody’s destination, someone’s starting point. Many people depart, and many arrive. On the parallel rails of departures and arrivals, life chugs ahead with a determined unmindfulness. There is a different type of life at the platforms as well. It is almost a secondary world. Right in the shadows of the bigger world hurtling with an exalted impulse, this secondary world carries limitless desolation. Severely crushed, trampled and trodden under the furtively commuting and journeying larger mainstream world, it’s a smaller world on the fringe. It involves beggars, crippled, runaways, petty porters, and nondescript migrant labourers who survive like the wayside thorns and thickets along the rutted path on which there is an incessant stampede of those whose lives are not bracketed inside the gaolic strokes of the term ‘platform’. It survives in dreaded anticipation; waiting to grab the fallen crumbs to beat its hunger. Its painful scars lie right there in broad daylight, but are still invisible. To many it doesn’t even exist. The adventurous ebullience and pomp and paraphernalia of the bigger world pass over it like clouds ploughing the skies with cotton-soft ease.

The same is the case of the unlived lives on the platforms of Ambala junction. It buzzes with crowds of peasants, railway staff, passengers waiting, walking, deboarding and boarding apart from porters, hawkers and homeless people and beggars. Lost in this jostling crowd are the multitudes of castaways whom the crippling circumstances force to ride the static back of this cemented space along the clattering rails and nettling wheels. It heaves like a sighful wave trying to tug at the sleeves of the bigger world. It pours like a mournful drizzle to wash the sandy screen of human apathy. It shines like remorseful rays to light the darkest corners.

It was mid-November. With pining pioneership the new millennium had just started. More than the sheds—during the day—bright blue apron of the vibrantly lit sky was more comfortable to lie under. So these citizens of the kingdom named ‘platform’—mired in pain and penury—now basked in open at the far ends of platforms under the unbiased, indiscriminating and warm beams of the bright father, who seemed chiding the cold breeze naughtily sashaying over the plains after tasting early snowfall in the upper reaches of the Himalayas.

Inshan’s hand-pulled cart—on which entailed the fistful of his life (loaded and embaled in fewest of things and circumstances)—was standing at this sunny far end of the platform. The world under the tin sheds appeared unwelcoming, cold, and rebuking. A train was standing by the platform. He looked thoughtfully into the people swarming its doors. There was an ostentatious penchant to grab a bit of space, a bit of foothold, a chit of more life. Then with a shrill toot the hooter went out and with a jerk the train started to move. Slowly...people fought their way rapidly. The last compartment was slowly moving away with introspecting sobriety. The cart-puller’s thoughtful gaze was distracted by a heavy footfall from the other direction. Having run along the stones and rails, a young man was now cascading still faster on the smooth tarred platform. The law of relative motions in operation, he ran smartly to emerge victorious in competition against the handle bar of the last carriage coldly running away. Old Inshan was brought out of his reverie. With agility unfaithful to his age, he rose from the rag he was lying on and ran to cross the young man’s path shouting:

“O brave son...it’s not a suitable place for sprinting and climbing!”

The young man swung around and gnashed angrily, “Enough of it old man...next time you do it I’ll break your hand!”

Those who commuted the place were conversant with this old beggary fellow’s policing regarding this violation of rule (of boarding a running train). He was a particular eyesore to the adventurous types. 

The adventurer just ran ahead. Helplessly, Inshan saw him running to the dangerous end. His dirty, stained, raggish, linen head-cloth draped over his head, standing tip-toe in praying agitation he watched the heroic feat. His hand gripping the door rail and running very fast, the young man launched himself but the spring in his feet was not enough. His knees struck against the foot support. Involuntarily Inshan’s eyes closed. He wouldn’t open them till the train had chugged away. Fortunately, the man’s grip had worked in proportion to the harsh words to the old porter, and hanging on he had somehow sneaked in helped by the passengers on board. There was no commotion of fear around the old onlooker. Hesitatingly the old man opened his eyes and much to his relief saw that the man had been saved. He was all alone in the world, so considered this vagrant fellow as one more belonging to his own family born of inshaniyat and thanked God for keeping his blessing eyes over this inexperienced and immature colt, who had just foolishly jumped into the invisible, inexhaustible, and inexplicable snare of accidents stealthily laid by the God of Death.

Thank God, for on this important day in his life no untoward incident had happened! Today he was to be rewarded by the Director of the local railway zone. Yesterday the station master had called him in his cabin and with dignified confidence informed him about it. One day’s gap between the announcement and the event only explicitly indicated that it was no pre-arranged and agreed recognition of his services. Still the staff at Ambala had been decent in grasping the opportunity of the Director’s visit as a reward function for the poor, homeless man’s yeoman service to humanity.

There was nobody from his lineage he could relate to. Before 1947, his poor Hindu family in a downtown quarter of Lahore survived and struggled as daily wage earners, picking up petty jobs thrown into their beggary bowl by the tensioned circumstances of those turbulent times. Then 1947 saw liberation and the massacres. At one of those long blood-hissing nights, when blood came to be strictly grouped as Hindu and Muslim, they somehow managed to board a bleeding train having more dead than alive. And even those on board had little chance of reaching alive to the other side of the border. As expected, before it could cross the newly created border, it was stopped by a blood-thirsty mob at a desolate place and unthinkable hacking of humans happened. It was hideous ecstasy. A savage delirium. He was seven years old and was lucky or unlucky to survive. Later at some station, he was dragged almost dead of fright. They pulled him out all blood stained from the mass of bodies. Blood dripping from the floors, he was thus lucky to come to Amritsar. He saw all his family members being hastily taken away in a truck overloaded with corpses for mass cremation.

From that day the platform became his home and all its allied crowded phenomena the familial things he could relate to. During his juvenile stage, he grew up doing all types of petty jobs, sufferings all types of physical and moral hazards, apart from ever-persistent exploitation that an orphan is destined to come under. Caught in the eternal encagement of circumstances, he worked as a tea-stall helper, table cleaner in station canteens, dishwasher in railway restaurants, balloon vendor, and peanuts hawker. And when his arms were strong enough to pull a handcart, he became a carter to carry all types of provisions on this small two-wheeled appendage to his beast-of-burden-type existence.

He definitely must have been given some name by his family. It but got smudged under blood clots and flesh in that train compartment. Hate doesn’t kill just bodies, it butchers names as well. His limbs were intact, but he had lost his name somewhere in the gory stampede. How do you keep your name alive? Only others can help you in this by sweetly or sourly speaking it, either in front of you or in your absence in some context. But a name that is never spoken by anybody evaporates like raindrops in a desert. His name had evaporated. Many a time he would think, who am I, and a blankness struck his like he did not exist at all. He still remembered what his family called him. But just a memory cannot help you in keeping your name alive. You need others to help you keep your name alive, and for that you ought to have a social identity. He hadn’t any, so very soon he became nameless. He would have lost his name forever, if not for this wandering mendicant, so prominently bearded and hair braids and all, who gave a warming sermon to tea-shipping passengers waiting for their trains that frigid night. “We should try to become inshan, a good human being, who follows inshaniyat...” He literally stole the word. Kept it safe in his pocket. Repeated it hundreds of times to stamp his identity. And knowing that a name is no name unless spoken by others, he did all he could to be recognised with that name. So he became Inshan, slowly, over a period of years. That was his achievement. He had earned a name. He was not nameless and faceless like scores of other citizens of the platform.

Time’s arms swung silently, straddling the decades of existence. Just survival for the sake of it, like it was the best achievement that could be. It was 40 years ago when he arrived at the Ambala railway station with his pittance of savings on his frail, prematurely withered 20-year-old personage in 1960. His initiation into what was to become the overarching motto of his life happened just after a couple of months after his arrival.

Diwali, the darkest night of Amavasya, is followed by the waxing phase of moony nights to reach the milky night’s brightest cusp in the rain-washed early winter sky. The moon’s unpolluted clarity and cool misty air make the nights smile at their best. During its waning phase after the full dazzle, the moonlight spreads in misty romance over the languorously lying nights. Sometimes during the morning twilight, when there is no mist, it shines like a night sun, casting shadows on earth, beating for some time even the sun’s efforts from below the horizon. It was on one such night that a middle-aged man belonging to some other part of the country was cut to pieces by a train. With disastrous discourtesy the time whirred on it axis. An accident. And a sinister silence sprawled over the scene. The sight’s horrific details struck him with all the fright possible to a human heart. It was an accident; an unclaimed body; so its removal from the tracks and cremation got mired in the usual hassles that accompany and entail public responsibility. It was broad daylight and the body still lay there. It made the tragedy even more gruesome. A policeman, standing as a sign of the authorities’ knowledge of the accident, was trying his level best to get some men and conveyance to take the limbs to the civil hospital for post-mortem.

Coming across the railway policeman’s helplessness and gory apathy for the after-death cause of once throbbing life, it was for the first time that Inshan’s conscience got those initial pickings, which if welcomed and received cordially blossom into beautiful moral facade.

The wholesale dealer whose packages of provisions were lying in the platform warehouse, having paid him some token money in advance, pulled at his sleeve with the attitude of a master hurrying his slave.

“Oh come on, haven’t you ever seen a dead body in your life,” he gasped huskily.

“Seen sahib...perhaps seen too many to ...!” from the deep dormitory of memories, cries, and killings flashed.

Solemnly straight-faced, he gently returned the ten rupee note and offered his services for the final journey of the diseased. The tragedy of these crushed limbs connoted the gruesome massacre in that fateful train. While on the way to the hospital, bloody scenes vividly, massively returned to haunt him. The savage behemoth of memories gripped him so tightly that he went numb. For a whole week afterwards he pulled his cart lost in a mysterious feeling. He had refused money for that job. It appeared too sinful and against whatever notion he had of dharma. Next month, while he was pulling his cart on the platform, he was beckoned by the same policeman who had asked him to take the unclaimed, unidentified body to the cremation ground. Again he followed the duty, just getting solace from the fact that his soul felt some invisible reward for the kind act. He was getting a sensation that even a 100 rupee note won’t give him, offered more as a tip or charity by a wealthy merchant in lieu of littlest of cartage.

It’s convenient to fall in the trap of cold apathy because it is easy like just drawing a breath. Goodness is just a one step away. It’s another matter that we choose to ignore it. It seems to require a huge effort to take that step. Some people but move out of the rut to pick it up. It gives them a certain satisfaction. He knew the meaning and essence of his name, so just picked up the abandoned speck of goodness. May be to keep his name alive; to prove that he is worth it. We explore meanings in life. He too had found one. His was a small world and he kept that speck of goodness. And held it with marvellous stillness.

As years reaped their share of accidents along the steely furrows, his voluntary acceptance of the job, in a period of time, became a duty in the eyes of others, who expected him to do it without even sparing some praise or appreciation for his unselfishness and without harbouring any reservations for their own apathy. Years rolled in this mundane way, interjected with atrophied chunks of accidents which spattered the earth now and then. He came to be known as the man who carried the dead bodies of train accidents to the civil hospital and even performed the last rites in case there was no claimant for the body.

Now after 40 years, his deeds had accomplished the benchmark of a reward. It was a sort of D-day to him. He drew out his bucket from under the cart and smartly, smugly went out to fetch water from the platform hand-pump. Coming back he freed his old tattered knapsack from its smart knot to the axle of his cart. The cart was his profession, his house, his world. Standing with its hand-bars raised on the peg-support, it served him as a shelter that enclosed his portion of the world. During winters, he put a tarpaulin sheet over the whole of it and sneaked into the tiny interior. A plank supported on bricks at both ends served as his bed.

Irrespective of all caste, class and all other man-made differentials, every person has a special dress to adorn for the special-most occasion. He too had one. Or rather he had a choice to hit the best combination out of various items: different-sized shirt, sweater, trousers, and shoes donated by those daily passengers who donated on some occasions with different moods with the same motive of getting God’s blessings in lieu of the charity. Most of these were oversize for him. The shoes, however, should not be too tight or too large; the rest of the mis-fittings can be somehow adapted. These adaptations are what he thought about tidying up. He borrowed hair oil, comb and a piece of looking glass from different beggary neighbours, prompting one of those kind commuters who sometimes spoke to him while coming from or going to office, to say:

“Ho Inshan, are you getting married today?!”

Beaming with shyness he replied, “Yes sahib, it’s as important as marriage!”

He had assumed that the function was for him specially. Each particle of his poor existence was agitated with excitement and frightful uncertainty. He was feeling a part of the larger world, not just a faceless speck lying on the platform. The people who mattered knew his name. That was the most important thing to him. He tidied up with a sweeping exuberance. How blissful the feeling! From the dark corner, which sucked all identity and spewed invisibility, he had been put on a shiny stage. He was recognised. They knew him. All the miseries of life didn’t matter anymore.

It’s very difficult for the world to change suddenly to accommodate such happiness. All these goose-bumps creating sensations were belied very soon as he was made to sit in a last row in the hall. It was some big show for a bigger purpose. He felt being sucked into oblivion again. With joggling force it swept the tiny cottage of his expectations. His felicitation was a mere appendage to the function and that too caused by the generosity of the station master. Still, with a school boy’s eagerness and anticipation he saw the proceedings to make the best of the occasion. However, his patience was wearing thin and for a moment he even grew apprehensive that they might just wind it up without even recalling his presence.

Luck but struck for him at last. The station master got up and gave a nice introduction to his deeds of 40 years. It lasted a couple of minutes and during that period people cared to look at him like a fellow human being. He found it too burdensome, the gaze of the gentry from the better world, and stared at the faded leather of his shoes in embarrassment. Walking up to the stage his limbs were trembling. The Director, an enlightened academic man, was impressed by the gilded caption to the long chapter of his unassuming, unknown life. The station master had handed him 1100 rupees to give as a reward to this poor carter in recognition of his services. Deep down in his conscience, however, he felt hurt somehow, in some vague manner. Rolling the notes in his fingers, he was lost in thoughts as this beggary man attired in his best dress approached the stage. He felt that giving just money (without any souvenir) would be trivialising the silent services of this man. So his senses ran to find something to act as a medallion (the real reward) along with the money that would surely get spent. There was nothing but the bouquet presented to him. He picked it up and handed it to the embarrassed and shy person cowering in front of him, patting him, congratulating him for the show of humanity on the inhuman platforms. There was customary round of applause. Inshan just stared mechanically at the objects of his reward. With an overpowering emotion, he hugged tight the flowery recognition of his deeds and stammered:

“Thank you for the flowers sir. But I...I cannot accept money for it seems as if today after years I’m accepting the price for my services to the dead.”

Saying this in all humility he put out his hand to give the money back to the chief guest. Dumbstruck by the dazzle of this lotus of goodness in the mud of life on the platform, the Director could not utter a word. He appeared reactionless. He just patted the frail man on his shoulder. Putting the money on the table and embracing the flowers, Inshan saluted in military fashion and moved out.

For many days to come, he ogled with happiness at the withering flowers, drawing more juice of happiness out of those rumpled petals and crumpled stalks...and still more as the de-juiced, crumpled petals lost all moisture and turned to pieces.

So he kept on living and serving in his customary manner without anymore rewards and earning his livelihood by transporting goods on his hand-pulled cart.

The Bread of Stones

God must have been in benign, prodigious spirits when He decided to bless this simple farmer couple in rural Haryana with a child who became talk of the village right from his birth-cry on account of his bulk and weight. In was a culture defined by putting on more and more weight fuelled by copious diet of milk, butter, butter-milk and curd, and digesting the same in competition against the beasts in the fields. The most important cultural items, if we can call ‘agriculture’ the culture, included the plough, bulls, cart and hookah. In such an agri(cultural) scene, this robust son of the poor, famished farmers could give smirk, solace and consolation to the perpetually toiling parents, that God had showered all blooms and benediction upon them in the form of this exponentially robust boy whom people loved to cuddle, caress, and call Pahalwan.

It was 1950 when God blessed them with this star of their eyes and everyone else around. Looking at him they would forget their hard days and become numb to the bone-breaking drudgery and, like humans usually do, start dreaming of a comforting future during their old age, secured in his mighty arms. The poor farmer’s family stretched out its last of the last farthings earned from their small plot of landholding to keep up pace with his furiously increasing diet. By his tenth year people started calling him Bhima for he really looked like the mythical super-heavyweight Pandava. If there is power and those around you smirk at it, making it the first item of congratulatory glances in your persona, you too then, like a fleeced animal, jump for an acrobatic display to win more applauds. He too did the same. The boy would crouch down under a calf, taking his arms around the pair of forelegs, and give a ferocious push to lift the little one on his back. As he grew up fulfilling people’s expectations, their hopes also increased in parallel. Such is society after all. It is a playful thing for them to watch someone become increasingly ambitious, venturesome, and adventurous—especially if it does not materialise in monetary gains, in that case they might even start looking down at it, for if money enters the fray it no longer stays a casual time pass and becomes an enviable business. Since not a single paisa was involved in the entertainment, they doled out copious amounts of praise, expecting him to become bold and daring to cross all limits to get crushed one day finally under an unthinkable weight, and become the stuff of local legend that will give them entertaining anecdote to share in chaupals sometime in the future. 

More the people’s expectations, more was the weight on his broadening, bulky back, and still more became the pressure on the resources of his frail father. The prematurely greying man had seen those days when the wrestlers and power jugglers were held in venerable esteem, when wonderstruck Maharajas showered sparkling bounties on their sweating, soil-smeared, muscular frames after witnessing an entertaining, daring show of strength; when the akhara was worshipped like a shrine; when in local wrestling duels at fairs people gathered crazily to watch and holler at the brutal show of strength. Apart from the heroic status, object of incessant talk, it fetched rewards as well. However, in post-independent India the returns from the show of strength were getting bleaker. After all, it was a modern India in the making. Show of mind was getting predominance over the show of strength.

He was their only child. Such a huge one. Easily spottable wherever he went. His body was not muscular like stone. It was corpulent, but that sort of flesh which always breaks the shackles of lethargy. He was wonderfully agile for his shaking flesh. The more he tried to tan and harden his body, thicker grew the flesh. The taller he grew, the more became his strength and agility. His critics started calling him a slumberous elephant, but in reality he was agile like a panther. Someone one day shouted from behind the bushes ‘elephant’s calf’ to which one of his admirers might have justifiably added ‘but having a tiger’s prowess and agility’.

“Studies are for weaklings only! If he torments his brain he will get weak!” his father would easily remark whenever the question of studies arose.

So unsurprisingly he did not know much of letters and books. Despite this his passage through the years was unchecked, his promotion from one standard to another vouchsafed by his brave efforts in the akhara of this tiny primary school that complacently saw the students up to the eighth standard before leaving the field open for the studious volunteers to take cudgels at higher studies in towns and cities.

When he was in the sixth standard—here we include this just for chronology’s sake—tragedy struck the household. It was a fine evening that seemed all eager to bestow all the prospects of a good supper and rest after daylong ploughing in the fields as his father was returning home. The tiny bells around the bullocks’ necks chimed in congratulatory tone for the good acreage covered during the day. He was giving patronising pats at the cattle’s haunches. But then pleasant and carefree present is oftentimes ambushed by the advance patrol of future—is the plan predetermined or we just by chance come into the line of fire?—leaving the main body of future to decide and twist our fate. On a path-side tree, a big hive of bumble-bees, of the size of a fat calf, had been robbed of its orderly sense. Some eagle might have tried to sneak out a beakful of honey from some corner. It might have hit at some weak point and a larger section of comb had fallen, letting loose chaos, and gone was that fine thread of responsibility and commitment by the time to maintain normalcy. Big black bumble-bees were swarming furiously to take revenge and fall prey upon anybody who chanced to arrive and fill up the vacancy of ‘enemy’. The poor tired farmer fell victim to their unremitting fury. He crouched down and fell at the spot. After heart-rending cries he toppled unconscious to get further stings of mortality. The bullocks also bore the brunt of their fury. Pitifully bitten they ran towards the village. An hour later when the villagers approached the scene of the bees’ crime they found his terrifyingly swollen body lying in the sand. If not in life, at least near death he indeed appeared the father of his prodigiously huge son. As the nearest hospital was 20 kilometres away, and no mechanical conveyance at hand, they took him in a cart and beat the bulls back mercilessly to defeat the swift pace of death. The poor farmer died on the way.

He was just eleven when he lost his father. Now was the time to put the stone of responsibility on his bulky childish shoulders in addition to the playful load of entertainment on his back. School was now necessarily a waste of time, for validity of cultural things is relatively defined by the time one has to spend in earning bread and butter. He thus dropped out of the school, like anyone else would have done and in fact scores of others were doing the same, and helped his mother in agricultural chores. It was mere sustainable agriculture on a small plot of land, just to beat the hunger, nothing more. It is a vicious circle among one or the other deprivations, killing of one dream so that others won’t grow at all, of becoming a hardworking brute so that no finer thing pinches the hardened physique and roughed soul.

He was moulded unsentimentally as a boy of his bulk is expected to be when buffeted by adversities. But the human soul cannot be a desert beyond the oasis of sentimentality completely. In his simplicity he knew—in vague connotations and feelings—that his father would have drawn maximum solace from the sight of more and more weight on his son’s bulk. So his duties in the fields could not shun his weight-adding worship to his body. He just accepted it as another brick on his back.

A school dropout, a slogger in his fields, performer at fairs and local competitions (whenever time was available) that is how adolescence took shelter in his bulging figure. It was the rattling anonymous pace for survival. The future devoid of all glory now waited as a mundane akhara to be treaded sweating and perspiring. He simply followed the rut just like others did, though intermittently encumbering his back and shoulders with unbelievably large weight.

Some sympathiser suggested he should join an akhara to try professional wrestling. But quite mysteriously this big strong lad seemed fit for utilising his enormous energy in vertical component more than in any other direction. He could lift huge, unbelievable weight on his back and shoulders. Wrestling, however, is a three-dimensional game of manoeuvrability and force. Everybody expected him to exploit the field in proportion to his weight-lifting capacity. They were not—especially the guruji—satisfied with his performance in the field. In one duel, when the rustic, strongly pumped pride of the akhara was at stake, this big boy, always in news on account of his mammoth physique, could not uphold the banner and surprisingly hit the dust to everybody’s disbelief. It proved decisive.

“You fit-for-nothing big elephant, you slouching sloth! You yourself eat almost half the ration of the whole akhara! And let us down like this!” the head pahalwan in charge of the akhara could not control himself.

Perhaps for the first time in his life, buds of anger sprouted forth inside this calmest sea of eighteen. The head wrestler weighed around one quintal. He just plucked him off the ground and threw him, breaking one of his legs and couple of ribs. It was sacrilegious...unpardonable from all angles. In this mighty game played on the bosom of sand, the guru is even more venerable than Hanuman, the God of wrestlers in northern India. So they condemned him and implicit in this condemnation was the verdict that henceforth nobody would accept him as a pupil wrestler. Led by frustrating, flailing youthful instincts he stopped exercises, increased his gluttony, and worked still harder in fields with lessening returns. Result? The body that could have been sculpted beautifully got puffed up like a balloon. By his twenty-first year he stood six feet four inches around a pulpy weight.

The last vestiges of wrestlership were naturally harvested as his prematurely old mother got him married to a farmer girl. Now in this part of the country, if somebody with power and attitude for wrestling bids adieu to celibacy and ties the knot, putting his langar on the door-side wall spike, he just becomes the yoked bullock of the family institution, all his energies being sapped by the constantly demanding role of the family man.

By the age of thirty he led a brood of four kids, a famished wife with spent eyes and a bed-ridden mother. He still ate much and his quarrelling wife cursed him for this.

“You eat 90% of your farm’s production!” she often cried with scorn.

When after at least a thousand versions of the same scolding put some weight on his heart, and like a father going to the battle field for survival, he decided to do what deemed fit for him—lifting weights. After some days in the privacy of his cattle house someone was fortunate enough to peep inside and come across this spectacle:

The bulky man caressed the buffalo with his huge hands. The gentle animal acknowledging the gesture raised its tail. The man then bent down and sneaked under the animal’s belly supporting it on his back. Resting his palms on the ground, feet planted firmly he heaved gently, softly. His bulk thrust into the protruding mass on him. Another great jerk and his hands were resting on his knees. The animal’s spine arched; hoofs barely touching the ground. Giving a huge cry and grunting his teeth, he gave another push and for an instant the onlooker might have doubted his eyes when he saw the four hoofs slightly airborne for the fraction of a second. The animal panicked and kicking its legs threw the man onto the ground, and almost trampling him broke free of its tethering.  

From that day onwards the word of his feat again started doing rounds. The man was in streets now showcasing his power-lifts. From his thirtieth year to the fortieth he performed mighty heaves and lifts in the countryside of Haryana, earning mammoth praise and pittance of money, sugar, butter, flour, jiggery, and many other things that bucolic praise could fetch him. With the little money he supported his family and ate almost rest of the offerings, sparing just enough for the children and his accusing wife. He lifted heavy stone-rollers on his shoulders; crouched under a wet sack of sand weighing four quintals and still a man sitting on it and moved ahead; pulled massive wooden beam, with many children riding on it, tied to a thick hemp rope with his teeth. He then claimed the maximum attention he could draw. A photo in a local vernacular paper: a felicitation cheque worth 5000 rupees by a state minister. He had risked his life hundreds of times to reach this level.

Nonetheless, any bull or horse, howsoever hard and sturdy in the heydays, comes across the days of ignominy and neglect. Age was catching up with him, and so was people’s expectation. To find no fault with the audience, those who had seen him at the cusp of his abilities, now found little applauding interest in his waning performances. Hence, the quantity of offerings on the linen sheet of his sweat and slogging trickled down rapidly in his forties.

He had three daughters. His son was the youngest. During this period of waning business, with the money he had saved, he married his two elder daughters. The third one, the son and their mother tirelessly worked in the fields to keep the fire going in their fireplace. Now he returned more sullenly and more frequently and earlier from the performing tours.

It was 1995. The third daughter had also blossomed. Sensing the precariousness of youth, his wife continually prodded him to find a match. Out of job he was slouching at home and there was no money. She gave him an ultimatum that the girl had to be married in the upcoming marriage season at any cost. However, before setting out to find a match, he needed the feel of some money with himself to even have the guts to propose because dowry was absolutely mandatory. After much deliberation and no solution in sight, he was thinking of selling the land to save the family’s honour at any cost. Then an opportunity glared!

****

In the Buddhist philosophy of interlinking of universal phenomena in a commonly linked cause and effect chain, the phenomena at two places are reciprocally inter-effecting. His individual-level problem and its solution had something to do with the national capital. As the city grew mammoth so did the milk demand, and to meet it illegal dairies boomed. These milk producers—problems or solutions, put anyone before or after at your own convenience—gave rise to an irritation for the urban gentry. It was the problem of stray cattle. These proud beholders of our religiosity now blocked the capital’s rapid pace to development. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) had some cattle-catching vans, but the city’s civic body drew flack for its inability to put a check to the ever-burgeoning problems. These mute and frustrated animals, pushed against the wall for survival in the concrete jungle, started attacking the people. Put into a tight fearsome corner, the people themselves started to chase them away. In one month four people had been gored to death. Their status thus became analogous to man-bovine conflict in the concrete jungle.  

The Delhi High Court whiplashed the civic agencies and held them responsible for the incidences. Without mincing any critical remark, it ordered compensation from the MCD coffers, relocation of illegal dairies (most of whom thrived on political patronage), and gave instructions to round up the stray cattle as soon as possible. The MCD in turn reprimanded its Director of Veterinary Services for the cattle menace. Apart from the court’s indicting music, delegations from resident’s welfare association from different colonies led by their smart, suave retired presidents and secretaries virtually bombarded the agency with their incessant complaints. The posh colonies of south Delhi—whose residents having toiled lifelong for urban advancements and amenities found these characteristics of third-word India quite unbearable—were raising hell of a storm.

Poor cows in posh colonies. Not matching. Religion has its use, but from a safe distance. It was an insult to the retired citizens’ right to lead an advanced life in posh surroundings. But then filthy India is too strong and big. It seeps into the islands of peace and prosperity. It was a big problem indeed. They even employed special guards to fight away the pathetic encroachers into the smirking clean neighbourhoods. To fulfil their quota in the problem, these upmarket people left huge piles of garbage on the margins of their localities, where the herds of stray cattle gathered and repeatedly peeked over their boundaries. Further frustrated they installed cattle traps at colony entries, but the problem won’t be solved. Cast out from the illegal and legal dairies and gau dharamshalas, bee-hiving in hellish stinking environment of Asia’s largest fruit and vegetable market at Azadpur and at incalculable small market places and garbage dump-sites, these poor cattle, grossly caricatured in their skeletons, reminded people that India still was a country of masses despite efforts to the contrary by a few selected men of classes.

The High Court bombarded with pleas and litigations from South Delhi colonies had to direct the MCD to announce a scheme of reward to any citizen for catching the stray cattle. The MCD’s veterinary officers and inspectors were directed to make arrangements for this. The Deputy Commissioner of South Zone came zealously forward to follow the directive. A lump-sum prize of one thousand rupees per catch was announced in newspapers. However, very few came forward to take up the offer from inside the city to encash the risky reward. After spending some years in human-hugging crowd of indulgent mundane masses, the sight of an animal puts one in perspiration mode. The city seeps into the spirits. It chains the guts. So the Delhi government, MCD and NDMC raked their brains, ‘Where could the probable volunteers come from?’ The choice was easy: Haryanvis who are born and brought up in the nearest vicinity of lowing and braying cattle and buffaloes. They are more comfortable in the company of quadrupeds than the two-pawed, over-smart animal ruling the earth. So there were quite a few takers for the risky job in the surrounding pockets of Haryana as advertisements appeared in local newspapers. Our out-of-job, 45-year-old man of this type of business also caught hold of the offer. Even if I catch 90 of these it would ensure the marriage of my last daughter, and the dispensation of my responsibility to save the family’ honour, he thought.

In the battle for survival, the stray cattle and our Pahalwan were now face to face. Both sides pushed by the larger forces, driving them into the corner of limitations and deprivations. The cattle, once the proud beholders of the emblem of survival and spirituality, carried a much faded respect as their utility had plummeted down dangerously. However, this fact was not sufficient to wipe these out of existence. Even in this majestically shiny cityscape these were needed when young and abandoned later. The male calves were even at greater risk of being let loose and roam ownerless because they were not for milk, and their utility when grown up was just for farming tasks that was not to be here in the cities. So the dairy owners just pushed the males out keeping the female calves with them. Their rival, our Pahalwan, was also almost obsolete on account of the oddity of preferring physical strength over brain. These were smarter times, of brain over the brawn. With education India was taking massive leaps towards development with sharper minds and less show of brute physical strength that could just provide the job of daily wage earning around construction sites.

Most of the stray cattle were just mute and pathetically fragile animals, and just after a frail tip of struggle gave into the bulky man’s rope, fist, elbow, and knee work. Still cuts, wounds, sores, and bruises cannot be avoided in a fight between animals and humans. Given his lifetime drudgery in the akhara of power game, he performed as he ought to have as per his experience. He did admirably well and within no time became the prized cattle-catcher. After a month in the capital he returned like a soldier on vacation from the battle front; carrying a broken tooth, blooded pupil, swollen lip, and dangerously paining joints on account of his fights in the concrete jungle. However, these things were easily overshadowed and safely bandaged under the note pads of 40,000 rupees under his belt. His ecstatic wife served, solaced, and assuaged him both physically and mentally as to the humble capacity of her weak, work-wreaked body. It was but a half accomplished mission. He needed one more such push, exactly the same in fruits and then he could rest for a bit longer, for the future of his only son should not offer them much problem. In a terribly patriarchal society, the chances of the son of the poorest of the poor are still better than the daughter of a reasonably well-off person. Nevertheless, the son of a poor man meekly saddles himself almost with the same set of problems and solutions as his father.

During this one-week stay at home he was restless; always anxious lest all the cattle are caught in his absence. His tendons, muscles, joints, and ligaments were still protesting when he again set out for the job. As it happens with the two ends of a scale, once evenly balanced, if the weight is decreased in one pan, the other becomes weightier even though no physical weight has been added to it. With each new fight he got more injuries, became less menacing in his approach, and consequently more became the effect of the animals’ protests. Like a long-fatigued traveller, he took final steps into the second leg of his journey. After twenty more catches he was having sleepless nights on account of his pains. Some suggested that he must hire some assistant to help him, but he won’t share the booty with anybody. All along his life he had worked alone, and he preferred to carry with it even now. More than brute force, now he employed strategies and shrewdness to ensnare the animals, which made it even worse, for it became a game running into days and nights with equal felicity. Using more brain than brawn was not his real self. But the game of survival was forcing him to become smarter in the city. During his initial catches people loved to watch him from a safe distance. He was providing a few street shows as well. They applauded when he, like a heavy grindstone, clasped the animal’s neck and forced the rope-end on one of the front hoofs, ran the rope diagonally under the belly to give expertly unbalancing push, and once the cattle was grounded he would just throw his bulk on the terrified body. His huge proportions made him look like any other animal. All hoofs and horns tied, these would be picked by the MCD vans to be transported out of the area of its jurisdiction.

He was in low spirits, bruised, and anxious because the remaining cattle were sturdier, because it is the rule of the jungle, concrete or the green one, the frailest are the one to be wiped out at the earliest. Ironically, the lesser became his odds, the stronger he faced the enemies. In his forty-ninth and fiftieth fight he could have been easily killed. However, drawing out reserves of his strength he turned sure defeat into couple of more thousands for his daughter’s marriage to salvage his honour by getting her married at the earliest. Once so near the target, no eventuality and foreboding would fright him away from the grand figure of money sufficient to pay for the dowry of his daughter.

His body was rapidly giving in. He knew any catch could be fatal and the last. The remaining cattle were predominantly bulky bulls. He just could not convince himself to call it quits with immediate effect. It was like leaving the field out of being scared. His brawn was fighting with his brain; both drawing him in different directions. His brain could not force him to flee with immediate effect. His brawn held him back for some worthy fight, one final soul-satisfying battle. He knew that he was preparing for his final catch and then sweet return to home. He prayed to God—he did it for the first time in his life—to get him face to face against a famished prey. But he knew that none of the frail ones was left. Only hefty beasts were still cocking a spook at the civilized face of urban gentry. The earth is the testing and trying arena of God against our wishes, prayers and dreams. His case was no exception. In proportion to the fervency of his prayer, he came face to face with a bizarre bull that had gored a couple of people to death and injured many others. It was only on account of religious sentiments that it had been given a bit more time to try other means before the final step of shooting it dead. Our Pahalwan, at the lowest ebb of his strength, was against the strongest opponent—one of the few whose attempts at challenging man’s authority in the concrete jungle had sparked the numero uno animal’s anger—the real culprit from among the dozens of previous weakling and innocent ones.

The thought of only one man tackling this monster was a glaring impossibility. However, if one is once at the threshold of a dream’s fructification, possible and impossible lose their meanings. It had even gone beyond the expectation of just 1000 rupees extra. He was fighting it for himself. He believed himself to be the strongest. He had to prove it to leave a local legend so that those who saw it won’t forget it till their last breath. Having pity, they doubled the booty on the fearsome creature’s head and promised help in man and material.

Well, he nonetheless fought the battle of his life. He at the lowest of his will power, strength and capacity while confronted by the mightiest deed of his life. By this time, he had acquired a bit of local fame. This almost pre-announced fight carried news-worthiness with it. His game of life and death carried circus value. From a safe distance a journalist followed the action on camera to catch the highest point of action. People depending on their bravery quotient chose their safe distances as allowed by their urbanity. What happened for the next one hour, nobody, who witnessed it, will ever forget it till his last moment. The bull went on a rampage. Several times it brought him down on his knees with the huge toss of its horns. He but escaped being trampled to death on account of the still remaining signs of his agility that in the face of death so near worked at full throttle. In frustration, and not without a prick of conscience even at the perilous moment, Pahalwan had to thrust a wood splinter into the bull’s eye in order to mellow its lethality and blithe brutality from so near quarters. Both of them were bleeding and panting. The one who lasted more was to win. For dozens of times the bull had escaped the ensnaring loop of his rope. Taking a sharp turn he approached suddenly from the side of the bull’s gored eye. It spared him from the rival’s peremptory advance. The bull was thus a bit belated in defence. Grabbing it like the last opportunity till eternity, he clung to the left foreleg like lice. Jumping and swinging around wildly, the bull gave ferocious jerks at his neck to kill him with its horns. He had been successful in tying the rope-end to the leg. Taking the other free end in his hand, he jumped into the well of death—dived under the belly to emerge on the other side, taking the rope diagonally across the beast. The people saw the hoofs squelching on his flesh. He but was oblivious to all pain now. He looped the other end around the right hind leg and was dragged by the furiously charging bull for a few paces. When the line was finished, its charge forward became its own undoing. The huge mass toppled down. People looked with horror.  

With the spare rope in his hand, the man all bloodied jumped onto the bull and fell between horns. His hands worked till he had tightly tied the rope-end around the horns. The bull had been knotted and embaled. It struggled. The man just remained there on the trophy. Blood copiously oozing from his mouth. All the promised help now arrived. The MCD veterinary surgeon, sure of the safety, injected the bull with heroic fingers. The bull collapsed. The man too. He died. His spine broken. His shattered ribs protruding through his lungs. With full honours he was taken to his native village.

He had gathered 55,000 rupees for his daughter’s marriage. And couple of thousand for the last kill to defray the cremation and allied crematoria costs. It was the last kill!

Lost in Red Mist

Kashmir, the paradise on earth; the jewel of the Himalayas; the abode of large glaciers (Siachen, Baltora, Biafo, Hisper); the proud beholder of mammoth peaks (K2, Gasherbrum); the conglomerate of mountainous, fearless details with its successive waves of Pir Panjal, Zaskar, Ladhak, and Karakoram ranges running from N-W to S-E; the carrier of the throbbing arteries of Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, lakes and rivulets; and ending at the knot of Pamir, the roof overlooking the rugged plateaus of Central Asia. The valley of Kashmir lying between Pir Panjal and Zaskar—the heart of Kashmir—palpitates with murmuring ingression of the Jhelum blithely cutting across the valley. With passionate honesty, nature smiles on beautiful female faces. There is magnetic ambience that finds the soul scampering away on a spiritual sojourn. Mystically glorious chime of brooks sing songs of holistic wellness. There are little lilting paradises scattered in solitary groves.

Here the rich forests nurture tropical evergreens like siso, mahua, neem, and khair in the south; leading to lush green Himalayan temperate forests like pine, oak, chir, conifers, silver fir, blue pine, and deodar in the north. What is the exact shape and size of Kashmir? History is muddled, so even more muddled are the interpretations. As per our claim it appears the most beatifically set and balanced crown on Hindustan. Like a triumphant headgear its proudly uplifted N-W fold meets the Pamir knot; pleasantly topographic handshake with Afghanistan through 40 Km wide Vakhan corridor; Vakhan buffer separating it from Tajikistan, hesitantly eyeing imperialist China in north; and recalcitrant Tibet in the east with its distinct socio-cultural and physiographic entity. Multiple forces worked greedily, laid grabbing hands on its horns; shook it and took away chunks—chunks of strategic location in its northern wastelands and strips and pieces on religious ground along the west. Result! See the map of this disputed territory in foreign news channels. A torn topography: older sedimentary and granitic rocks, highly folded, faulted, fossilised glaciers, deposits of boulder clay, U-shaped hanging valleys, river terraces, and average mountain heights around 3000 meters. Torn languages as well: Urdu, Kashmiri, Dogri, Ladhaki, and Gujri. Facing such a paradox of ‘who is right; who is wrong?’ has no meaning in the hotchpotch manmade clatter. Still there is a floral synergy; there is an inexplicable musical note that plays in the background of gun-smoke and blasts. But then suddenly a disturbing glint punctuates the demure sentence of silence. And it becomes uncharacteristically noisy and cacophonous. In the protectively caring cradle of nature the kids of freedom try to hold onto dying dreams. It’s not a matter of who is to be blamed. More important is who is suffering on account of wayward obsessions.

China took the stony wastes for geostrategic and warlike motives. But the war between the famed rivals has torn living tissues, hearts, limbs, cultures, and religions. Meanwhile nature flows still with some inaudible message as breaching torrents of Kishanganga, Jhelum, and Chenab cut through Pir Panjal ranges to irrigate and fulfil human needs all across Kashmir and beyond like a mother beyond this game. In self-sustaining free spirits, time, and topography carved out passes like Banihal through granite, gneiss, and schist to allow the lugubrious, slow-paced caravan passage to the heart of paradise. The mountain soils in their shallow and silty loams to dark and rich un-decomposed organic matter provide just enough for need, far away from greed. In exotically versatile spirits people cultivate Ladhak gram, paddy wheat, maize, barley, and potatoes. In solitary confines they lead almost an unknown life surviving on little occupations like crafting papier mache, Kashmir handicrafts, wood carving, and carpet and shawl making. Beyond the pale of fortuitous circumstances there are so many little worlds hidden in the majestic mist of lofty valleys.

Nature must have had a grand purpose in demarcating the western boundary along N-S line defined by Jhelum. Its embracing curves around the feeble, imperceptible, loose line of symbolism defining a distinct socio-cultural and physiological entity to the east. But then the partition turned it into a bloodied, iron-grilled, and barbed one. The frontier moved and ended in a bloodied LoC to the eastern side. In the north it lost its bloody colour in the vast, uninhabited northern wastes. In south Jammu, Rajouri, Poonch, Baramula, and Kupwara slowly humanity bleeds across both slopes of the Poonch-Riasi hills. Here the clinkers and epiphytes tighten their survival grips around the trees at the sudden shudder of unnaturally banging noise. Wild olives are not wild; they get trampled suddenly by an encroaching human foot. Pine, cedar, silver fir, spruce, laurel, juniper, and bamboo suddenly come out of their ancient silence and helplessly watch the blasting fury, the man-made fury, the war of religions. Chilgoza and cypress on steep limestone slopes hold to their grip more tightly as the game of one-upmanship is suddenly bulleted through the greenery where no human foot had trodden possibly for decades. In the highest alpine forests, dense green scrub buried under snow suddenly comes to life as humans pursue each other in blind desperation. Silver fir, pine, and birch lying in pleasant hibernation like skeletons under snow break their snowy slumber and brace up fearfully as fearsomely hard-hitting mandarins arrive. Surrounding mountain ranges in the valley echo with hate and its carrier weapons. River terraces, snows, glacier, and flowers have taken a backseat. Something more important has taken the front-seat.

In the University of Kashmir and Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology in Srinagar some mightier lessons are discussed among the teachers and students. Simple knowledge is no longer relevant. Hazratbal mosque engraved carpentry sells more than any other florid design born of artistic creativity. Srinagar in the bosom of the valley on river Jhelum and connected to Leh through Zoji pass is a sickened heart. Beats with fervid, panicked beats. It’s under attack. It shakes. Life still tries its best to take a foothold as people try to carve out a living through growing saffron (kesar), mushroom, zira and honey in the valley, and apple, almond, walnut, and cashews on the hills around. While they look around with suspicion and grudges at the uniformed soldiers they continue working at wood carving, woollen textile, silk weaving, carpet making and many other handicrafts. Gulmarg ‘the meadow of flowers’ is no longer the Gulmarg known to the outside world. It was defined by the tourists’ exclamations, so without them it is just any other place. Anantnag at the foot of Pir Panjal on the right bank of Jhelum is looking insecurely at the arrival of a new heavily weaponised military unit. Of course there had been many strikes at military pickets by the secessionists. Across the fractured line of the tissues of the same limb puss oozes out. There are wounds at all levels, to all sides.

Staring down at this blooded line from the eastern side, the peaks of Pir Panjal range shake with pangs of agony, for beyond lay the heart of the vale of Kashmir, the glittering symbol of Kashmiriyat in it sheenful socio-cultural and environmental connotations. Pleasant pensiveness of this cradle of heaven on earth has been lost and dusted. The uneasiness prevailing between 1947 and 1989 that had not been able to tarnish the slumberous charm of the paradise—including the jolts of 1948, 1961, 1965 and 1971, for these had just predominantly geographic connotations—was suddenly kicked in its belly by the Jihadi version of the issue. It 1989 the volcano erupted in the flowery valleys. Long-drawn-out follies (despite best efforts to integrate the state in all forms) and single-minded, devastating proxy warfare of Pakistan were the ammunitions. There were genuine causes of grudge on this side and Pakistan threw oil in the slowly smouldering fire. Richly beautiful peaks, pastures, and wooded slopes of Pir Panjal became the blooded battle ground of insurgents, rebels, militants (with local and PoK bases) and the counter-insurgency measures of India. In place of glow-worms in autumnal dales, rockets and shells flashed. Gunpowder pungency hit the nostrils as the sharp odour prevailed over the intoxicating smell of apple orchards and wild flowers. Love was replaced by hate. Humanity huddled on the highest peaks of mountains. Below violence and intimidation did the nasty rounds. Ecstatic exuberance of sweetly pining solitude was overtaken by a mad raze of one-upmanship. The springs lot their lively, vibrant colours; summers lost their cool, breezy airy openness; autumns lost their surrendering, windfalling siesta; and winters lost their frozen moments of love in the snow.

Isolated from Delhi! The only surface link between New Delhi and Srinagar, National Highway 1Acut through the Pir Panjal’s eastern margins, passing through the Banihal Tunnel (2813 meters) acting as the gateway to the valley of Kashmir. These were late nineties of the last century. The famed Kashmiri scenic beauty and panorama along the LoC in Poonch Rajouri sector covered by Pir Panjal had been shot in full blossom by unbridled violence. Incessant clatter of guns along the LoC from both sides echoed among distant peaks. It had become natural and normal like the chirp of a bird. There were also those fierce encounters between militants and security forces in tiny hamlets, forests, and craggy cliffs.

The last major township to the west in Poonch district, Surankote appeared famished of its pastoral charms after almost a decade of insurgency. Neighbouring Hill Kaka tract was awash with militants, their local commanders even boasted of running an Islamic State there. Indian government literally out-swarmed the area with military, but still infiltration continued given the harsh terrain. Casualties on both sides ensued but the worst sufferers were the self-sufficient pastoral people of the Gujjar Muslim community. Cradled in the high altitude climate they roamed the pastured hill slopes. Survival meant migration to upper reaches to escape the rising temperatures in summers leaving behind their shelters empty for the season. There high on the slopes their cattle and sheep nibbled at grass in the green chiragas (pastures) while the still higher peaks—snow left just on their crown heads—appeared lost in misty blue. During the days when there was no LoC, people from as far as Mirpur (now in PoK) travelled to this part during seasonal shifting. In the little circumference of their self-sustaining endeavours they formed a world that was just driven by simple need, unstigmatised by any materialistic greed. The pastures were lush green. Time moved on with gracefully languorous strides. Alas, these grazing lands were now being trampled under the beastly man-made hoofs. In the vilified air of suspicion desperate soldiers saw connivance at every nook corner. These proud hilly people in turn hated them as occupiers, for the larger issues of sovereignty, nationhood, nation state, and theocracy had no meaning for them. Beyond the clutches of the larger world, they had led isolated lives following their unique customs. Then militants arrived. They claimed to be freedom fighters, the ones who were waging holy war, and asked for unquestioned requisition of food, shelter, and even sex. Any question and they were termed as traitors to the religion. It was a struggle for freedom they said. But to these nomadic Gujjar Muslims freedom meant only moving with their animals to their highland chiragas. They were not much concerned about facts and figures of a larger life beyond this.

Having spent his entire fifty years in these remote Pir Panjal mountains of Surankote, Muhammad Aslam Khan scratched his beard in trepidation. In Marrah (a forward hamlet in Surankote) a gentle gale tugged at his beard to make him realise the disciplined periodicity of his earlier migrations. His world started and ended between dhoks, temporary shelters in higher pastures, and his permanent stone, wood, and mud cabins in Marrah. Journeys among these meant life. It was late spring time. Snow had thawed in higher reaches. Blades had grown. Their scent pricked his nostrils as he greedily ogled into the hazy heights. All through the spring he had suffocated his urge to escape into the thawing pastures. However, all the paths leading out of the hamlet had military outposts. How he wished to run unchecked into the far flung hamlets on this and the other side to meet his acquaintances and relatives. He had no photograph of theirs, so despite his best efforts only a misty semblance of their visage and gilded name entered his brain. His closest friend Haji Makhan came to meet him the other day. Coming from Telikatha in Kulali belt this mighty mountaineer and scaler of peaks appeared sagged and worn out.

“At every step you have to show this chit!” he held out a dog-eared piece of card paper that authenticated his identity. “I could have even twice scaled the Tatakutti hills”—Pir Panjal’s highest peak—“during this time.”

Their friendship had blossomed in mountains. “Last year we somehow managed. But this year it seems almost impossible,” his host agreed and nodded into the mountains.

“From our side too we cannot move out. Delhi army is swarming like ants along the surrounding ridges. Still the Jihadis succeed in piercing. The terrain does the plainers in. If a goat can sneak in through the densely forested hillside so can the fighters. The army-men just spray around their bullets during nights while they safely land in,” Haji Makhan sighed and added another talk about the long-running saga basically of agonies. 

Bashir, his nephew, got a few of them into the village two nights back. “Lashkar-e-Taiba commander,” he had pointed at the fiercely big fellow. The man in turn said that the area was under their control and they would liberate the whole land from here onwards.

“The earlier they do it, the better it would be. Before summers! So that we can go to the chiragas freely!” Aslam had a glint of hope in eyes.

During winters about 200 militants had hibernated in an almost inaccessible but strategically important ridge. Many of these were mercenaries. Afghans comprised a good percentage of the lot. Their requisitions devotedly maintained by sympathetic nomads along hidden goat tracks and short-cuts along the historical Mughal road on which the soldiers patrolled while lost in a strange silence cutting across air laden with uncertainty and death. This rugged, dangerous and famished link (short-cut) to the valley had been abandoned after the wars. With hair-raising, pinpointing precision it cut through the daunting peaks of Pir Panjal. In just 84 kilometres of arduous journey it reached Anantnag at the other end of Pir Panjal. People now took two day long tiresome route through Jammu to reach the cradle of their heart—Srinagar.

“That is alright. But every minute of the night I felt an army bullet piercing my chest. Even more pinching was the lustfully shooting eye of that Afghan. Just ate my granddaughter Noor through his eyes. Hadn’t that AK-47 been by his side I’d have slapped him hard to teach him manners of the land. The rascal....Then during the winters I’ve lost almost a quarter of my flock. I have given him several beatings but the lad is just helpless. His back just a pathetic path between my bleating sheep and the jihadis’ big mouths. Yesterday the Major summoned him for interrogation. Bashir stood stonily while I pleaded, ‘If militants succeed in infiltrating then Sahib what is the fault of we poor villagers?’ I almost wept, ‘We are the helpers of army. My maternal uncle was a legendary informer in Poonch’s Chaneri village. Local commander even awarded him during the war in 1965. He also ran a network of information through his nomads in the 1971 war. Whenever he sat for namaj, Haji Pir mountain loomed large in his memories, for he had grown up as a child on its motherly slopes. We captured it in 1965, but it was handed back to Pakistan. Do you know the fate of this man? His house was destroyed in shelling from across the border and just from his identity, a few years ago, the militants killed the old man. Then there is my cousin in the Sekhlu village’....hee hee I would have eaten his brain with patriotic stuff. He was bored, the officer. ‘OK OK,’ the officer cut me short. I had to make Pakistan a villain and Bashir was lucky to give me company back home.”

Now the question of reaching the chiragas rose. Makhan ruled out the possibility of large-scale herd movement from his side. “May be from your side it’s possible. I will just go with you to breathe in the pure air over there. Here it’s just gun-smoke. In my absence Ramzan, my younger brother, will take care of the family.”

With mellowed, lacklustre steps they were walking along a path passing by an apple orchard. The Major, officer in charge of the nearest military post, gave them a stern lecture. “Swines...traitors...seeking pretexts to go up there and replenish the terrorists’ supplies!” he pointed to a bluish ridge dimly visible across the misty clouds high up in the mountains. 

Many of them had run from places just near the LoC after Pakistani shelling destroyed their houses. They looked apprehensive as if scared of another onslaught even here. Their dreams razed down in the forward hamlets of Poonch.

“They got compensation for their destroyed houses and now get wages,” he pointed out the Gujjar labourers.

“Like caged wild animals they would escape helter-skelter into the west if there is ceasefire along the LoC and would go further,” Haji thought nurturing a natural, faded, vague pang of sympathy for Pakistan. This sympathy was born of just one fact: They were people like themselves—the land of Islam. While these gun-totting Hindus were the ones who were fighting against Islam. Their helpless loneliness in counterinsurgency operations evoked, on rarest of occasion, some traces of pity for these professionally bound humans risking their lives for the causes he could not understand. It happened sometimes.

“Sahib, saar please remember that we Gujjars gave the initial information about Pakistan’s designs during all the wars...” Aslam tried.

“And now provide help to the terrorists!” he heard the Major telling him curtly. “Listen miyanji, those chiragas of yours are like buzzing beehives of terrorists armed with full ammunition. Till we clear the area, you better stop bleating!”

“Saar, how will we survive?” entreaties are to be repeated, so Aslam tried again.

“Government is thinking of some relief and rehabilitation. Rupees you will get. Tart notes...for doing nothing!” the Major rapped the folded newspaper on the wooden bench.

At Poonch, the district headquarters, a virtually non-existent administration was scratching its bald head to chalk out some relief dispensation. Faarukh Abdullah had been ensconced in the hot seat.

“You have your own CM! He will ensure that all your miseries are done away with and you get a nice compensation!” putting all hope on Sheikh junior’s burly shoulders, he tore open a letter and was lost in more important matters.

Two soldiers entered the tightly secured premises. Old Gulam Mohammad walked by their side, distinctly carrying his frail pride through quick agile steps. His son Irfan was missing for the last five years. He had been a primary school teacher. Being educated among the simple Gujri- and Pahadi-speaking people meant a status symbol. He looked at problems with a different perspective than others around. But then a fellow teacher from Manjakote near the LoC in Rajouri arrived in his life and those long talks turned him into somewhat peculiarly serious reflections. They then twice visited Pakistan legally—once through the Wagah route and second time by the Uri route—to meet their divided families across the border. The second time they did not return. Rumours had various shades. Some said he had gone to Arab, others said he was fighting in the valley after getting trained in Pakistan; still others suggested Nepal and Bangladesh. A faded dark headcloth folded around his head, an open unbuttoned woollen sleeveless sheepskin jacket over his long flying dark-grey kurta and loose pyjama, Gulam Muhammad’s tall sinewy figure approached with typical nomadic dignity. His clean-shaved upper lip and well-manicured silvery strands of beard bordering his sagging jaw-line twitched with apprehension and fear.

“Your elder son has probably been paid with a bullet for his traitorship, now we hear the younger one is also...”

“No saar, he is just a poor innocent shepherd,” Gulam’s face betrayed his Gujjar pride.

“Well old man, keep him controlled otherwise you might lose him as well!” the stout Major shouted. “Do not forget we have our informer nomads who tell us about what is cooking in your Pak-poisoned brains!”

Sweet–sour engagements in any society are inevitable. These mundane skirmishes had their inconsequential existence in this simple mountainous society as well. However these harmless flints of sparks could be misused to build up a huge fire in the hayrack of hate, violence and distrust. Just as among the locals there were those who had picked up guns, there were some who had grudges against them born of neighbourly fight over cattle, pastures, and prestige. These things are inevitable among humans who stay in neighbourhoods. The army drew informers from the latter. A couple of months ago two such alleged informers, two sweet-faced minors, had been killed. “Killed as revenge by the jihadis,” was the common refrain.

To take the chain further, the two victims had their family, friends and well-wishers to whom the jihadis became just plain murderers. During the mourning period, the local armymen sympathised with them and a few youths from the positive corners were enlisted as special police officers (SPOs). “Iron cuts iron!” the top brass on the Indian side must have thought. There were four SPOs from this hamlet. During the upcoming summers it was expected they will function as expert guides in the treacherous mountains in army’s war against the terrorists. It was the army’s strategy of erecting a strong local bulwark against terrorists along the 740 kilometres of LoC zigzagging across Poonch, Rajouri, Pulwama and other districts. The army detachments in this area included many Sikh troops and due to linguistic affinities between Gujri and Punjabi there were at least sweet-sour verbal pot-shots with the troops. Then there were locals who in lieu of pittance of an allowance provided facilities (like conscripting horses, mules, and ponies for transporting man and material for the pickets on stiff cliff faces) many times worth their wages. At least their identities had not been lost. Walking on razor edge they had to somehow support their families and even nurtured some feeble traces of pride to align with the side that was at least numerically superior in the warfare. Those fleeced by the other side led a faceless life, where martyrdom was the only destination for some future fulfilment of the dream.

Muhammad Aslam Khan’s problems increased further. Theirs was a big family and he was the patriarch. He was respected for his mature understanding ways. During the decade of militancy he had seen much change. Lifelong his ancestors had scaled the highlands for greener pastures. But when the military and secessionists fouled the virgin blades even before their goats could nibble these, they were forced to register themselves to avail passes for movements to pastures from the revenue authorities. When the bureaucracy comes to plague a place it has its own clean, bloodless form of pillaging. Rules, regulations, renewals meant some folded, crumpled, dog-eared ten, or twenty rupees bills in the sarkari babus’ pocket. The prices of their livestock products like wool and mutton had toppled down with increased violence. While the guns rattled, it was the fight against poverty that was acquiring even nastier forms. In that little world even small-small pleasures were rapidly becoming rarities. With consummate advocacy larger players had toppled the tiny stage basking in peace and tranquillity. People’s psyches carried a plethora of pains.

His younger sister Begum Khatun lived at Chaneri near LoC. During these ten years innumerable wrinkles had come to mark her once beautiful, spotlessly apple-coloured face as the guns rattled from both sides and her face contorted with fear. During this violent decade her two kid daughters, just four and six years old respectively when the violence started on a fiercer note, had blossomed like undaunted flowers amongst terror and mayhem. Finding it an area of most suitable incursions the local army command decided to fence it from this side. Their forward hamlet was left in a lurch between the LoC to the west and the barbed wire fence to the east. Now her eleven-year-old son, whom she wanted to get educated, travelled a couple of kilometres along the fence to reach the road to his primary school. Her husband grew mountain paddy and maize. The crop was but trampled down many times as encounters raged between the interests on this side and those on the opposite.

“Both sides are responsible for the desecration of our crops. The jihadis because they take shelter in it; the army because they force us to cut out even prematurely if it creates inconvenience. The place from where we hoped to earn a living, we saw them dragging out the bodies of four boys and two soldiers,” she wept before her brother as those rusty red-painted iron posts with V-shaped upper ends with lethal grey silvery barbed wires haunted her conscience.

The fence ran right across their maize fields taking a strategic and safe turn to provide safety to the soldiers during the gunfire. To its eastern side along the footpath gun-totting soldiers in camouflage fatigues patrolled in hair trigger alarm. She often fought with them wordy duels for last night’s forays into the breasts of her crop, and swore in alien language so that they could not understand. Those sturdy young soldiers just laughed her away:

“At least you are sleeping with your beautiful daughter’s auntie! We are fighting for life here,” they mused, staring at those chiselled Kashmiri features.

“Then a week ago there was a bombardment from both sides. Fools on both sides...are too far from each other to taste each other’s blood. Their combined rockets just fall on our poor heads. The roof of our house was shattered killing the children’s father. Why did not Allah take our lives as well! Just like sheep and goats we too should have accompanied him to the other safer world!” she was choked with irrepressible sorrow. “India’s or Pakistan’s bomb we do not know.”

With a cold and dejected sigh Aslam looked at the girls and the boy. “Things here also are the same! But we will try to help you in these troubled times,” he looked older than he really was as he spoke in utter dejection.

****

Talks of village defence committees (VDCs) did slumberous rounds from different sections of the forward districts in Pir Panjals. In strife torn Mahore (Resai), Kalakote (Rjouri) and Surankote (Poonch) the military command charted out an effective strategy to raise efficient bulwarks against militancy in the far flung hilly hamlets of these areas. Whatever might have been the extent of Indian military’s frustrated high-handedness in tackling the infiltrators and their local support bases, the shadowy faceless network of the militancy had sown seeds of dissension against the ‘freedom fighters’. After all there were forced and intimidated requisitions of food, shelter and sex; targeted killings of Hindus, Sikhs and moderate Muslims; enforced migration of minority to the south of Chenab; and polarisation of society. In fact the jihadis let loose a long trail of distrust and fear as after infiltration and strengthening their pockets of support they sneaked into the interior areas for the final kill. However, the people then did not know the larger concept of a pan-Islamic theocratic state. Their distinct lifestyle ensconced in a unique self-sustaining culture cast a distrustful eye over anybody bumping into it. The sheer number of Indian troops in their intimidating convoys, patrols, pickets, and eagle emplacements had created a cloud of fear and suspicion. The militants, meanwhile, lesser in number, had their romanticised share in the cycle of violence. As time passed both sides appeared culpable for their woes to these simple hilly people whose language, culture, and nomadic economy unitised them into a distinct entity.

There were some struggling sinews of minority in these border belts of fire. The easy-going nomadic society had been polarised by religious extremists and the equally harsh measures to suppress the uprising. Initially it was the minority that accepted the military offer to save their home and hearth. The AK 47 (the pen of jihadis to write a chapter on freedom) is a mighty big thing. It started pouring metallic venom that was impassive to the wounded agonies of even local Muslims. There were instances of the supposed freedom fighters killing the families of Gujjar Muslims on suspicions of army informers. Revengefully the latter enlisted with the VDCs and it perpetuated the fiery circle further on. When the militants massacred the members of the minority community, the Gujjars shook their heads in disapproval, some denied cooperation, and some even raised voice against the jihadi culture openly. Result? Their names also entered the target list. Much to their chagrin they soon realised that the jihadis conscripted more pride and matter than swarming (most of the time innocuously tut-tutting to feigned harshness) Indian forces. This dismay slowly spread from the Pir Panjal heights to the richly wooded Kalidhar ranges to the west.

Oh what a dreamy world it was: cradled in temperate forest mountains; pine trees hemming the ridges; walnut trees almost plugging the gullies and hollows; rice and maize standing in sloppy fields; and tin roofed mud, stone, brick, and wood dwellings standing so comfortably composed like these were just harmless part of the nature around. Then everything was savagely deformed. They just anxiously gauzed the relativities between the two warring sides. These poor people were definitely at the receiving end. Paramilitary and military units billeted in their hamlets, these simple people tried to mind their own business. It but was simply not possible. The world around them had changed. It was no longer that small world. It was rashly ignorant of their plight. There were curbs on their movement. Army patrols shoot at any sound in the dark. Army engineers were building bridges and culverts to strengthen the shackles against the terrorists. Rumours multiplied dangerously. Every happening or mishap acquired a religious colour. The extremists pulled their attention and demanded full cooperation and support. It was all getting muddled up.

There was deadly shadow network of Lashkar e Hizb mujhadins that had swarmed this rough terrain. In some pockets—which they proudly called as liberated zones inside Indian Territory, proclaiming these as conclaves of Azad Kashmir or Gulam Kashmir—they called their ruthless shots. The religious zealots had mighty guns in their hands to enforce a medieval system of beliefs. Diktats like mandatory burqa, ban on worshipping sufi saints, and prohibition of Indian styled clothing raised their dictatorial head. Community and clan leaders very soon found that the scale of their sins was swinging from one side to other. Still the army has to work under certain discipline however tough the situation gets because they are answerable. Militants on the other hand can go overboard and take their zealotry to any level, driven by the brainwashed frenzy. The scale even tilted against the militants as the young fire-born souls carried their enthusiasm to the extreme. When there is fire it burns all those around. Even though there were a large number of local supporters  among the cadre and a far larger number of inactive (temporary or chance supporters and sympathisers) there were some who cast looks of aspersion at both sides, and a still smaller section that had suffered at the hands of the militants. This last one became the support base of the VDCs. Those who had lost their whole families at the hands of militants became pioneers in enlisting youths for the VDCs.

“Let us get these old .303 rifles. A weapon is a good thing to possess. The wolves are fighting. Whose teeth will come to bite our lambskin we cannot be sure. To defend ourselves from the warring wolves we must not waste this opportunity to get weapons even if it is no match to the devastating assault power of their weapons!” seemed to be the initial refrain of majority of the VDC members.

Thus, squeezed between counter militancy measures lost in bureaucratic apathy on the east and blood thirsty fusillade (the religious avalanche not knowing any limits to violence in its overzealous craze to kill and get killed) and the extremist launch pad on the west, bloody contours of innocent locals suffering were emerging. The VDC members became sinners against Islam for accepting these almost archaic old weapons from the infidels. In reality it was just a fearful reaction to get some means of support to life in a bloody environment sanctioned by the larger force and hence deemed legal. What if it rattled just a single shot at a time and there being even danger of the rifle getting locked at the crucial moment of life and death while the opponents hurled bullets in hundreds without any risk of weapon failure. So it happened tragically in a remote hamlet of Kalakote area in Rajouri district. Paradise safe in mountains, nearest motorable road 10 kilometres away from which a treacherous footpath led its journey to completion among this little group of humans, the middle aged and youth of this hamlet showed almost a childlike fascination for the gun that had just a marginal edge over a plain stick in fight. Before that they had just yielded the sheep-herding sticks. A gun was but a gun irrespective of the make and lethality. They loved it like a toy. Half a company of Bihar regiment was making its way on horses and ponies last autumn. The conduit was an SPO from this hamlet. He was a fully bearded Gujjar carrying a checked shawl and leather jacket in his bag. They camped for a fortnight there. It was a festive environment. Men in woollen caps, turbans and headclothes, kurta-pyjamas and woollen open breasted jackets flurried around the weapons. They enlisted 20 men. The behaviour of the young Captain was extremely praiseworthy. These simple nomadic people went out of their way to show respect to the soldiers. In winters they drove away four militants coming to feast and hibernate. During the start of summers they but had to pay the penalty for going overboard in getting enlisted. The militants massacred 28 villagers. Bloodied font of the news was too big to be missed by all those families who had any reason to suppose they had arisen jihadis’ suspicions born of any of their inadvertent action. Result!? Around 1000 death-fearing nomads from the surrounding area fled to the south of Chenab.

****

The graph of terrorism and counter-terrorism had fluctuatingly ascended during the decade. The quake’s tremors bore consequences for each individual, each family, each hamlet and the society as a whole in its myriad specific and hydra-headed manifestations. Aslam had four sons and a youngest daughter. Sajjad, Khalid, Abdul, Tauseef, and Busra in that order. The first three married adding grandsons and granddaughters to his flock. The youngest two were on the conjugal threshold. As per their customs their matrimony seemed to have been delayed a bit. However, there was no stigma emanating from the fact because the prevailing uncontrollable circumstances appeared to put everything on hold. “Times will normalise soon. Then all delayed things will be put in order!” seemed a pleasantly expectant refrain.

The pastoral economy had been brutally beheaded in full blossom. Such a large family could no longer be supported while lying idle helplessly gazing dreamily into the pastures where if somehow they tried to reach the consequences could rattle off in a most unexpected and chaotic spurt. Sajjad and Khalid formed a wood cutters’ party from the area and were slogging it out in the plains of north India. Their indefatigable lung power that helped them in scaling most treacherous hills now found an outlet in this axe-work as they cut and chopped down woods of any type. Their thickly accented Hindi—a virtual linguistic filigree laced with Hindustani, Urdu, Kashmiri, and Gojri words—provided a very amusing, somewhat shy, and reluctant means of conversation with Punjabis, Haryanvis, Biharis, and others. Their hard, slim, lithe, steady bodies lost in a wonderwork of axe-manship as if they forced themselves into oblivion far away from the tragedies back home.

The third son Abdul whiled away his time as a grocery store assistant at Surankote township. Tauseef and Busra precariously walked on the path of youthfulness (that is heavenly during normal times) but made now a motley mixture of blunder, ecstasy, and risk bordering life and death. Pari Jan, their mother, was continuously fretting and fuming since the arrival of Abdul’s sister. Her often used tormenting tool against the family patriarch was the marriage of their unmarried son and daughter. Now the frustrated pungency increased manifold in her verbal punches.

“God forbid if this young filly commits a sin! Oh you children’s father, are you dead not to see such a ripe apple in your orchard. There is a time for everything. Deal with it before it falls or rots. She is a wild river. Will get into trouble. Curse on these Indian soldiers. They just stare at her like hell. Tauseef! As a mother I can feel what is going in him. Do you think his sinful escapades with his sisters-in-law are enough? He is walking a tightrope. Seems completely lost. Either the jihadis will pick him up or the soldiers will fleece him,” she was continuously holding her brow drawn taught with tension.

Aslam and Makhan cast a worried look at Tauseef as he passed in the company of Asim Khan. The latter was a surrendered militant. Bearing an AK 56 he walked with militant stealth and military arrogance. The locals called him a traitor because his dreams of azadi had dashed somehow. Now having renewed the license of his gun he moved with an undaunted difference, fought last assembly elections, but lost by a narrow margin. He was now busy with a pioneer effort of forming VDCs, recruiting SPOs, and creating an intelligence network for the local army command. People just cast aspersion and spat in his direction saying he was getting huge money from the Indians for all this.

That evening Tauseef did not return. “Seems to have landed himself with a job!” Aslam sounded even relived as he lost a game of chausar to his guest under oil lamp in the warmth of sheep shed. 

They played their hands without vigour and energy. Each giving the other maximum breach points to self-inflict a defeat. The victory felt alien. It just drew a cold sigh. They seemed resigned to the fate’s favourable wind, if there was to be any. With fervourous exude of night time spirits an owl hooted. Outside the splendorous rays of the spring moon were bathing chinars and deodars with milky comfort. However, agonies in human heart were beyond the reach of nature’s comforting hand. 

Makhan sighed despondently, “Yours have not yet started...the problems. Ours have boiled up even in the freezing winters. Due to Bashir the army always smells the rat. Crammed in my hole, unable to go to the pastures, hearing soldiers’ abuses, I just could not take it anymore. One night I saw him with a sketch map. He was marking hillside bunkers and soldiers’ positions. I saw blood in his eyes as he drew those red pencil lines marking escapes and hide routes. I have left everything to Allah’s will! And came here for a few days to...” He was choked with some vague fear and stopped, startled as if some soldier’s gun was thrust into his ribs.

Aslam’s big hairy hand dropped gently with a sympathetic tap on his friend’s shoulder.

Next day, while they were smoking hookah under a walnut tree on a little hillside terrace where Aslam stored forage, his wife came running and yelled, “Enough of smoke old man! Run to Surankote and save Tauseef if you can! He has picked up the kaafir’s gun against the Prophet. Allah save us!” the force of the calamity was too overpowering for her.

How could he avoid her homely diktats? He hated noise. There was enough of it due to the guns rattling around. Next dawn both friends were setting out for the sleepy township so dangerously close to the line of religious fissure.

“Their son is an educated sahib. Jots down the pillaging demands of his mother and sisters,” she dropped a crumpled and bunched sheet of paper that she was squeezing in her sweating fist.

Aslam straightened the crumpled piece of paper. From the far away banks of memory, his sister’s childish face lurked in his mind and smilingly he put the paper in his pocket.

Even though she was a helpless refugee, still one needs a few things at a new place. She had absolutely no money to pay for anything. From distant hilltops gunfire echoed through the valley. His sister’s boy came playing on the footpath straddling the pine tree covered ridge. Looking at him, at his childish unconcerned ways, everything appeared normal. But it was not. Paradisiacal surroundings echoed with a vague warning. Far away walnut trees stood in fear and suspicion. Terror and counter terror vilified the air. Some flowers ensconced on a narrow strip of fertile ledge stood soaked in fear. A gun rattled in the valley. A pigeon that was sitting on a walnut branch and lost in a corpus of soulful thoughts suddenly fluttered among the branches and lost a feather from its plume.

Aslam’s ear though drummed with violence, but he was immune to the noxious fumes of gunpowder smoke. If the fresh fragrance of wilderness no longer reached his nose, then gun-smoke did not either. Last autumn his visit to Surankote had been at the cost of his smelling faculty. Coming back from the shop Abdul worked in, he passed the semi-crowded bazaar. A hand grenade was thrown at the square side watch post. Due to the protection provided by the sand bag parapet none of the intended targets was hit but the unfortunate visitor found himself hurled to the ground. Minor splinters had cut his dress. He but found his bleeding nose more disturbing because there was no outer cut. It stopped by the time he received first aid. However he felt a slight pain when he put some pressure on the olfactory area. There was a bit of swelling as well. He did not know that his smelling nerves had been damaged. It was the first Friday of Ramzan. A prayer was to be held by the square. The military brought order. The gathering for prayers was handled with shoves and angry words. Aslam, bandaged, his smelling nerves damaged, still stood with unusual calm, mystically rolling beads in his fingers and murmuring Allah’s name to restore the heavenly lore of his land. In utter humility and surrender the people bent on their knees, their head touching the ground to feel the solely supreme power of God. His nose so close to the mother earth, he was unaware that the world was odourless to him now. Yet he was as firm a believer as he ever was.

Heavily armed J&K police personnel stood guard over their backs. Most of them were Muslim and appeared lost in a strange no man’s land. While bending Aslam felt pain under the top point of his nose, a tiny drop of blood trickled down his nose and kissed the soil of his famed land. The land tasted a sip of innocent blood. That evening, much to his chagrin, while praying for his family at a Sufi dargah—militants had boycotted the worship—he no longer felt the fragrance of incense that gives divine succour to soul at the dargahs. Next day his son took him to a doctor who prescribed some cheap anti-inflammatory drugs and read out his verdict:

“You have lost your smelling power bade miyan. There is no drug for it. If the damage is temporary, you might regain your smelling faculty after some time. But if the injury is permanent, then...” he tut-tutted to send the message.

It is better to lose smelling power in a grenade blast than to lose limbs or even life. Aslam understood it and knew exactly well how to console him, or even consider himself to be lucky.

This following summer, as he stepped again on the town’s soil, he found the whole sleepy town abuzz with strange tension. How strongly he felt the urge to drive his flock of sheep into the misty heights. Far away from all these maddening events and tensions. A prominent field commander of Hizb-ul-Mujahideen had engaged the forces in a fierce encounter. Ibrahim Khan the architect of terror for the security forces commanded a brute reputation among the locals. His oeuvre of terror included car-bomb attacks, a hair-raising suicide attack by one of his cadre and several attacks on government offices. Operatives of his cell were spreading far and wide under his astute tutelage. With this open challenge to the army’s authority he seemed to have written a distinct chapter in the violent history of the times.

****

Ibrahim Khan and Asim Khan (the latter the famous cog in counter terrorism) came from well-to-do families of the area. Both were fast friends and final year students of the University of Kashmir when mass indoctrination of violence started in 1989. On the campus secession from India seemed more important than curriculum. They had their overzealous conception of violence and Kashmir. Very easily they found an ideological mentor in one of their teachers who from the safety of his chair brainwashed them to believe in violence for Islam’s sake. When it came to choosing the fighting groups they chose separate outfits. Why? Because their camaraderie and friendship stood on the foundation of the commitment to excel each other in whatever they did. They were fierce competitors. “Whose cell will excel in inflicting more grievous injuries on the Indians” was the competition now. Asim went for LeT while Ibrahim chose HM. Under the tutelage of Srinagar-based elements they showed enough promise. Crossed the border to kiss the holy land of jihad and came back as lethal fighters. Very soon, Ibrahim acquired notoriety for eliminating dissidents, exterminating the moles planted in the organisation and killed a Maulvi with moderate intentions. Asim on the other hand showed his daredevilry on a soft-hearted cog in All Parties Hurriyat Conference, a politician of National Conference and attack on the BSF headquarters. Both vied with each other to fabricate lethal most explosives from commonly gettable chemicals, and in increasing their stockade of weapons and cadre. When they had portrayed enough vengeance at the heart of the valley they were called back to PoK. Muzaffarabad-based central command of Hizb rolled a red carpet for Ibrahim as he teary-eyed met the Chief. Same was the jihadi deference shown to Asim by the LeT mentors. Keeping their blood thirsty competition in view they were made respective commanders of insurgent elements in Poonch-Rajouri area to swipe the wild fire across the Pir Panjals. They planned blood-letting meticulously. Riding the wave of extremism they turned the already vilified air into poisonous mass that suffocated dreams, hopes, and aspirations.

The great Mughals used to come on a furlough through the Mughal Road traversing the east–west swipe across the Pir Panjal. While the Mughals came here to assuage their battle-hardened nerves, the militia commanders came to explode the smouldering jihadi fire and fury in them. Jahangir, the great lover of nature, had died while enjoying this teeming kiss of nature along the road and had been buried at Chengus. Asim a keen lover of history loved this king for his majestic flirts with nature and luxury. To him he appeared a devotee of the unstigmatised beauty of Kashmir. Paying homage at his grave he vowed to clear the holy land of the infidels. When snow blizzards mercilessly knocked at the peaks and wooded slopes, hibernating with his violence in a dugout on this side of the border, he keenly read Pakistani version of Kashmir history. Here Akbar the great was presented in ordinary terms. He had used this very road, the royal armies from Delhi vanquishing the apple and orchard towns on the way, to conquer Kashmir in 1586. Then the Mughal imperialism consolidated its strength and grandeur along this short-cut. Many serais were built along the path. He had spent a night at one such serai as a fugitive running away from the security forces. Another such place at Chandimarh had been blown away with grenades by the military killing five members of his cell who had taken shelter there. At Thanamande in Rajouri district there is a little waterfall named Noori Chump named after Jahangir’s beloved wife. Once when he had been hit by a bullet in the leg he tore away the bandage and stood under the waterfall yelling “Allah-ho-Akbar” in the biting cold of the night. To him the pride of his religion had come to an end with the demise of the Mughal dynasty.

An extolling emotion stirring the stony fabric of his fundamentalism, he ran his finger across the trail of this road during the times when there was no LoC. The map appeared a strange puzzle under the yellow glow of kerosene lamp. His finger started from Jhelum town in Pakistan, moved upwards and shifted across Pir Panjals to Kotli in PoK and sneaked into Rajouri on the Indian side.

Stopping at Chandimarh he exclaimed, “Here Ramzan Ali, Abdul Dar, Pir, Haseem Bhat, and Hafiz Mughal got martyrhood!” And they chorused a prayer.

Moving his finger back to Thenamandi he seemed lost in the misty moonlit nights of royal past, “Here queen Noor bathed and I washed my blood from the infidels’ bullet!...Then after azadi we will be sweeping over unobstructed!”

He swiped across the Pir Panjals. Pir Panjals—their friend as well as foe. Foe for separating the valley from the land of Islam; friend for providing shelter in their guerrilla warfare against India.

“In order to separate the soul from the body Indians now make us travel more than two days to reach the Valley,” he drew an aspersion-sod finger over NH 1A’s circuitous route. “The Valley is just a stone’s throw away across the Pir Panjals and they plod people like they are mules. Once we achieve our goal, from Bafliaz on this side to Sophian on the other, Islam’s welcoming banner will greet us into jannat in less than just four hours like it did for the great Mughals during our rule in India!”

“Hizb men have stopped worship at the shrine of peer baba at Pir-ki-Gali. The gujjars are angry about it,” his lieutenant informed with some concern.

“Peers are too mild blooded. Too far away from the iron-hard core of the religion of the Prophet. Even the kafirs and Indian soldiers go there to seek protection from us. It is good!”

He was tipsy having consumed home-brewed potion of pahari herbs even though his mullah mentors croaked it was strictly prohibited in Islam. He had picked this habit at the university in the company of Hindu Kashmiris. Snowy isolation in this belt aided and abetted by violence had seen the migration of many families to Gulf countries. His family was one of these because they could just see a dead end here at Bafliaz after he picked up gun against India. After all it was an influential family of clan leaders. Only his old grandfather would not budge saying he would prefer to die in the lap of the mountains he had been born in.

Tipsily he was bragging, “Once the Poshanna—highest point in Pir Panjals—shook under the hoofs of Amirul Beher—title of commander of ocean given to Afghan governor of Akbar named Kasim Khan—as he conquered this piece of jannat in 1586. After 400 years it will be Asim Khan who will make this stretch the life line of freedom movement along this route where the huge number of jihadis will not allow a single Indian foot!”

Then a worrying furrow surfaced on his brow. The troops of 28 Rashtriya Rifles—a lethal counter-terrorism unit—had raised an effective base at Chandimarg about 12 kilometres from Bafliaz thus plugging a severe breach in security arrangements against the infiltrators. Here the army commanders had been successful in winning the locals’ sympathy; conscripted them as disguised military intelligence operatives who spied on both sides of the LoC; and even sneaked a few as moles into the training camps in PoK. Due to this support the local cell of Tehreek-i-Jihad had been completely destroyed by the troops.

****

Chowdhary Zafar Khan who once diligently led an affluent family with political connections now lived alone both braving the stigma and gilded respected for being the grandfather of Asim Khan. His favourite grandson lost in gun smoke, and rest of his family now staying in Saudi Arabia, he had renounced all the heritage (sold and now with his sons, brothers, cousins, and grand-cousins-in-a different form) and sustained himself with carpet and mat weaving—an age-old hobby he had picked up from his grandfather Asfaq Khan. In the evenings his grandfatherly tone blared verses from the mosque’s public announce system. On important Hindu festivals he gifted oranges and dried copra to his neighbour Mr. Lal, the sole Hindu left with that surname in that hamlet, with an assurance, “Nobody will dare to touch you as long as I’m alive!”

When he was not working his eyes gloated childlike onto the worn out pages of religious books. For most of his time the superfine touch of his frail fingers weaved a sweet moments for his old age. His cataract-smoked eyes exuded an aura of dreamy self-reliance untouched by all the turmoil around. While working he would pause and reflect over those happy times when whole tribes of weavers looked at them as esteemed dignitaries worth offering woven presents. So, on weddings and festivals they used to receive exquisite hand-woven mats, carpets, and tapestries. They as beneficent patrons doled out rewards totalling many time the market value of the gifts of love and respect.

He still recalled that ultra-fine silken mat, dreamily woven by the most skilled craftsperson of the whole area as a wedding gift to him. Its lustrous finishing flashed in his memory with astonishing vividness. But the shy supple lady with the perfect sitting posture was seas way in her wrinkled avatar. He went up-hill to collect grass strands, returned with a bundle lugubriously, weaved these into threads and made floor, dining and prayer mats in full sheen and texture. While working on woollen carpets his frail bones felt peculiar warmth. However the fine stages of processing and dyeing required him to hire two assistants and that is how he found company and something to talk about to fellow human beings. These two assistants were orphans left to fend it off of their own. Their parents had died in military firing during a violent agitation. Apart from his upkeep he spent his money to support these two teenagers.

On some fearfully shrouded dark nights Asim Khan paid him visits but the look in the old man’s eyes was vaguely sterile—neither hostility nor happiness, some indifference bordering on no urge to be part of an unlikeable world anymore. Some silent melodies kept his soufflés going on somehow. With a defiant energy he was bluntly dismissive of any talk in favour or against the parties involved in the conflict. Age makes one a sage. He seemed calm having accepted all that had befallen him and his family. All he wanted was a peaceful death in the dreamland of his heydays. However, even that sounded too much to ask for. After all, peace was being assaulted with brutal regularity. 

****

It was pleasant spring time in 1996. Ibrahim and Asim had been well entrenched in the greasy, murky machinery of militancy. Their Muzaffarabad-based respective commanders had summoned them to discuss and solve a problematic sector along the LoC—Uri sector in Baramula district. To foment troubles the Tehrik e Mujahiddin had massacred ten Sikhs, all truck drivers, on Uri-Muzaffarabad road. Sleepy hamlets in the Tangdhar range north of Pir Panjals bore a helpless testimony to what man-made boundaries can do to the socio-ethnic fabric. People living in these nondescript settlements and Tangdhar Teetwaal town had their relatives across the Neelam River forming the LoC in this sector. Virtually every family had relatives on either side of the fearsome line born of the ceasefire between India and Pakistan in 1948. Just like natural landslips and slides on the Uri-Muzaffarabad road these faint memories were sustained by the hopes that a day will come when relatives, brothers and distant cousins will be able to move freely into the welcoming homes on either side. To these simple hardworking Rajput, Pahari and Gujjar Muslims India and Pakistan seemed two heavy mill stones between which their poor, simple lives had come to be crushed. Militant organisations were envious of the relative calm in the area despite their best efforts at raking up fissiparous, rupturing facts and fables piled up during the last five decades.

Then quite inexplicably, given all the flaring up tensions after the winter-time lull, the military commanders on both sides allowed people to stand on their respective shores of the river and shout pleasantries to their acquaintances if they could recognise them. It felt like a refreshing deliverance even though the gesture was ludicrously superfluous. Egged on by festive spirits the people walked, waved and shouted along the shores. Some recognised their acquaintances while majority of them just drew solace from the general mass of relatives from the other side. In between, the river Neelam flowed mournfully. Ever-unspooling echoes of sadness impregnated the air with a sad message about irreconcilable disparities between the two sides.

“Shaukat...! Your cousin here...Shabir Khan...me, me...here don’t you recall my brother was married...Hey Asfaq...Abdul, the one to whose son Kabir’s daughter was married...Khursheed Bi, daughter in law of...Shabir is dead...Muhammad Rashid has picked up gun to liberate you...Merciful Allah unite us after all...Will Pakistan be able to defeat India?...”

As the commanders of the so-called liberating forces, deep and ebullient emotions were stirring in the hearts of Ibrahim and Asif Khan. They had no relatives to look for on the other side, but the recruits in their respective cells were bleating to draw attention of some known face. Muscles were drawn taut under the thickly bearded square jaw of Ibrahim Khan. Amidst the clattering noise of people’s accosts, his wireless set beeped the merciless steel of a message that stabbed his heart.

Acting on some wrong piece of information the Indian troops, believing him to be at home to meet the family, had launched an assault at the big house covered under pines from all sides. Gunshots rattled in the dark. The life-saving instinct in his father found him firing from the pistol left by his son in case an emergency should arise. The family was left with a house devastated, almost every member injured and three dead. Now it was a grievous personal loss beyond the pale of extremism, freedom, and fundamentalism. All reasoning was packed off his brain, leaving him under the cumbersome and fatal yoke of revenge and death. Drawing out his toy of death from under his knee-length over-smock he yelled, “No more diktats from the kafirs! Lunge forward and embrace your brothers on the other side!”

The loud burst from his throat was followed by the one from his gun. Writhing in rage he fired at the Indian jawans on the other side. Panic exploded. Many plunged into the river. Suspecting betrayal by the Pakistani troops the Indians also fired. Then how could the Pakistani troops restrain fire? The fifteen minutes of uncontrolled fury saw many dying and injured. The indiscriminating hands of death swept soldiers and civilians on both sides. The red waters of the river Neelam moved on to leave the scene of the tragedy to regain its impartiality, neutrality, and colourlessness downstream. Was it a Hindu body or Muslim? Whether it was a nomad, or a Border Range Organisation’s Muslim labourer, a freedom fighter, a terrorist, a separatist, or hard core Islamist? In blinded fury Ibrahim shot at anything on the opposite side. He was firing standing at a place and was picked by a gun from the other side and a rattling burst gorged through his left flank just below the ribs, and he fell. As he was required to do, Asim too fired with calculating and discerning fury. It was but motley crowd in front of him. However hard he tried and aimed at the Indian uniform, before he could shoot he would be stalled by some innocent civilian running into the line of fire. By the time of completing his duty of finishing his ammunition he knew he had killed or injured dozens of innocents. In hate, pity and disgust, he fell headlong into the riverside grass.

After that massacre Ibrahim, recovering from his injuries, became a volcano of fire and lava against anything symbolising Indianness. His animosity had crossed the goal of liberating Kashmir. It was now defined by harming Indian interests anyhow, anytime, anywhere. Asim on the other hand, always looking at his blood-stained hands and pungent recollection of the bloodied river, found himself falling deeper into the pit of disillusionment with the chosen path. Those blood-splashed stones haunting him, Asim still crossed over to the eastern side with fellow jihadi infiltrators to flare up violence in this relatively calm stretch. After all India had to be stealthily cut at as many places as possible to bleed it to death. However this time he was missing that characteristic verve and enthusiasm for bloodletting. The work assigned to him comprised fanning gun culture in the heights of Shamsabari range separating Tangdhar from Kashmir Valley. In the ensuing inevitable encounters with the Indian troops he led his guerrilla squad well below the capability of his shrewd commandership. Almost all of them were wiped out by the unsparing fire of a troop party valiantly commanded by a Subedar Major of Mountain Artillery Unit. Both flanks of his thick, hairy arms had been torn by bullets. Staggering across dangerous precipices he somehow managed to sneak into higher snowy heights. There in the misty heights, snow was thawing; water was trickling down with lively mirth; with petite gumption a flock of mountain sparrows darted through the peaceful air; in blissful quietude trees were yawning to welcome the spring sun; in sync with spirituality cool air kissed cliff-sides to literally melt their stony hearts. An ethereal solacing mirage was strewn over the surroundings. He fell headlong into a rill and red water trickled down to tell a little tale of humans’ bloody ways. A wandering Sufi mendicant who had taken shelter in a nearby cave tracked his almost frozen body following the bloody trail in the little sinewy water channel. During the next month he recovered and recuperated by the sage’s healing herbs and assuaging words. His life had been shaped by the shower of hate. It was now was being reshaped by the shower of love. He felt vulnerable due to his rootlessness. But the heat of his injured reaction would soon be absorbed by the cool waters of this convenient harbour, this real glimpse of Kashmir, unaffected by human frailties and failures. He saw the fascinating glimpses of the Kashmir he had forgotten. He had been lured and enticed by the handlers of death. But through the path of death how can you nurture life? The insatiable desires of his hard-core indoctrination had blinded his eyes to misinterpret malaise as the will of God.

When he tracked down he knew that he will surrender before the military. He did exactly that. The militancy network was critically jolted. There was no dearth of people in the flowery cradle who cursed him as a betrayer. He was talked of as a villain. During his one-year prison term, the military used all means, fairest to the foul-most, to conscript him into counter-insurgency operations. He but stoically spurned all such advances. Smelling the disinfected violent man in him they released him. It was a very tired and broken former evoker of doom and destruction to the Indian troops who fell into the receptive arms of his old grandfather.

****

Judith, an artist foremost and a qualified medical assistant in the field of psychology, felt the confines of her mundane circumstances, happenings and life over all in well to do France. She packed off to the scene of tragedy to give full vent to the creative zeal of the social worker in her. It was 1991 when her 24-year-old petite self had landed at Srinagar where the proxy war had left Kashmiris traumatised by invisible shell scars on their souls. To the painter in her, whose sensitivity had been nurtured in the relaxing environment of the developed society, it was a buffeting scenario where her soft soul literally shed tears over the man-made tragedy even though the nature tried its best to shine at its best. Working at the Psychiatric Diseases wing of Shere-e-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences as a volunteer, she, at the peak of her beauty and youth, started her unique work of art therapy and psychology among the patients born of violence. A local doctor named Zohra gave her ample support as a translator and professional.

Soon the number of patients swelled to nearly hundred. Children, elders, women symbolised the grotesque and disturbing pictures of the mute sufferers of violence. Caught in a swirling avalanche, destiny had scrawled a painful caricature of life for them. A full palette of colours robbed of their lives, they stared abstractedly in stony bleakness. It was a collective loss of Kashmiriyat that seemed to be plaguing them through different manifestations of psychiatric illnesses. Many had been killed, orphaned, widowed, and maimed. Scores had been left in a depressive hysterical pit, traumatising scars on their souls gnawing at their existence every moment. In their delirium many showed signs of schizophrenia at the peak of their youth. Their lives daubed in perennial depression they cried, behaved like lunatics, broke things, inflicted serious injuries to themselves, as it appeared the only form of an outpour.

Her calm and gentle face, gently fleecing caring words slowly drew them out of the meaningless pit and they scrawled glaring manifestations of violence on papers. Virtually a flood of pent up, choked emotions was let loose. During the next six years she talked in pleasantly molly-coddling Kashmiri with a heart-warming French accent and came to be titled “Princess of Smiles and Colours.” In the beginning of 1997, one more helplessly out of mind patient was dumped in the ward. It was Asim Khan. During the six intolerably harrowing months since his release his condition had grown pathetic like never before. On the one hand the military won’t cease from its efforts to enlist him in counter-terrorism by all means and baits, on the other all networks in Muzaffarabad were buzzing with the talk of his betrayal. They called it a defection. Fearing that later or sooner he will succumb to the Indians they planned to exterminate him. After a lethal pre-dawn attack the day saw a brutally shot body of his grandfather. Asim had tried to repulse the attack with the archaic gun provided by the military. However, his bravery was no match for the militants equipped with sophisticated weapons. He too had been shot in both legs. What a terrible life he had led. Shot both by the troops (in arms) and jihadis (in legs). His body bore scars from both sides. Whom to call his own? His grandfather’s slithered body bearing the fleshy crater marks of AK-46 and AK-56 found him hysterically beating his head. Word spread that the scion of liberation had gone mad.

There he was now lying on bed under the mercy of Judith’s art therapy and gentle healing words. She was often moved to tears looking at his sketches and attempts at paining. As a professional she interpreted these scrawlings and prepared his case history. She found these outpours belonging to a man who was once educated and could have gone to excel in any field had the circumstances being normal. The check dam of all his held up emotions was broken in the forms of these sketches. A lot many human lives could have taken a better course had the circumstances been better. Possibly our fate isn’t that much in our hands as we suppose. Plum shackles of darkness so many times thrive on the feast of tiny rays of light.

“What paradisiacal emotions were wilted by time! His self has to be drawn out of the stony dead walls!” she sighed.

With her tranquil logic and smiling care she was always there with her rope of professional psychiatry to fetch out a bucketful of normalcy for these injured souls. In the following months her angelic face and softest words found him coming out of the dark and gloomy corner of rootlessness and isolation. And once out of the darkly dismal ditch, his esteemed persona, glittering after the fiery test of tragedies and losses, caught the long-awaiting love buds. He had never felt the power of love of a man for a woman. He was a child of hate lost in the miserable mirage of actions that were shaped basically by unseen forces. His youth had been eaten by the violent pages of extremist indoctrination. In calm beatitude love drops fell on the desert sand of his injured, uprooted heart. Love has its subtle repertoire of emotions that can take even the hardest of a soul into the deepest depths of tranquillity. He was happy that he had found love at last. These sprouts blossomed under the gently acquiescing dew of his heart.

The summers of 1997 portended all the healing and compensating months ahead. Destiny seemed redeeming him after the long-drawn bloody chapter. He could see a life beyond guns and blasts. His soul felt peaceful, colourful music. There was palpable exuberance in his spirit. How nice are the times when a man falls in love and how scary the moments become when a man fills his heart with hate! His happiness knew no bounds that bright sunny day when Judith proposed to him. She the European lady with healing fingers and words! Was life really so kind to him? He just couldn’t believe it. It was a dream and he clung to his life-giving dream. However, were the times comfortable with such contradictory outcomes? No, they weren’t. Fatality had a ravenous appetite. The viciously swirling whirlpool of violence had acquired such intensity that once caught in it, it was impossible to get out. To them, the killing forces, he was a traitor to be punished at any cost. This time they aimed the bullet straight at his heart now obliviously sleeping in her breast. In broad daylight she was shot in the hospital premises. Again he went mad, this time but with gun instead of pathetically scrawling pencil. He thus became a famed counter-terrorist.

****

Begum Khatun, Aslam’s widowed sister in her late thirties, carried glaring gaping holes on her dishevelled, grizzled pre-greying face. The fact that a Pakistani shell had widowed her, forcing her to become a refugee was enough to convince her that the Pakistani talk of liberation and Islam was a slanderous sham. On account of her personal loss, weighing the both sides’ sins on a scale, she found Pakistani culpability in her misfortune outdoing the Indians.

The military wasn’t leaving any stone unturned in countering the menace of terrorism. The women had their extra share of suffering in the conflict. The military tried to use this fact of female suffering. Military propagandists gave goose-bump arising speeches and implored the womenfolk to come out of their routine chores to pick up guns and brace up to face any eventuality. In the sleepy hamlets an interesting word was doing rounds among the womenfolk that at Talikata near Surankote even women had picked up guns to defend their peace and security. There had been a thaw in their mute sympathy to the Islamic struggle. They had just come to become the mute providers of entertainment in the form of sex  to the battle-hardened co-religionists. Some did it willingly shielding their budding sexuality under the lustrous sun of Islamic revival. The majority however did it unwillingly thinking it to be the only—even though it was vulgar—form of contribution to jihad. Once the gate to sex requisition was opened, it carried tales of rape by professional mujahideens in its abusive wake. Discontent was brewing up. The cases of repulsing such advances and efforts to protect their honour were becoming more frequent. There were many victims of violence for being the wives of SPOs. So they too formed self-defence committees at their places. The feminine will power was far superior than their wrists. The local army detachments were training them in warfare.

So these women who once nimbly picked apples in orchards were now being trained in operating .303, SLR and even AK 47. Leading a secluded life atop those remote hills, to reach where it required several hours trek from the nearest metal road, they could expect no police or military help if finding such open lawless field for exploitation the militants misused their power. The women were disgusted over the fact that many of the foreign mercenaries were in Kashmir just to taste the famed beauty of the Kashmiri women. These proud Gujjar women who grew up competing shoulder to shoulder in their fight for survival took up weapon training with charming urgency. Sometimes even tales of transgression by the errant army-men also did rounds. So there was no loss in getting arms training. These were violent times and weapons had become as much of a necessity as the staple food. They considered wolves on all sides, so preferred to equip even if it was with archaic weapons. To add more salt to it, everyday tales trickled over from Afghanistan, how Taliban was brutally dragging their womenfolk into the medieval prison of veil and systematic torture. Realising the danger, a local teacher coming from elite background gave a clarion call of Gujjar women’s pride and an all women VDC was formed.

Begum Khatun mulled over the news with sweaty palms. She never had any share in deciding her fate. She had done what was expected of her first as a daughter, then as a wife and mother. It was like always being asked to do, just like their meek flock of sheep was herded off to graze for survival. She felt helpless, a mere stone that was being kicked around by situations and bigger players. That was no life. She wanted to live, to shout against her pathetic situation.

Just like a wicker flares up dangerously, energetically before going down into the gloomy oblivion she too looked at the scion of anti-terrorism from her brother’s village. Her heart beat like a young girl whenever she saw him. In agreement with the sweet harmony of her heartbeats, she just tried to steal as many glances of him as would help her in passing restless nights, tossing and turning in pining agony. Sardar Bashir, in his early forties, carrying a square-jawed thickly bearded face and grenade scars on his brow drove those dilly-dallying ripples in her heart as he launched the mission to teach weapon handling to the women in the village. Undaunted counter-terror enthusiasm in him was truly heroic given the fact that Ibrahim Khan had gunned down whole of his family. It was a revenge attack as he had helped in eliminating several hard core militants in the area. Seeing the brutal fate, even those related distantly to him (that came to add up to a whole clan) migrated to the south of Chenab in an area where there was heavy deployment of the Indian army.

With a young girl’s strands of sunshine and puzzling urgency of overpowering emotions, Begum Khatun was the first one to lay her slender fingers on the cold metal of the gun trigger. Her heart beat violently, full of love for this man and an excitement born of a peculiar feeling of independence. Was it driven as a revenge act for her husband, sympathy for this broken stony man, or her own surrender to the cooing of her heart, one cannot be sure. It was possibly a mixture of all these. There was a fraction of widow, a part of a human being, a fragment of a female desire in her. Beating their blushing blues away, following Begum Khatun’s bold and gutsy initiative even other women from the hamlet picket up guns.

“In return of my son’s every school month lost I’ll kill at least one trouble maker...from this or that side!” she got goose-bumps of excitement.

However, far more effective and pungent was the shock and sympathy arising out of the tragedy faced by Sardar Bashir’s family. It was love indeed. She was even apprehensive of the possible fallouts. The feeling was but deeply empowering and she helplessly chose to be taken in its fold. The ridiculously muddled superstructure of bigger clashes across the line of division meanwhile guffawed in trepidation. After all, hate was expected, not love. Love simply wasn’t matching with the times. There are times when love gets out-dated. These were simply such times. Unfortunately though.

****

Gulam Mohammad’s son Irfan, the onetime teacher who had been missing for the last five years, surfaced in the quagmire of human miseries. He had been arrested three years back without anyone’s knowledge. One year of tortured isolation in a military cell was enough to change his loyalty. When he came out of solitary confinement, his educated self had been brainwashed of the fundamentalist filth. He was then planted as a mole in the expanding Students’ Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) network in northern Indian plains.

There were reports that SIMI activists from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh were holding secret meetings with Al Mansooriyan militant outfit. Just to show that Irfan was still on jihadi side, the military kept on questioning his father now and then, while in reality he was trying to lay bare the extent of SIMI’s role as a backbone for Islamic militancy.

The grossly intricate, stealthy network of ISI using local cogs spread out in Nepal was trying to weave a spider snare to catch the beetle. Even in Nepal, the only Hindu theocratic state, there were shadow organisations like Nepal World Islamic Council and Nepali Islamic Yuva Sangh that were giving sleepless nights to the Indian intelligence agencies. Their effort was to take the disgruntled Islamic underground network right to the Bangladesh border; sow the seeds of militancy in northern districts of West Bengal (in Siliguri United Islamic Liberation army) and Assam (Muslim United Liberation Front) and put this as a spice in the dessert of north eastern insurgency (tribal-Christian), thus weaving a lethal shackle of armed revolt across the chest of Hindustan.

Senior operatives of this network poured money via Nepal and Bangladesh to sustain the multiple-bleeding theory of Pakistan. Irfan as the educated mole provided ample clues to monetary transactions and the ways of money laundering to swell up terrorists’ funding. It was a long and wavy network taking circuitous route through Arabic and Central Asian countries, and to grease the oil of jihad God knows how it surfaced in the local accounts of the persons involved in the network.

After looming between life and death, tracking the dark pathways of this faceless trail, Irfan surfaced in his native hills having completely lost his identity. Now always pretending to be running away from the security forces, people drew their own specific images of his persona. The task he had been assigned here was many times riskier than anything he had done earlier. One night he paid a visit to Aslam’s house. All air was thrown in a dizzying fright. Begum Khatun’s fingers itched to pull the trigger of her .303 rifle to get her first score. However, her death frozen sister-in-law pulled her away. Being asked for a not so cordial and energetic supper, Irfan sat there like an enigma. When beautiful Busra served him Dal Ghosht—mutton cooked with pulses—her beautiful eyes glittered with the risk and pleasant adventure of a storm-tossed canoe. A holder of gun carried such a big aura around him and her young heart was throbbing with precarious agitation.

They were lovers from then onwards and met in the dark under the still darker shades of walnut and pine trees. Society’s parameters of success had been etched by gun. Those who lurked under the shadow of death were the heroes by default. By jumping into the fire he had earned his own share of enigmatic heroism. The young girl was in awe of him. She stammered and shivered as he took her in his arms. She was frozen under the tornado shower of unthinkable sensations as he groped his hands all over her body. We just cannot forget certain basic things that we carry with us as human beings, not even under the pal of death and amidst thunder of the gun. 

****

Rubeena and Rukiya, daughters of Begum Khatun, were blossoming like undaunted rose in the face of gun-smoke, and clattering and bursting shells. The time, however hard, cannot stop youth’s blossom, just like it cannot stop a flower from flaring up with fragrance. Rubeena, 18-year-old, sweetly poised at the cusp of peachy youth, was all starry eyed. Louder the guns boomed, more effervescently it sent sweetly shrivelling, bitter-sweet, and pleasant and frightful shivers down her supple back slenderously hidden beneath her embroidered smock. Well, we ought not to find fault with her, for this is all youth is about!

“What have you been dreaming so pleasantly to be so happy and sweet!?” seemed to be the query of everybody who happened to see her.

Undaunted and unfazed, her marriage having been postponed indefinitely by circumstances, she flirted and darted around like a butterfly over spring-time roses. Like everybody embroiled in the insurgency, she too fancied her little niche in the scheme of smoked up things and situations. Well, the prince of her dreams was not some valiant jihadi prowling predatorily in the wooded valleys, ready to shed blood for freedom. It was a handsome man in uniform. Growing up, her sweetest years drenched and drowned in gunfire from both sides, she had caught the fancy of olive green camouflage, epaulettes, and chest ribbons. While large-scale violence clamped down all plightful voices of their communities (Gujjar and Bakerwal) she had reason to inculcate fondness for the man in uniform. Two winters ago, while their father was in Ambala district of Haryana on work, inclement weather, record snowfall and avalanches hit Pir Panjals. The same mountains that had fed them now became carriers of sufferings in isolation. Cowering on the outer edges of the Pir Panjals along the LoC their tribal-cum-nomadic fabric was cut by snow storms and blizzards.

About 20 feet of snow was recorded. Snow the spring and summer time charmer for tourists turns dark in misery. It becomes rigid and un-melting to human sorrows and pain. The systematic disrobement of the Pir Panjal heights by the timber merchants for decades aggravated the natural calamity. Of late, even the militants had come to extract their share in the loot by forming nexus with timber contractors. So the debris and snow wreaked havoc burying cattle and owners. Cut off from the rest of the country no relief could be imagined. The lives trapped in snowy desert just prayed for a helping human hand. Hindu or Muslim it didn’t matter. When survival is at stake we behave like just humans, merely like any other animal species around. Theological battles are for leisure times, easy times when we don’t have anything more important at stake.

People were thus suffering in these desolate, frozen hills. Snowy blizzards and avalanches turned everything mundane, far less complex, just plain human suffering, spotless white and devoid of any human colouration. In this white solid sea, sorrows swam and melted to again form still bigger flakes of pain.

It was during this period of their almost certain snowy doom that a troop party led by a valiant fresh lieutenant who arrived there having braved militants’ bullets during the summers and now coming to tame the diktats of inclement weather. They were rescued and taken to a relief camp. The rescuer became a hero in her rosy-hued frightened eyes. Heart has its own diktats at that tender age. Emotions are arrogantly flamboyant. The travails of life in the relief camp scampered like shadows of fleeting clouds under sun as she found herself lost in pleasant thoughts about him. They rarely shared words but mostly talked through smiles. A smile can beat thousand words. It can compensate for hundred miseries at least.

Their eyes seemed to utter the coded words of love-lost hearts. She a Pahari tribal Muslim girl and he an Indian army officer, and that too a Hindu! Due to this chasm the disciplined soldier knew the limits to the pursuit of his heart. So even after making a short-cut of characteristic bureaucratic wrangling to get their share of relief package, he just restrained himself to a cold distant smile. Meanwhile, the burning love in her sparkling almond-shaped dark eyes just flared up exponentially with each passing hour. There she lay blanketed with the sweet pangs of unrequited love and his cold indifference in their makeshift shelter.

Summers came and they shifted back to their homes along the LoC. Her father came back with pocketful of wages devotedly saved while working in the plains below. His only wish came to centre around Haj pilgrimage. However, given the testing situation around it was a tough nut to crack to proceed out of the violent web. Once again that dreamy prince came to their aid. Again clipping the shrouds of bureaucratic haggling he helped the over-desperate man in boarding his plane from Delhi to kiss the holy land of his faith. Her secret love exploded for him. He saw it clearly but further withdrew into the disciplinary confines of his job and the thick line delineating the separateness of a young Muslim girl of Kashmir and a Hindu soldier fighting the insurgency. While she spent her every second lost in his memory, a bullet that had the young officer’s name written on it pierced his chest. He died. During those long nights she shed silent tears for him.

They too had a Dhok (temporary shelter) in the heights, but his father having taken to wage earning in the plains they no more visited the place like others did annually while the summers kissed the slopes. Moreover, the haggling over their movement had been growing at an irritating pace. However, during that summer some herders from the hamlet were moving to pastures. In order to escape the agony of the place where the prince of her heart had been killed, she too moved her little flock of sheep and goats in the guarded company of her uncle and his family. She wanted undisturbed time and space to mourn the death of her love. All alone lying in the pastures she stonily ogled into misty blues. In the luxuriously wild summer-time pastures her burning lips pined for a touch. In soulful silence she recalled his face, his taut military gait, his helplessness in not reciprocating, his gentle eyes, and those handsome features. During nights inside the Dhok she cried inaudibly. Silent tears for secret, short-lived love! Gun-smoked time was cutting its crop of little tragedies to grab its quota to complete a chapter in history. Irony is that such unseen pains don’t even earn a single line in the fat book of history that gets compiled later. 

In youth the body recovers quickly and so does heart. The rivulet of youth is too gurgling to flow mournfully for too long. It’s just not in the nature of a youthful river to not make noise against the rocks. It spreads and spends its youthful fury amidst confining rocks. A young heart is helpless after all. Soundlessly grieving, the mountain river of her youth was pouring its water into the reservoir of memories against the check dam of his sudden death. Now here at the new place the forcefully erected dam gave away to the ripples of the wild river in her heart. Life is too strong to be put onto hibernation. It just bursts out of its own. It was the charming Naik of the Infantry Division enlisted as a guard in the troop picket set up in the main street of the village. Manvendra Singh, tall, dark and handsome Punjabi-speaking soldier of the Sikh regiment, clean shaven, and his hair cropped short carried the look of a hero from some Bollywood movie. After the pleasantly evading game of no-no and yes-yes they somehow stole precious moments together. It was the biggest risk she could take almost bordering on the risk of life. It was the true love of the age outpouring from two innocent hearts where some sweet words spoken in soulful proximity outdid the pleasure of spoiling one’s clothes in a secret corner. They just talked, hugged, and smiled a lot.

Her younger sister Rukiya, however, knowing the secret as all younger sisters do, gave her reproachful looks. Girls have varying notions of the hero of their hearts. As the sovereign prince of her heart she dreamed of a jihadi wreaking death and destruction on the infidels. So a wedge was dangerously building up between the mother and the elder daughter on the one hand and the youngest boy and girl on the other. Like an airy shadow violence was creeping into hearts putting even the closest relatives to doubt each other. A gun in the hands of a jihadi. Another in the hands of a soldier. Guns are guns, they just mindlessly blow up flesh and bones. But then they divide hearts as well. They spawn dangerous warps in emotions. That seems even more lethal.

****

Rukiya, recently blossomed and having the recklessness and arrogance of a sturdiest filly, had her own self-possessed stake in the happenings around. Her tart breasts drawn straight with certain arrogance appeared to proclaim: “As a girl what can we contribute to the jihad? It is only gifting our virginity to someone who is ready to shed blood for the cause of Islam!” In her dreams she often surrendered to the over-violent ogle of some fierce fighter for the cause of religion.

With confusing combativeness she had flared up at Rubeena, “You will spoil your clothes under that kafir soldier! Allah save you sister, you are on the threshold of a sin! At least Ammi is better than you, for even though she is helping kafirs, but the reborn youth in her has at least fallen for a Muslim!”

Peace was resignedly obsolete. Thrown into a smouldering situation, all of them pitter-pattered in different voices. Invisible walls crept up to compartmentalise even those small hutments. The extended family became a drama of different roles. Although agony was collective, yet its individual consequences brought a chasm among the relatives. As a dithering spring handed over the baton to a curious summer in April, Makhan again paid a visit to his friend’s house. The manner of his talking and expressions clearly evinced that he was possessed of bigger worries than he tried to portray. The way he constantly talked of going higher into the pastures, Aslam realised that the unfolding circumstances at home had been too taxing for his friend and he was somehow trying to escape the heat back home.

His nephew Bashir entailed him the next day. The very sight of the youth sent a shiver down the old man’s spine. Muttering something he turned his head away. In his old-age defiance he was turning his neck as if that would change the reality.

“Uncle you had no reason to come out of house almost flying like this!” his nephew tried to be as courteous as possible while eyeing Rukiya.

He winked at her and she flushed. He was so straight as if taking it for granted that a girl will only take it positively. It was blunt courage. His manner was raw as if he wasn’t bothered of any consequences. It moved her. It was a pleasant disturbance. Her heart beat faster than any other man had caused it to beat. She felt a pang, a pleasant sensation in her stomach. It drifted down, the sensation, and mixed in the agitated folds of her virginity. 

“...You swine, fighting for this mother or fatherland of yours is OK. But if you sacrifice the family’s honour at its blood-smitten altar to those Afghani hounds then...then...” his uncle could not complete his outpour.

His eyes having sipped her freshly blossomed beauty he was no longer interested in forcing ahead his idea. Imperceptibly smiling at Rukiya he drawled in an emotionless tone: “People are sacrificing their lives for the cause of Islam and ... and you are browbeating over...”

Fledgling shallow waters in the pond of her teenaged self were stormed by his penetrating, prying gaze. “He looks like the man enough to pick up gun against Indians,” she evaluated him. With a buoyantly multiplier effect the pores of her skin contorted and goose-bumps surfaced on her fair skin. The air carried the rapturously tender wail of a cuckoo. It blew into the free horizons of her heart. 

Rukiya silently sneaked out of the house and walked up to the path amidst pines by which he was supposed to return. Fifteen minutes later he came fretting and fuming after the quarrel. She just pretended to come from the other way. He but was a very experienced hunter and she just an ignorant, excited sparrow.

“Hello girl, I hope you too do not hate my face like my uncle does,” he straightway accosted holding her hand.

The electrifying touch was too much and she just shrank pleasantly within herself. Coolly calculating the pleasant and consenting consequences of his boldness he drew her forward and embraced, “The life of a jihadi is too short to lose time in such shyness!”

His touch was deliriously desirous. It was just like a gust of air picks out a richly ripe fruit: a deft touch, and a trip, and a resonant fall. He was furnace like hot and groped her with melting fury. There was no way for her except submission to this transcendental allure. Ever frightful joy cascaded down her taut body. She wanted this outpour to be everlasting. Silence expressed its wonder at such sparkle of ecstasy. The stormy river of passion rolled with stones on its bed. She did not resist while he wolfishly lifted her lithe body and sneaked into the safety of a bushy ravine. A very mysterious, mischievous reflectivity was sprawled around in air. Riotous passion dissolved in the fluffy clouds hung with curiosity. She was crying while he hastily prepared to stealthily leave the scene of his hunting. He appeared all too normal, while she on the other hand looked shaken like a wind-lashed flower orchard.

“How will I now face mother and my sister?” she sobbed.

“You should be proud of shedding this tiny bit of blood for the cause of liberation. We, who are always facing death for freedom to all, at least need this much support from beautiful girls like you. I will again come the day after tomorrow and then we will see!” he winked profusely.

Meanwhile his uncle was letting out all his sorrows to his friend.

“...We too sympathised with the cause of the mujhadeens. But this monster in our family has crossed all limits. That day I mentioned that Afghan wolfishly eyeing granddaughter Noor. Well our scum has been so taken in by this bearish burly pathan that all his senses seems to have gone to chiragahs to graze with the lucky sheep there. While I bear witness before the army Major so often to disprove their suspicions constantly cropping up due to his dubious nature...He is an Afghan overlord—a relative of Taliban minister and has been to central Asia. One day to prove the extent of his loyalty he fleeced the poor girl and offered her like a lamb to the wolf. Eh, the scum! And see what strange logic he gave to redeem his sin: ‘If not he, who has come to liberate us, some kafir soldier would have deflowered her, so why fuss over it so much’ he says.”

Bashir came next time. Just had a formality of quarrelling and a sham show of breaking the ice with his uncle, winked at Rukiya and waited at the place of their last meeting. She meekly followed him there all the time lost in the grand vision of jihad and she a part of the life of a freedom fighter. His talk of holy fight was sure to carry her off her feet. In strangely curious hustle-bustle he groped her body. The extravagant buoyancy of his bloody resolve pacified the last bit of her resistance and again she gave in. With arrogant diligence his words took her in their swirling loop and the girl eloped with him. With this act he had put off all the veil of secrecy from his trove of sympathy and help to the militants hiding in the higher reaches and preparing for a strategic assault across the Pir Panjals. The match had been struck. An explosion awaited Aslam’s family.

****

An unwell sheep bleated in the barn. It was a crinkling, sickening sound. It floated and insidiously crept into the fate of this simple pahari gujjar Muslim family. It had its members divided in their loyalties towards both sides. After eloping from her home she accompanied her lover on the daylong trek across the mountains to reach the militant hideout. The path stealthily passed along the once Mughal road. Her girlish heart was in awe of his esteemed persona. Whenever she held his hand to balance against a fall it was like he was pulling her to the sacred platform of religious war. She felt lucky and privileged. I’m already playing my part in the war, she thought.

At last they reached the rock cut shelter. There was scared silence around. The cool mountain air was laden with a strange tension. A sudden barrage of contradictory emotions left her numb. Like a helpless lamb she stared at their faces. They were the messiah of freedom, the liberators of Islam. She was scared of them, but then she would have very easily fallen at their feet to proclaim her support for the cause. Despite best of her efforts to overlook the strength and presence of the Indian military, her faith in the jihadis’ ability to defeat such a big force always lacked firm conviction. After all they were so many and visible. The jihadis on the other hand were so few and invisible. Her doubts drifted a bit as she saw the arms cache of explosives. The harbingers of death to the kafirs. There were AK-47s, AK-56s, machine guns, flame throwers, sniper rifles with lethal range, grenade launchers, heavy calibre machine rocket guns, handguns, rifles—all this arsenal of death and destruction having been transported here inside Indian territory. It was a wonderful feat of perseverance and stealth.

The commander of this arms dump was an Afghan warlord cum mercenary having a vast experience in fomenting Islamic militancy in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Chechnya. After successfully rubbing shoulders with the jihadis in north Caucasus region, operating a lucrative trade in drugs and arms, he considered himself the Messiah of Pan Islamic republic—the ideology psychopathically gutted into his mind by a reputed Islamic school in Saudi Arabia. From that time onwards, firing the cannonade of his ideology, speaking several languages, he had left a trail of extremism and separatism in the region. In Dagestan, commanding a unit of a fundamentalist Muslim organisation’s rebel forces he had been seriously wounded. His name was Mohammad Sarwar Azimi, a distant relative of Maulvi Qalamuddin heading the Department for the Prevention of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue in Taliban’s tyrannical government. This brutally powerful warlord had blossomed from the prolific seeds of arms culture and opium trade, commandeering ruination, abductions and summary executions entailing the Soviet invasion of 1979, which turned the land into an inferno forcing people to flee from the mayhem and flood the refugee camps in neighbouring Pakistan. With terrorising sweep the homeland had been blood-bathed in atrocities and hostage taking of cadets from rival factions. Unsparing commanders ruled over their territories, perpetrating robberies, beatings, killings, rapes and murders as if these were their lawful taxes. Starting from a religious school in Pakistan, he along with friends Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and Abdul Mohaqiq (who had been killed in the Caucasus region) he had been taking the self-annihilating fire in him to jump into any fray, anywhere with any risk. He was drunk with sura, rolled a hand grenade in his fingers, while Ibrahim Khan cleaned his AK-47. With her entry a new energy seeped into the group. All of them wanted to embrace her but then chose to just hold her hand to greet. Their eyes did rest of the job. It was a beginning after all. Fascinated at the sight of this flower in red kerchief they invited her as their first woman jihadi in the squad. When you get ready to die for an ideology, fulfilment or non-fulfilment of lesser desires appears the same. 

It was one of the most treacherous parts of Pir Panjals here. In the nearby bunkers about 200 jihadis were lurking as harbingers of death and destruction. Some very systematically chalked out offensive was on the cards. This summer was definitely auguring a bad omen for the paradise. With competing resurrection of their spirits, they whispered of some unprecedented jihadi assault somewhere inside the LoC in North Kashmir. Even their whispers echoed among the cliffs. It felt abstractly monstrous in some mysterious way. With dogmatic certitude they just waited for some trigger from across the border.

****

Suspicion was brewing up in the local terrorist cell about the role of Irfan. Ibrahim Khan had a long call by his satellite phone from the Muzaffarabad based command centre. There was something wrong and it needed attention. They decided to stalk Irfan by poking torturing spikes into his love tale. Everybody knows the hardness of the souls who have taken the path on which death is sure to cross at some or the other time. Surety of death makes one immune to any limitation born of fear or emotions. It leaves a strange plume of sensation, this surety of death for an ideology. In absurdly opulent enthusiasm one seeks heroism in kicking humanity right in its stomach. The soul’s salvaging spurts are long dead. One seeks happiness in others’ tears. The smile is not relevant; cries of pain satiate the self.

It was happening before Rukiya’s eyes. A rifle slung across her frail shoulders, she exuded stony masculinity way beyond her feminine features. She had fleeced the poor girl and her unsuspecting lover into the forest. Busra had no clue to her cousin’s real motives and changed identity. Rukiya had been teasing her about the man. It let loose a titillating trail of sensation in Busra’s throbbing heart. It is so easy for a conniving mind to fleece a love-blinded heart. She trusted her cousin. She took it to be a part of simple teasing fun as she was led into Rukiya’s plan to arrange a meeting in isolation.

The world of blindfolding ideology is a petty world absorbed in its selfishness. It’s basically a knife. It cuts throats with airy ease, just like it cuts relations with an unmindful swipe. Rukiya was now a total stranger. She looked as if she had never seen Busra before. She had a more important family now bound by some majestic oath. Busra’s all attempts to evoke some emotion in her cousin’s eyes failed as they heinously tortured Irfan. But he did not budge. He had seen many such situations in life. So they picked up the soft target. Each cry from Busra, as they burned her breasts with cigarette butts, found Irfan’s strength floundering like sand from a fist that was losing its grip. Hate snatches life, love on the other hand sacrifices. He opened his secret. Authoritatively reading out the verdict of his field marshal, Irfan was shot in the head by an eager jihadi spirit. As the hefty Afghan raised his pistol to shoot the mole’s sweetheart, Rukiya shivered from head to feet. It takes some time to get completely uprooted. She tried to bring herself to intervene, but any of her effort was nullified peremptorily as Bashir held her back. Before fainting she heard another shot. Irfan’s death too was faceless like he had lived. Once their bodies were recovered the mourning talks in the nearby hamlets were again hatefully intriguing. Those who believed Irfan to be a jihadi condemned the army as the murderer; while those who had some inkling to his dubiousness praised the terrorists. Of course there still many more who talked of scandal. Of love, of relationship, of sin. Anyway it was a little story of invisible, long sorrows. Overall, there was a big story of little sorrows.

****

Rukiya proved to be as supple as a willow switch. Flailing darkness seemed to have taken a firm hold on her young, heaving self. The springs and stars had lost their meaning to her—the wispy gentilities of life that feed youth like dew does a spring rose; the ravishing enchantment of youth that puts smile to lips even without reason. She had dreamless, stony eyes which saw and didn’t see at the same time. She took the killings like it was just a matter of snapping a dry twig and overcame the initial shock with awful ease. It even surprised her colleagues. She was a perfect daughter of jihad, they said. Their hardly knotted convictions felt the warmth of her proximity. It simply boosted their resolve. A girl cutting away her roots, and thus almost killing herself even before she physically died, was important to them. But the girl being comfortable at the sight of her innocent relative being killed was even more important. It was the true hallmark of a jihadi.

Grandly old pines meanwhile reached out to the bluish skies and appeared to seek divine intervention. The air invisibly whispered songs of peace and a common humanity. Primly pleasant sound of water dribbling among pebbled course tried to evoke the innocent child in hardened souls. Weary solitude among spruce and birch hummed with a honeyed silence. Showers fell with pining, wondrous slowness. Beautifully blossomed moments in sunshine and shades mated to surrender their contradictory natures. Big, bold mountains loomed with love, waiting to surrender their existence to the inflamed passion of the breeze cutting across their peaks. Ignited passions of bright sunny days merged into the slowness of twilights. That was Kashmir, invisible, helpless, trying to have its say. Nature but has come to be subservient to the mankind. The beautiful smile was expiring on many a rosy lip. Aspirations helplessly swam in air. We have created hell at places where there could have been paradise as easily as the drift of clouds in an open sky, provided the sweet-singing melodies of the heart aren’t smothered by the useless symbology of ideas and ideologies.

Before that final all important assault they decided to eliminate Asim Khan. In the past a dozen efforts at his life had failed. They now had a feminine flirter with the jihadi fire of death and adventure. With the suicide belt neatly tied around her slender waist, like a young full of life gazelle, Rukiya proved to be the epitome of the idea of toying with death during the mock exercises to press the all-important final button. The denunciating wrath in her brought many appreciating smiles on the inflamed ruddy lips of the Afghan mercenary. There was a tiniest trace of love in his eyes. But then he just swiped it away to turn his look blood thirsty. Religious war required blood, not love, no fond emotions. They had made love in pale, melancholic moonlight. But was it love-making? The agile brook of desires carried bewailing miseries. She had surrendered to him like the weakest slave giving into the strongest master. But then she flared up so forcibly that he was swept into the self-absorbing fire of her passion. It left him almost shaken. He couldn’t but help being possessive about her. These were malignant traces. He hated these emotions. But why did he feel those pangs of jealousy when someone else was being sucked into the smouldering fire of her desire? He had followed the path of death on which life was just an inconsequential shadow. No, it was just impossible to turn around now. He was surprised when he even dreamt of eloping with her to some far place, away from all problems and issues. He forced himself to throw a grenade at any such softer feeling. He would sacrifice for the cause of God. He knew a sacrifice was waiting. And he was ready for it, somewhat even happier than he would have been without any such softer emotion. Ready to slaughter the self as well. That’s what his indoctrination had prepared him for. If Allah was merciful enough to give him the opportunity of celebrating another Eid, he thought, he will carry his head a bit higher on the auspicious day. He wasn’t sure about what was he sacrificing. And if he was, he didn’t want to accept it.

At the Rajputana Rifles base camp, on the outskirts of Surankote, a valedictory function had been organised to facilitate those who had come forward as VDC and counter terrorists. Also some charity provisions were to be distributed to the poor. Clad as a poorest of the poor destitute, the female jihadi sneaked into the crowd of charity seekers. Her eyes were empty like they no longer saw anything. The face was expressionless as if she was no longer bothered about the best and the worst. Asim sat on the dais along with a Colonel of the Rajputana Rifles and local bureaucrats. With unmoving air around her she moved ahead when her turn came. Before Tauseef could see her and run to hold her back, she was almost by the table in front of the guests. She looked at her relative, and hesitated for a moment. She but had been religiously brainwashed to the extent of quelling any doubt or fear when face to face with death at the final moments of life. The button was pressed. Ten people including Tauseef, Asim and the Colonel died and many others were injured. Death had taken a liking to poor Aslam’s house.

****

Amorously entwined emotions. Delicate majesty of a fresh-springing rose. Love makes, but then it breaks as well. Begum Khatun, fully carried away by the last sparkle of love before the onset of menopause, spent many nights in secret in the arms of SPO Sardar Bashir whenever he came to stay in the hamlet. She carried out the plan in the night so meticulously that not a single soul apart from the couple had the least idea or inkling about the nature of their love escapade. Long chains of silence gripped the scandalous air around their love-making bodies, to save them, to keep their happiness from falling apart. There were but conflicting ironies. Guns ruled and fear seeped into lungs more comfortably than even oxygen. Death was a bigger surety than life. Unchallenged happiness was a rare thing. And mishap carried a weightier guarantee than the most normal routine things of life.

The couple happened to be in bed when the expected happened. Bashir—who had gleaned the facts of his late girlfriend’s mother’s and sister’s anti-jihadi liaisons—carried out the eliminating strike at the SPOs house. Right in response to the first strike at the window the naked couple knew they were imperilled. Sardar Bashir had his service machine gun while Begum Khatun had carried her archaic .303 rifle to give her courage and conviction during the night-sashay. Clothes on or off, we have to fight to save the skin.  Both naked, they fired back. As the shots rattled exclamatory interjections into darkness, all the women VDC members knew that their male mentor’s life was in danger. Duty-bound, they too shot from a safe distance from around the corners of the house. Hoping the shots will scare away the militants. However, the militants were well aware of the innocuous rattles by feminine wrists bearing almost harmless guns and carried on with the seize of the house methodically.

The picket commander of the watch post outside the hamlet informed the administrative base camp of 14 Jat Regiment where his company commander had gone to celebrate the birthday of his Lieutenant Colonel. Nonplussed by the urgency in Subedar’s voice, he responded a bit tipsily:

“Do not move from your place! You need not add to the bloodbath. They are both sides of the same coin, let them enjoy their marksmanship, or markswomanship...the bastards love the rattle of gun so much...as if...” and he snapped the call.

When the scared dawn peeped over the ridge, more than the gory deed it was the naked secret of the lovers that became the talk of the day. Most of them saw beyond the bullet-holed bodies of the lovers—a feisty scandalous tale of love. Guns had won, love had lost.

****

The month of May had begun. With melancholic coolness the air seemed to turn hardened, insensitive hearts into softly throbbing, forgiving operators of humanity. With beauty, grace and skill the sunrays melted the frozen peaks. The frigidness in human hearts was but monolithically changeless. Mountain streams gurgled with pleasant melancholy. Teary, dewed moonlight wailed for those times when rapturous romance kissed the knifed stone edges and flowers with equal ease. The nature had lost its grip. It was a human stranglehold drawing its strength from pathetically enlightening dreams. The rumours of valiant jihadi deeds in the Kargil sector did rounds to pump up the dreams of freedom. Day in and day out the people gossiped about impending freedom and Pakistani victory.

Still guided by love and misguided by lust for Rukiya, Bashir knew he had one more score to settle in the family and it was with Rubeena, the lover of a kafir soldier. Dexterously he planted a mole in the love tale. Nahila, a girl from the neighbourhood, overnight kindled many a friendly feeling for the grieving girl. No sooner had she visited her for a week than she came to know the timings and meeting places of the couple.

It was a fine, hot, suffering saffron evening. In the pine grove the still air hummed with primitive exaltations of tranquillity. The nature is a natural accomplice to love. It was fistful of a cosy world, away from rattling guns and talk of religions. But mankind has turned out to be a plunderer of its own peace. Taking his picket commander in confidence, Shailender Singh sneaked out to steal some humane, relaxing moments with the lady of his heart. Their intimacy had taken the first few steps on the path of love. They were up to hurried, soft kissing whenever they met and held each other tightly looking around for some human eye or a bullet before parting with still more aching heart than before. Every meeting fuelled the fire to meet again. Love seemed to possess so many possibilities in pleasant anticipation.

“A soldier lives by chance, loves by choice!” he was lost in her angelic beauty, “and kills by profession” he muttered softly. “Next time I get leaves, I will take you to my peaceful place. One can move freely in the night. No bullets. No fighting. Away, away from this doomed place. Oh Rubeena, how I wish that India and Pakistan strike peace and leave us soldiers to our own fate. We are so much frustrated that now we feel like totally separate and suffering third party in the conflict...”

Only tragic stories had come to earn a copyright to bloody completion. Dreamy designs and magnetic charms of love stories had no right to meet a happy end. He like his story was not destined to complete his love talk. From a distance Bashir shot him in head with fearsome passion and glee. The killer seemed caught in some inexhaustible and insatiable delirium.

Only love can take something to conclusion. An act of hate is an incomplete sentence having many possible ends, sub-endings rather. It lingers like a ghost and breeds further hate in minds and souls. The effable young soldier was the darling of the whole company. His killing drew away all sense and logic out of his fatigued and frustrated colleagues. They roughshod the whole hamlet and dragged a weeping and wailing Rubeena, rubbing salt on her injuries by calling her an impostor lover who lured away the soldier to get him killed by the terrorists. A horrible fate awaited the poor girl in the interrogation cell.

****

In strained silence the month of May was heating the hay in Pir Panjals. Rumours had twisted all shards of facts. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, it was being said, of jihadis and Pakistani soldiers had sneaked deep into the Indian territory and taken hold of strategic heights along the LoC during winters. The whole of the LoC was crumbling under their attack and its repercussions were being felt in the valley. Kargil war (May to July 1999) had broken out. The whole fabric of sanity was cut down. The bitter rivals were fighting; the world community was worried they might annihilate each other with nukes. The spark had begun in the Kargil sector along northern LoC and every second it was feared it would flare up all along the perilous line of control.

Ibrahim Khan opened the front in Poonch. 

“Like the legendary Mughal commander we will cut across Pir Panjal along the once Mughal road! Allah ho Akbar!” the shouted the clarion call of jihad.

Consolidating their rear touching the LoC to maintain supply line with the help of Pakistani army, they annihilated an advance party of 11 Jat Regiment. It was a masterly mixture of hit and run, as well as battle in front-to-front formation. The Indian military lacked troop mobilisation in this belt, most of the replenishments being made for the Kargil and Drass sector.

Before dying a valiant death, the Major leading the party, gave valuable clues to the strength and position of the mujahideens. Then the shot rattled like a last stern message. A grenade was thrown at the jawan bearing the field telephone backpack.

The main party of the regiment was taken aback by the military perfect assault of the jihadis. Its morale was flummoxed when the Lieutenant Colonel leading it was injured by shrapnel. Unmindful of the orders to pull back a few riflemen—not able to control their emotions after seeing their colleagues dead and maimed—remained on the front, advanced thunderously, inflicted some casualties but were wiped out thus adding to the command’s frustration.

Cursing and crudely swearing the Colonel from the battalion base called them back. The operation could not be started for a whole week—spent in waiting for reinforcements—during the time the terrorists replenished their men and material reserves from across the LoC. Meantime, the Bofors fired at high slopes from the fire base of the artillery company and air force planes pounded the terrain a few times during the day.

In the sweaty month of June a coherent plan was carried out by the military: 4 Grenadiers linked up with 16 J &K Rifles and moved in dark from one side of the ridge blowing the jihadi watch pickets along the way. While 4 Gorkha Regiment linked up with 3 Rajputana Rifles advanced as reinforcements. From the slope that was open and likely to bear most casualties brave platoons of Jat Regiment sneaked ahead, brilliantly led by young freshly commissioned officers.

“Jat Balwan, Jai Bhagwan!” they thundered.

“...over and out...Allah ho Akbar!”

Sarwar Azimi, the Afghan warlord, adjusted the headgear on his big head. He knew finest and fiercest of hill battles had begun. He had grown up taking Indians to be grass-eating cowards totally lacking killer instinct. But now looking down from the strategically high hideouts, he in heart of hearts was marvelling at the Indian army’s capacity to bear losses uncomplainingly, as unmindful of killed and maimed colleagues, columns after columns of reinforcements with their chin up moved upslope to finally overpower the enemy.

Nonetheless, as the rear was still safe, supply to the militants meant Indian casualties were to count even more. The battle was thus prolonged. It was not before the brave Gorkha Regiment battled ahead on an almost suicidal mission in the rear along the LoC to cut their lifeline that the table was turned against the transgressors. The Indian Army got busy in the killing fields, pulling out weeds from the crop that was sown in 1947.

Once the mujahideens’ supply lines were cut, they were left stranded in those treacherous heights of Pir Panjals. Death danced on both sides. The circle of confinement went on narrowing and so did the bloodletting. The terrorists battled with dark heroism, totally hypnotised by the ideology of militant Islam. They stood up till their last bullet. The soldiers advanced mechanically with steely patriotism; with each soldier falling, the rank being filled by the backup, without any fear, without any fuss. And hundreds died....

We live in a world of alternative realities. The boundaries transgress and we are caught in deadly pale zones of confrontation. Here the slow grandeur of kaleidoscopic plurality gets lost in the grey shadows of death and destruction. And there are plaintive cries of pain. Of humans. There is blood. Of humans.

****

Direct scars of the strife were now visible on Aslam’s face. This internecine conflict had taken away his son, daughter, sister and two nieces. On 14 July the Indian military officially declared the mission accomplished to exterminate the jihadis. As a celebratory gesture the local army command allowed the Gujjars to move to their pasturage in the higher reaches. “It is but too late now. The summer is at its end!” they refrained. The summer had been too bloody for Aslam. He wanted to leave the place for some time. He still wanted to see the world he had grown up. Possibly it was lying in fragments in the higher reaches. It won’t come to them. They will have to search for it and join its broken pieces with the still remaining parts of their spirit to jumble up a little world resembling the past.

He and his friend Haji Makhan decided to go to the Dhoks even if it was for less than a month. Having gone a couple of kilometres from the hamlet and moving along the nostalgic goat track Makhan raised his full bearded face upslope and drank in the full vigour of summer’s breeze.

“I can smell lush green grass there!”

Aslam looked morosely: “I will have to wait to go that far to be able to see it with my own eyes, for this accursed war has robbed me of my nose’s job along with five of my people!”