And she had learned from experience that Need was a warehouse that could accommodate a considerable amount of cruelty.
==========
Aurangzeb, emperor at the time, summoned Sarmad to his court and asked him to prove he was a true Muslim by reciting the Kalima: la ilaha illallah, Mohammed-ur rasul Allah – There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is His Messenger. Sarmad stood naked in the royal court in the Red Fort before a jury of Qazis and Maulanas. Clouds stopped drifting in the sky, birds froze in mid-flight and the air in the fort grew thick and impenetrable as he began to recite the Kalima. But no sooner had he started than he stopped. All he said was the first phrase: la ilaha. There is no God. He could not go any further, he insisted, until he had completed his spiritual search and could embrace Allah with all his heart. Until then, he said, reciting the Kalima would only be a mockery of prayer. Aurangzeb, backed by his Qazis, ordered Sarmad’s execution.
==========
He spoke of the past with dignity but never nostalgia.
==========
Mir Taqi Mir:
Jis sar ko ghurur aaj hai yaan taj-vari ka
Kal uss pe yahin shor hai phir nauhagari ka
The head which today proudly flaunts a crown
Will tomorrow, right here, in lamentation drown
==========
‘D’you know why God made Hijras?’ she asked Aftab one afternoon while she flipped through a dog-eared 1967 issue of Vogue, lingering over the blonde ladies with bare legs who so enthralled her. ‘No, why?’ ‘It was an experiment. He decided to create something, a living creature that is incapable of happiness. So he made us.’
==========
She was at the age when anything to do with shitting, pissing and farting was the high point, or perhaps the whole point, of all stories.
==========
Jisey ishq ka tiir kaari lage Usey zindagi kyuun na bhari lage For one struck down by Cupid’s bow Life becomes burdensome, isn’t that so?
==========
She knew very well that she knew very well that she knew very well.
==========
The saffron men sheathed their swords, laid down their tridents and returned meekly to their working lives, answering bells, obeying orders, beating their wives and biding their time until their next bloody outing.
==========
On the whole it was only slightly less alarming than the previous arrangement.
==========
This was because Anjum stole her electricity from the mortuary, where the corpses required round-the-clock refrigeration. (The city’s paupers who lay there in air-conditioned splendour had never experienced anything of the kind while they were alive.)
==========
The advantage of the guest house in the graveyard was that unlike every other neighbourhood in the city, including the most exclusive ones, it suffered no power cuts. Not even in the summer. This was because Anjum stole her electricity from the mortuary, where the corpses required round-the-clock refrigeration. (The city’s paupers who lay there in air-conditioned splendour had never experienced anything of the kind while they were alive.)
==========
The streets were busy. Goatskins, goat horns, goat skulls, goat brains and goat offal were being collected, separated and stacked. Shit was being extruded from intestines that would then be properly cleaned and boiled down into soap and glue. Cats were making off with delectable booty. Nothing went to waste.
==========
You will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better.
==========
It isn’t as though they didn’t have plans. Anjum waited to die. Saddam waited to kill. And miles away, in a troubled forest, a baby waited to be born …
==========
In what language does rain fall over tormented cities? PABLO NERUDA
==========
When they finished chanting, the People of the World bowed low and joined their palms in greeting. Namaste, they said in exotic accents, and smiled like the turbaned doormen with Maharaja moustaches who greeted foreign guests in five-star hotels. And with that, in the advertisement at least, history was turned upside down. (Who was bowing now? And who was smiling? Who was the petitioner? And who the petitioned?) In their sleep India’s favourite citizens smiled back. India! India! they chanted in their dreams, like the crowds at cricket matches. The drum major beat out a rhythm … India! India! The world rose to its feet, roaring its appreciation. Skyscrapers and steel factories sprang up where forests used to be, rivers were bottled and sold in supermarkets, fish were tinned, mountains mined and turned into shining missiles. Massive dams lit up the cities like Christmas trees. Everyone was happy.
==========
In slums and squatter settlements, in resettlement colonies and ‘unauthorized’ colonies, people fought back. They dug up the roads leading to their homes and blocked them with rocks and broken things. Young men, old men, children, mothers and grandmothers armed with sticks and rocks patrolled the entrances to their settlements. Across one road, where the police and bulldozers had lined up for the final assault, a slogan scrawled in chalk said, Sarkar ki Maa ki Choot. The Government’s Mother’s Cunt.
==========
Instead, their homes, their doors and windows, their makeshift roofs, their pots and pans, their plates, their spoons, their school-leaving certificates, their ration cards, their marriage certificates, their children’s schools, their lifetime’s
==========
‘Where shall we go?’ the surplus people asked. ‘You can kill us, but we won’t move,’ they said. There were too many of them to be killed outright. Instead, their homes, their doors and windows, their makeshift roofs, their pots and pans, their plates, their spoons, their school-leaving certificates, their ration cards, their marriage certificates, their children’s schools, their lifetime’s work, the expression in their eyes, were flattened by yellow bulldozers imported from Australia. (Ditch Witch, they were called, the ’dozers.) They were State-of-the-Art machines. They could flatten history and stack it up like building material.
==========
Fiercely competitive TV channels covered the story of the breaking city as ‘Breaking News’. Nobody pointed out the irony. They unleashed their untrained, but excellent-looking, young reporters, who spread across the city like a rash, asking urgent, empty questions; they asked the poor what it was like to be poor, the hungry what it was like to be hungry, the homeless what it was like to be homeless. ‘Bhai Sahib, yeh bataaiye, aap ko kaisa lag raha hai …?’ Tell me, brother, how does it feel to be …? The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair.
==========
Experts aired their expert opinions for a fee: Somebody has to pay the price for Progress, they said expertly.
==========
Begging was banned. Thousands of beggars were rounded up and held in stockades before being shipped out of the city in batches. Their contractors had to pay good money to ship them back in. Father John-for-the-Weak sent out a letter saying that, according to police records, almost three thousand unidentified dead bodies (human) had been found on the city’s streets last year. Nobody replied.
==========
But the food shops were bursting with food. The bookshops were bursting with books. The shoe shops were bursting with shoes. And people (who counted as people) said to one another, ‘You don’t have to go abroad for shopping any more. Imported things are available here now. See, like Bombay is our New York, Delhi is our Washington and Kashmir is our Switzerland. It’s like really like saala fantastic yaar.’
==========
All day long the roads were choked with traffic. The newly dispossessed, who lived in the cracks and fissures of the city, emerged and swarmed around the sleek, climate-controlled cars, selling cloth dusters, mobile phone chargers, model jumbo jets, business magazines, pirated management books (How to Make Your First Million, What Young India Really Wants), gourmet guides, interior design magazines with colour photographs of country houses in Provence, and quick-fix spiritual manuals (You Are Responsible for Your Own Happiness … or How to Be Your Own Best Friend …). On Independence Day they sold toy machine guns and tiny national flags mounted on stands that said Mera Bharat Mahan, My India Is Great. The passengers looked out of their car windows and saw only the new apartment they planned to buy, the Jacuzzi they had just installed and the ink that was still wet on the sweetheart deal they had just closed. They were calm from their meditation classes and glowing from yoga practice.
==========
On the city’s industrial outskirts, in the miles of bright swamp tightly compacted with refuse and colourful plastic bags, where the evicted had been ‘re-settled’, the air was chemical and the water poisonous. Clouds of mosquitoes rose from thick green ponds. Surplus mothers perched like sparrows on the debris of what used to be their homes and sang their surplus children to sleep.
==========
The surplus children slept, dreaming of yellow ’dozers.
==========
The summer of the city’s resurrection had also been the summer of scams – coal scams, iron-ore scams, housing scams, insurance scams, stamp-paper scams, phone-licence scams, land scams, dam scams, irrigation scams, arms and ammunition scams, petrol-pump scams, polio-vaccine scams, electricity-bill scams, school-book scams, god-men scams, drought-relief scams, car-number-plate scams, voter-list scams, identity-card scams – in which politicians, businessmen, businessmen-politicians and politician-businessmen had made off with unimaginable quantities of public money.
==========
People who would normally have nothing to do with each other (the left-wing, the right-wing, the wingless) all flocked to him.
==========
He had something for everyone. He electrified Hindu chauvinists (who were already excited by the Mother India map) with their controversial old war cry, Vande Mataram! Salute the Mother! When some Muslims got upset, the committee arranged a visit from a Muslim film star from Bombay who sat on the dais next to the old man for more than an hour wearing a Muslim prayer cap (something he never usually did) to underline the message of Unity in Diversity. For traditionalists the old man quoted Gandhi. He said that the caste system was India’s salvation. ‘Each caste must do the work it has been born to do, but all work must be respected.’ When Dalits erupted in fury, a municipal sweeper’s little daughter was dressed up in a new frock and seated by his side with a bottle of water from which he sipped from time to time. For militant moralists the old man’s slogan was Thieves must have their hands cut off! Terrorists must be hanged! For Nationalists of all stripes he roared, ‘Doodh maangogey to kheer dengey! Kashmir maangogey to chiir dengey!’ Ask for milk, we’ll give you cream! Ask for Kashmir, we’ll rip you open seam to seam!
==========
Nobody had seen frenzy like this, at least not since twenty years ago, when, on the Day of the Concurrent Miracle, idols of Lord Ganesh in temples all over the world were reported to have simultaneously started drinking milk.
==========
The toilet lights stayed on, night and day. It cost one rupee for a piss, two for a shit and three for a shower. Not many on the pavement could afford these rates. Many pissed outside the toilet, against the wall. So, though the toilet was spotlessly clean inside, from the outside it gave off the sharp smoky smell of stale urine. It didn’t matter very much to the management; the toilet’s revenue came from elsewhere. The exterior wall doubled up as a billboard that advertised something new every week.
==========
Chheen li tumne garib ki rozi roti
Aur laga diye hain fees karne pe tatti
You’ve snatched poor folks’ daily bread
And slapped a fee on their shit instead
==========
His mother didn’t work as a sweeper in a dam-engineer’s house that was built on the land that she once owned. She didn’t have to steal mangoes from her own trees. She didn’t live in a resettlement colony in a tin hut with tin walls and a tin roof that was so hot you could fry onions on it.
==========
Opposite the toilet, back on the TV-crew side of the road (but some serious ideological distance away), was what people on the pavement called the Border: Manipuri Nationalists asking for the revocation of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which made it legal for the Indian Army to kill on ‘suspicion’; Tibetan refugees calling for a free Tibet; and, most unusually (and most dangerously, for them), the Association of Mothers of the Disappeared, whose sons had gone missing, in their thousands, in the war for freedom in Kashmir.
==========
They weren’t all mothers; the wives, sisters and a few young children of the Disappeared had come too. Each of them carried a picture of their missing son, brother or husband. Their banner said: The Story of Kashmir DEAD = 68,000 DISAPPEARED = 10,000 Is this Democracy or Demon Crazy? No TV camera pointed at that banner, not even by mistake.
==========
They had told their stories at endless meetings and tribunals in the international supermarkets of grief,
==========
Sometimes a single person’s clarity can unnerve a muddled crowd.
==========
He, a revolutionary trapped in an accountant’s mind. She, a woman trapped in a man’s body. He, raging at a world in which the balance sheets did not tally. She, raging at her glands, her organs, her skin, the texture of her hair, the width of her shoulders, the timbre of her voice. He, fighting for a way to impose fiscal integrity on a decaying system. She, wanting to pluck the very stars from the sky and grind them into a potion that would give her proper breasts and hips and a long, thick plait of hair that would swing from side to side as she walked, and yes, the thing she longed for most of all, that most well stocked of Delhi’s vast stock of invectives, that insult of all insults, a Maa ki Choot, a mother’s cunt. He, who had spent his days tracking tax dodges, pay-offs and sweetheart deals. She, who had lived for years like a tree in an old graveyard, where, on lazy mornings and late at night, the spirits of the old poets whom she loved, Ghalib, Mir and Zauq, came to recite their verse, drink, argue and gamble. He, who filled in forms and ticked boxes. She, who never knew which box to tick, which queue to stand in, which public toilet to enter (Kings or Queens? Lords or Ladies? Sirs or Hers?). He, who believed he was always right. She, who knew she was all wrong, always wrong. He, reduced by his certainties. She, augmented by her ambiguity. He, who wanted a law. She, who wanted a baby. A circle formed around them: furious, curious, assessing the adversaries, picking sides. It didn’t matter. Which tight-arsed Gandhian accountant stood a chance in hell in a one-to-one public face-off against an old, Old Delhi Hijra?
==========
Dil cheez kya hai, aap meri jaan lijiye
Why just my heart, take my whole life too
==========
Not enough to live on, but just enough to prevent us from dying.
==========
The government feeds us useless little pieces of hope through the bars of this iron railing. Not enough to live on, but just enough to prevent us from dying.
==========
Mar gayee bulbul qafas mein
Keh gayee sayyaad se
Apni sunehri gaand mein
Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar
She died in her cage, the little bird,
These words she left for her captor –
Please take the spring harvest
And shove it up your gilded arse
==========
Even some of the street mongrels have coats and show traces of pedigreed lineage. Trickledown. Ha! Ha!
==========
Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we are continue to coexist – continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the centre holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view.
==========
If you’ll pardon me for making this somewhat prosaic observation – maybe that’s what life is, or ends up being most of the time: a rehearsal for a performance that never eventually materializes.
==========
It would have easily made the Before part of a Before-and-After shampoo commercial.
==========
That both rumours were true. Her mother was indeed her real mother, but had first abandoned her and then adopted her.
==========
He noticed Tilo and switched on his (considerable) charm, like you might switch on the headlights of a car, only because she didn’t pay attention to him. He wasn’t used to that.
==========
He was a great showman; boisterous, witty, a bit of a bully, and utterly, hilariously merciless with the people he chose to publicly pick on. He was nice-looking, slim, boyish, a good cricketer (off-spinner), with floppy hair and glasses – very much the cool, intellectual sportsman. But more than his looks, it was his roguish appeal that girls seemed to love. They flocked around him giddily, hanging on to his every word, giggling at his jokes even when they weren’t funny. It was hard to keep track of his string of girlfriends. He had that chameleon-like quality that good actors have – the ability to alter his physical appearance, not superficially, but radically, depending on who he had decided to be at that particular moment in his life.
==========
Her main responsibility at work, she told me, was to take the blame for other people’s mistakes.
==========
A ginger tomcat yowled in sexual desperation for the female who had barricaded herself inside a nest of loose wicker that had come undone from the seat of a broken chair. I probably remember him so clearly because he reminded me of myself.
==========
‘I’m not marrying anybody.’ When I asked her why she felt that way, she said she wanted to be free to die irresponsibly, without notice and for no reason.
==========
I have never understood how that storm of dull, misguided vanity – the absurd notion that Kashmir could have ‘freedom’ – swept him up as it did a whole generation of young Kashmiri men.
==========
Even in the most uneventful of lives, we are called upon to choose our battles, and this one wasn’t mine.
==========
But who was to explain that to a crusading journalist who wrote his copy with the sound of applause permanently ringing in his ears?
==========
Today, as the saffron tide of Hindu Nationalism rises in our country like the swastika once did in another,
==========
Even my colleagues in the Bureau don’t seem to be able to see the difference between religious faith and patriotism. They seem to want a sort of Hindu Pakistan.
==========
That none of us who were fighting over it – Kashmiris, Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese (they have a piece of it too – Aksai Chin, which used to be part of the old Kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir), or for that matter Pahadis, Gujjars, Dogras, Pashtuns, Shins, Ladakhis, Baltis, Gilgitis, Purikis, Wakhis, Yashkuns, Tibetans, Mongols, Tatars, Mon, Khowars – none of us, neither saint nor soldier, had the right to claim the truly heavenly beauty of that place for ourselves.
==========
The Believers come with their guns, their prayer beads and their own Destroy-Yourselves Manual.
==========
The militants who managed to make it through rarely survived in the Valley for more than two or at most three years. If they weren’t captured or killed by the security forces, they slaughtered each other. We guided them along that path, although they didn’t need much assistance – they still don’t.
==========
Yesterday a Pakistani friend forwarded me this – it’s making the mobile phone rounds, so you may have seen it already: I saw a man on a bridge about to jump. I said, ‘Don’t do it!’ He said, ‘Nobody loves me.’ I said, ‘God loves you. Do you believe in God?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Are you a Muslim or a non-Muslim?’ He said, ‘A Muslim.’ I said, ‘Shia or Sunni?’ He said, ‘Sunni.’ I said, ‘Me too! Deobandi or Barelvi?’ He said, ‘Barelvi.’ I said, ‘Me too! Tanzeehi or Tafkeeri?’ He said, ‘Tanzeehi.’ I said, ‘Me too! Tanzeehi Azmati or Tanzeehi Farhati?’ He said, ‘Tanzeehi Farhati.’ I said, ‘Me too! Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Uloom Ajmer, or Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat?’ He said, ‘Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat.’ I said, ‘Die, kafir!’ and I pushed him over.
==========
The only thing that keeps Kashmir from self-destructing like Pakistan and Afghanistan is good old petit bourgeois capitalism. For all their religiosity, Kashmiris are great businessmen. And all businessmen eventually, one way or another, have a stake in the status quo – or what we call the ‘Peace Process’, which, by the way, is an entirely different kind of business opportunity from peace itself.
==========
(Ah yes, there was a time when a Muslim courtesan could so hauntingly invoke a Hindu deity.)
==========
Their cordon-and-search operations were always ‘massive’, everybody they picked up was always ‘dreaded’, seldom less than ‘A-category’, and the recoveries they made from those they captured were always ‘war-like’.
==========
The irony was – is – that if you put four Kashmiris in a room and ask them to specify what exactly they mean by Azadi, what exactly are its ideological and geographic contours, they would probably end up slitting each other’s throats.
==========
The irony was – is – that if you put four Kashmiris in a room and ask them to specify what exactly they mean by Azadi, what exactly are its ideological and geographic contours, they would probably end up slitting each other’s throats. And yet it would be a mistake to chalk this down to confusion. Their problem is not confusion, not really. It’s more like a terrible clarity that exists outside the language of modern geopolitics. All the protagonists on all sides of the conflict, especially us, exploited this fault line mercilessly. It made for a perfect war – a war that can never be won or lost, a war without end.
==========
The thinking was that permitting the population to vent its feelings and shout its slogans from time to time would prevent that anger from accumulating and building into an unmanageable cliff of rage. So far, in this more than quarter-century-long conflict in Kashmir, it has paid off. Kashmiris mourned, wept, shouted their slogans, but in the end they always went back home.
==========
Retirement is rarely kind to powerful men.
==========
‘Get them by the balls, Barber. Hearts and minds will follow.’ Kashmir did this to us.
==========
It’s true we did – we do – some terrible things in Kashmir, but … I mean what the Pakistan Army did in East Pakistan – now that was a clear case of genocide. Open and shut. When the Indian Army liberated Bangladesh, the good old Kashmiris called it – still call it – the ‘Fall of Dhaka’. They aren’t very good at other people’s pain. But then, who is? The Baloch, who are being buggered by Pakistan, don’t care about Kashmiris. The Bangladeshis whom we liberated are hunting down Hindus. The good old communists call Stalin’s Gulag a ‘necessary part of revolution’. The Americans are currently lecturing the Vietnamese about human rights. What we have on our hands is a species problem. None of us is exempt. And then there’s that other business that’s become pretty big these days. People – communities, castes, races and even countries – carry their tragic histories and their misfortunes around like trophies, or like stock, to be bought and sold on the open market. Unfortunately, speaking for myself, on that count I have no stock to trade, I’m a tragedy-less man. The upper-caste, upper-class oppressor from every angle. Cheers to that.
==========
‘shape up or ship out’.
==========
As for their death, need I tell you about it? It will be, for all of them, the death of him who, when he learned of his from the jury, merely mumbled in a Rhenish accent, ‘I’m already way beyond that.’ Jean Genet
==========
Then, as she had already died four or five times, the apartment had remained available for a drama more serious than her own death. JEAN GENET
==========
She remembered reading somewhere that even after people died, their hair and nails kept growing. Like starlight, travelling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died.
==========
‘Nietzsche believed that if Pity were to become the core of ethics, misery would become contagious and happiness an object of suspicion.’
==========
‘Schopenhauer on the other hand believed that Pity is and ought to be the supreme weevil virtue. But long before them, Socrates asked the key question: Why should we be moral?’
==========
A lizard on TV. Hello and welcome, you’re watching Lizard News at Nine. There’s been a blizzard on lizard island.
==========
There’s trouble in the city – you must have heard – protests, firings, killings, funerals … Our usual Srinagar Special.
==========
We follow our own rules Ferocious we are Lethal in any form Tamer of tides We play with storms U guessed it right We are Men in Uniform
==========
Mohabbat goliyon se bo rahe ho
Watan ka chehra khoon se dho rahe ho
Gumaan tum ko ke rasta katt raha hai
Yaqeen mujhko ke manzil kho rahe ho
Bullets you sow instead of love
Our homeland you wash with blood
You imagine you’re showing the way
But I believe you’ve gone astray
Habib Jalib
==========
‘And after Azadi? Has anyone thought? What will majority do to the minority? Kashmiri Pandits have already gone. Only us Muslims remain. What will we do to each other? What will Salafis do to Barelvis? What will Sunnis do to Shias? They say they will go to Jannat more surely if they kill a Shia than if they kill a Hindu. What will be the fate of Ladakhi Buddhists? Jammu Hindus? J&K is not just Kashmir. It’s Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. Has any Separatist thought of this? The answer, I can tell you, is a big “No”.’
==========
It was an instinctive gesture of solidarity with a prisoner against a jailer – regardless of the reasons that had made the prisoner a prisoner and the jailer a jailer.
==========
‘No. I was trained here. In Kashmir. We have everything here now. Training, weapons … We buy our ammunition from the army. It’s twenty rupees for a bullet, nine hundred for –’ ‘From the army?’ ‘Yes. They don’t want the militancy to end. They don’t want to leave Kashmir. They are very happy with the situation as it is. Everybody on all sides is making money on the bodies of young Kashmiris. So many of the grenade blasts and massacres are done by them.’
==========
Still, of all the women in the world, to have this woman’s hand in his made him indescribably happy.
==========
She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete – a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity.
==========
He always referred to people as ‘parties’. ‘At the end of the day’ was his favourite launching pad for all his advice and insights, just as when he wanted to belittle someone he always began by saying, ‘With all due respect.’
==========
Popular Bollywood song:
Duniya khatam ho jayegi
Chudai khatam nahi hogi
The world will end,
But fucking never will.
==========
Being seen as ‘successful’ gave him the pick of a range of women, some single and far younger than him, and some his age or older, married and looking for variety, or divorced and looking for a second chance.
==========
(whose job it was to know everything about everybody and to let everybody know that he knew everything about everybody)
==========
When you look out behind those curtains, do you feel there’s a crowd of people? I feel there is. There’s definitely a smell. A crowd smell. A bit rotten, like the sea.
==========
I feel I am surrounded by eunuchs. Am I?
==========
On most mornings, anyone who put an ear to her door would have heard her. No one put an ear to her door.
==========
How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated. Even after the rest of their bodies had turned to ash, two lung-shaped slabs of stone remained behind, unburned.
==========
I don’t know where to stop, or how to go on. I stop when I shouldn’t. I go on when I should stop. There is weariness. But there is also defiance. Together they define me these days. Together they steal my sleep, and together they restore my soul. There are plenty of problems with no solutions in sight. Friends turn into foes. If not vocal ones, then silent, reticent ones. But I’ve yet to see a foe turning into a friend. There seems to be no hope. But pretending to be hopeful is the only grace we have …
==========
‘These days in Kashmir, you can be killed for surviving.’
==========
In battle, Musa told Tilo, enemies can’t break your spirit, only friends can.
==========
THE BRAVEHEART Mehmood was a tailor in Budgam. His greatest desire was to have himself photographed posing with guns. Finally a school friend of his who had joined a militant group took him to their hideout and made his dream come true. Mehmood returned to Srinagar with the negatives and took them to Taj Photo Studio to have prints made. He negotiated a 25-paisa discount for each print. When he went to pick up his prints the Border Security Force laid a cordon around Taj Photo Studio and caught him red-handed with the prints. He was taken to a camp and tortured for many days. He did not give away any information. He was sentenced to ten years in jail. The militant commander who facilitated the photography session was arrested a few months later. Two AK-47s and several rounds of ammunition were recovered from him. He was released after two months.
==========
THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER Manohar Mattoo was a Kashmiri Pandit who stayed on in the Valley even after all the other Hindus had gone. He was secretly tired of and deeply hurt by the barbs from his Muslim friends who said that all Hindus in Kashmir were actually, in one way or another, agents of the Indian Occupation Forces. Manohar had participated in all the anti-India protests, and had shouted Azadi! louder than everybody else. But nothing seemed to help. At one point he had even contemplated taking up arms and joining the Hizb, but eventually he decided against it. One day an old school friend of his, Aziz Mohammed, an intelligence officer, visited him at home to tell him that he was worried for him. He said that he had seen his (Mattoo’s) surveillance file. It suggested that he be put under watch because he displayed ‘anti-national tendencies’. When he heard the news Mattoo beamed and felt his chest swell with pride. ‘You have given me the Nobel Prize!’ he told his friend. He took Aziz Mohammed out to Café Arabica and bought him coffee and pastries worth Rs 500. A year later he (Mattoo) was shot by an unknown gunman for being a kafir.
==========
In Kashmir when we wake up and say ‘Good Morning’ what we really mean is ‘Good Mourning’.
==========
All they have to do is to turn around and shoot. All the people have to do is to lie down and die. When the last soldier has gone, the people climb over the debris of the burnt house. The tin sheets that were once the roof are still smouldering. A scorched trunk lies open, flames still leaping out of it. What was in it that burns so beautifully?
==========
There’s too much blood for good literature.
==========
What is the acceptable amount of blood for good literature?
==========
The hair on her head was dead white. The triangle of hair between her legs was jet black. What did that mean? Was she old or still young? Was she dead or still alive?
==========
P.S. I have learned that scientists working in the poultry industry are trying to excise the mothering instinct in hens in order to mitigate or entirely remove their desire to brood. Their goal, apparently, is to stop chickens wasting time on unnecessary things and thereby to increase the efficiency of egg production. Even though I am personally and in principle completely against efficiency, I wonder whether conducting this sort of intervention (by which I mean excising the mothering instinct) on the Maaji – The Mothers of the Disappeared in Kashmir – would help. Right now they are inefficient, unproductive units, living on a mandatory diet of hopeless hope, pottering about in their kitchen gardens, wondering what to grow and what to cook, in case their sons return. I’m sure you agree this is a bad business model. Could you propose a better one? A doable, realistic (although I’m against realism too) formula to arrive at an efficient Quantum of Hope? The three variables in their case are Death, Disappearance and Familial Love. All other forms of love, assuming that they do indeed exist, do not qualify and should be disregarded. Barring of course the Love of God. (That goes without saying.)
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And they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true. JAMES BALDWIN
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But then the algebra of infinite justice was never so rude.
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When the fighting began and the Occupation tightened its grip, for ordinary people the consolidation of their dead became, in itself, an act of defiance.
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Cynics said it was the army again, always looking for ways to keep gullible people busy and out of trouble. There were rumours and counter-rumours. There were rumours that might have been true, and truths that ought to have been just rumours. For instance, it really was true that for many years the army’s Human Rights Cell was headed by a Lieutenant Colonel Stalin – a friendly fellow from Kerala, son of an old communist. (The rumour was that it was his idea to set up Muskaan – which means ‘smile’ in Urdu – a chain of military ‘Good Will’ centres for the rehabilitation of widows, half-widows, orphans and half-orphans. Infuriated people, who accused the army of creating the supply of orphans and widows, regularly burned down the ‘Good Will’ orphanages and sewing-centres. They were always rebuilt, bigger, better, plusher, friendlier.)
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They ran their sly fingers over the cold-metal bumps on their quota of grenades that was being distributed so generously, like parcels of choice mutton at Eid. They grafted the language of God and Freedom, Allah and Azadi, on to their murders and new scams. They made off with money, property and women. Of course women. Women of course. In this way the insurrection began. Death was everywhere. Death was everything. Career. Desire. Dream. Poetry. Love. Youth itself. Dying became just another way of living.
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Tourists flew out. Journalists flew in. Honeymooners flew out. Soldiers flew in.
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Please Sir, have you seen my boy anywhere? Have you seen my husband? Has my brother by any chance passed through your hands? And the Sirs swelled their chests and bristled their moustaches and played with their medals and narrowed their eyes to assess them, to see which one’s despair would be worth converting into corrosive hope (I’ll see what I can do), and what that hope would be worth to whom. (A fee? A feast? A fuck? A truckload of walnuts?)
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One of the things that S. Murugesan had secretly enjoyed about being in Kashmir was that fair-skinned Kashmiris would often taunt Indian soldiers by mocking their dark skins and calling them ‘Chamar nasl’ (Chamar breed). He was amused by the rage it provoked among those of his fellow soldiers who considered themselves upper caste and thought nothing of calling him a Chamar, which was what North Indians usually called all Dalits, regardless of which of the many Untouchable castes they belonged to. Kashmir was one of the few places in the world where a fair-skinned people had been ruled by a darker-skinned one. That inversion imbued appalling slurs with a kind of righteousness.
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In some countries, some soldiers die twice.
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As the war progressed in the Kashmir Valley, graveyards became as common as the multi-storey parking lots that were springing up in the burgeoning cities in the plains. When they ran out of space, some graves became double-deckered, like the buses in Srinagar that once ferried tourists between Lal Chowk and the Boulevard.
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Some Kashmiris die twice too.
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Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.
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Its cruelties became as natural as the changing seasons, each came with its own unique range of scent and blossom, its own cycle of loss and renewal, disruption and normalcy, uprisings and elections.
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So, seventeen-plus-one tin coffins wove through the streets, winking back at the winter sun. To someone looking down at the city from the ring of high mountains that surrounded it, the procession would have looked like a column of brown ants carrying seventeen-plus-one sugar crystals to their anthill to feed their queen. Perhaps to a student of history and human conflict, in relative terms that’s all the little procession really amounted to: a column of ants making off with some crumbs that had fallen from the high table. As wars go, this was only a small one. Nobody paid much attention. So it went on and on. So it folded and unfolded over decades, gathering people into its unhinged embrace.
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It knew that without the journalists and photographers the massacre would be erased and the dead would truly die. So the bodies were offered to them, in hope and anger. A banquet of death. Mourning relatives who had backed away were asked to return into frame. Their sorrow was to be archived. In the years to come, when the war became a way of life, there would be books and films and photo exhibitions curated around the theme of Kashmir’s grief and loss.
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Non-actionable intelligence is as good as garbage,’
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‘How are unarmed villagers supposed to turn away a group of men with guns who knock on their doors in the middle of the night? Regardless of whether they are militants or military?’
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Dekho mian, mein Bharat Sarkar ka lund hoon, aur mera kaam hai chodna. Look, brother, I am the Government of India’s dick and it’s my job to fuck people.
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(these ‘permissions’ never came in the form of orders to kill, but usually as an absence of orders not to kill)
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He was not a brooder though, and got over things quickly.
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In our Kashmir the dead will live for ever; and the living are only dead people, pretending.
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In every part of the legendary Valley of Kashmir, whatever people might be doing – walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home – they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier. And because they were in the rifle-sights of a soldier, whatever they might be doing – walking, praying, bathing, cracking jokes, shelling walnuts, making love or taking a bus-ride home – they were a legitimate target.
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Tilo didn’t know that Musa was married. He hadn’t told her. Should he have? Why should he have? And why should she mind? It was she who had walked away from him. But she did mind. Not because he was married, but because he hadn’t told her.
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There was no tour guide on hand to tell her that in Kashmir nightmares were promiscuous.
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In Kashmir the only thing to do with nightmares was to embrace them like old friends and manage them like old enemies.
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He hadn’t changed very much, and yet he was almost unrecognizable.
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He knew that she knew that he knew that she knew. That’s how it was between them.
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‘Our stomachs are graveyards.’
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‘Here it’s the same thing. Only the dead are free.’
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‘Did you love her?’ ‘I did. I wanted to tell you that.’ ‘Why?’ Musa finished his cigarette and lit another. ‘I don’t know. Something to do with honour. Yours, mine and hers.’ ‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier, then?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Was it an arranged marriage?’ ‘No.’
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He was deliberately digressing, circling around a story that was as hard – harder – for him to tell as it was for her to hear.
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‘You don’t really know me. I’m a patriot. I get goosebumps when I see the national flag. I get so emotional I can’t think straight. I love flags and soldiers and all that marching around stuff.
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Trav’ling lady, stay awhile until the night is over. I’m just a station on your way, I know I’m not your lover.
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It was possible for Tilo and Musa to have this strange conversation about a third loved one, because they were concurrently sweethearts and ex-sweethearts, lovers and ex-lovers, siblings and ex-siblings, classmates and ex-classmates. Because they trusted each other so peculiarly that they knew, even if they were hurt by it, that whoever it was that the other person loved had to be worth loving. In matters of the heart, they had a virtual forest of safety nets.
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‘You know what the hardest thing for us is? The hardest thing to fight? Pity. It’s so easy for us to pity ourselves … such terrible things have happened to our people … in every single household something terrible has happened … but self-pity is so … so debilitating. So humiliating. More than Azadi, now it’s a fight for dignity. And the only way we can hold on to our dignity is to fight back. Even if we lose. Even if we die.
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Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed. Women are not allowed. Was it to protect the grave from the women or the women from the grave?
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Death cleaner, misfortune saltier, And the earth more truthful, more awful.
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They spent the night together on a purely secular basis.
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When she woke she felt better prepared to go home and face the rest of her life.
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As always, history would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.
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They accuse you of eating beef and then take over your house and your land and send you to a refugee camp. It’s all about property, not cows.
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As a keeper of secrets, she was nothing short of Olympic class.
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All the cars that had stopped at the lights had their windows rolled up. The people in them were doing all they could to avoid eye contact with the Hijras.
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Saeeda said that because sexual-reassignment surgery was becoming cheaper, better, and more accessible to people, Hijras would soon disappear. ‘Nobody will need to go through what we’ve been through any more.’ ‘You mean no more Indo–Pak?’ Nimmo Gorakhpuri said.
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But when they took an exit road off it, they saw that the world underneath the flyover was an entirely different one – an unpaved, unlaned, unlit, unregulated, wild and dangerous one, in which buses, trucks, bullocks, rickshaws, cycles, handcarts and pedestrians jostled for survival. One kind of world flew over another kind of world without troubling to stop and ask the time of day.
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And Sarmad – Hazrat of Utmost Happiness, Saint of the Unconsoled and Solace of the Indeterminate, Blasphemer among Believers and Believer among Blasphemers – did.
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I must sound like those army generals who wage war all their lives and then suddenly become pious, anti-nuke peaceniks when they retire.
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The paramilitary are using pellet guns that end up blinding people – which is better than killing them, I suppose. Although in PR terms it’s worse. The world is inured to the sight of piled-up corpses. But not to the sight of hundreds of living people who have been blinded. Pardon my crudeness, but you can imagine the visual appeal of that. But even that doesn’t seem to be working. Boys who’ve lost one eye are back on the street, prepared to risk the other. What do you do with that kind of fury?
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Every evening as I watch the news I marvel at the ignorance and idiocy on display. And to think that all my life I have been a part of it.
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‘One day Kashmir will make India self-destruct in the same way. You may have blinded all of us, every one of us, with your pellet guns by then. But you will still have eyes to see what you have done to us. You’re not destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying. Khuda Hafiz,
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Mar gayee bulbul qafas mein Keh gayee sayyaad se Apni sunehri gaand mein Tu thoons le fasl-e-bahaar
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How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.
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She died in her cage, the little bird,/These words she left for her captor–/Please take the spring harvest/And shove it up your gilded arse.
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O God, thou art the giver of life
Remover of pain and sorrow
Bestower of happiness
O Creator of the Universe
May we receive thy supreme sin-destroying light
May thou guide our intellect in the right direction.
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