Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

A “ladies” had been captured along with Commander Gulrez, he said. She wasn’t Kashmiri.

Now that was unusual. Unheard of, actually.

The “ladies” had been handed over to ACP Pinky, for interrogation.

We all knew Assistant Commandant Pinky Sodhi of the peach complexion and the long black braid worn coiled under her cap. Her twin brother, Balbir Singh Sodhi, was a senior police officer who had been shot down by militants in Sopore when he was out on his morning jog. (Foolish thing for a senior officer to do, even one who prided himself on, or, as it turned out, deluded himself about, being “loved” by the locals.) ACP Pinky had been given a job in the CRPF — Central Reserve Police Force — on compassionate grounds, as compensation to the family for the death of her brother. Nobody had ever seen her out of uniform. For all her stunning looks, she was a brutal interrogator who often exceeded her brief because she was exorcizing demons of her own. She wasn’t in the Amrik Singh league, but still — God help any Kashmiri who fell into her hands. As for those who didn’t fall into her hands — many of them were busy writing love poems to her and even proposing marriage. Such was ACP Pinky’s fatal charm.

The “ladies” whom they had arrested, I was told, had refused to divulge her name. Since the captured “ladies” wasn’t a Kashmiri, I imagined ACP Pinky had exercised some restraint and had not unleashed herself completely. Had she, then neither Ladies nor Gents would have been able to withhold information. Anyway, I was getting impatient. I still could not fathom what any of it had to do with me.

Finally Amrik Singh came to the point: during the interrogation, my name had come up. The woman had asked for a message to be passed on to me. He said he couldn’t understand the message, but she said I’d understand. He read it, or rather spelled it, aloud over the phone:

G-A-R-S-O-N H-O-B-A-R-T

Rasoolan’s voice, still searching for her scattered pearls, filled my head: Kahan vaeka dhoondhoon re? Dhoondhat dhoondhat baura gaeli Rama…

Garson Hobart must have sounded like a secret code for a militant strike, or an acknowledgment of receipt for a weapons consignment. The mad brute on the other end of the phone was waiting for an explanation from me. I couldn’t think of how to even begin.

Could Commander Gulrez have something to do with Musa? Was he Musa? I had tried to get in touch with him several times after moving to Srinagar. I wanted to offer my condolences to him for what had happened to his family. I had never succeeded, which in those days usually meant only one thing. He was underground.

Who else could Tilo have been with? Had they killed Musa in front of her? Oh God.

I told Amrik Singh as curtly as I could that I would call him back.

My first instinct was to put as great a distance as possible between the woman I loved and myself. Does that make me a coward? If it does, at least I’m a candid one.

Even if I did want to go to her, it wasn’t possible. I was in the middle of a jungle in the middle of the night. Moving out would have meant sirens, alarms, at least four jeeps and an armored vehicle. It would have meant taking along sixteen men at the very least. That was the minimum protocol. That kind of circus would not have helped Tilo. Or me. And it would have compromised His Excellency’s security in ways that could have led to unthinkable consequences. It could have been a trap to draw me out. After all, Musa knew about Garson Hobart. It was paranoid thinking, but in those days there wasn’t much daylight between caution and paranoia.

I was out of options. I dialed Ahdoos Hotel and asked for Naga. Fortunately he was there. He offered to go to the Shiraz immediately. The more concerned and helpful he sounded, the more annoyed I became. I could literally hear him growing into the role I was offering him, seizing with both hands the opportunity to do what he loved most — grandstand. His eagerness reassured and infuriated me at the same time.

I called Amrik Singh and told him to expect a journalist called Nagaraj Hariharan. Our man. I said that if they had nothing on the woman, they were to release her immediately and hand her over to him.

A few hours later Naga called to say Tilo was in the room next to his at Ahdoos. I suggested he put her on the morning flight to Delhi.

“She’s not freight, Das-Goose,” he said. “She says she’s going for this Commander Gulrez’s funeral. Whoever the hell that is.”

Das-Goose. He hadn’t called me that since college. In college, in his ultra-radical days, he would mockingly call me (for some reason always in a German accent) “Biplab Das-Goose- da ”—his version of Biplab Dasgupta. The Revolutionary Brother Goose.

I never forgave my parents for naming me Biplab, after my paternal grandfather. Times had changed. By the time I was born the British were gone, we were a free country. How could they name a baby “Revolution”? How was anybody supposed to go through life with a name like that? At one point I did consider changing my name legally, to something a little more peaceful like Siddhartha or Gautam or something. I dropped the idea because I knew that with friends like Naga, the story would clatter behind me like a tin can tied to a cat’s tail. So there I was — here I am — a Biplab, in the innermost chamber of the secret heart of the establishment that calls itself the Government of India.

“Was it Musa?” I asked Naga.

“She won’t say. But who else could it have been?”

By Monday morning the weekend body count had risen to nineteen; the fourteen demonstrators killed in the firing, the boy the Ikhwanis had shot, Musa or Commander Gulrez or whatever the hell he called himself, and three bodies of militants killed in a shoot-out in Ganderbal. Hundreds of thousands of mourners had gathered to carry those nineteen coffins (which included an empty one for the boy whose body had been stolen) on their shoulders to the Martyrs’ Graveyard.

The Governor’s office called to say that it would not be advisable for us to attempt to return to the city until the following day. In the afternoon my secretary called:

“Sir, sun lijiye, please listen, sir…”

Sitting on the verandah of the Dachigam Forest Guest House, over birdsong and the sounds of crickets, I heard the reverberating boom of a hundred thousand or more voices raised together calling for freedom: Azadi! Azadi! Azadi! On and on and on. Even on the phone it was unnerving. Quite unlike hearing the Air Marshal shouting slogans in his prison cell. It was as though the city was breathing through a single pair of lungs, swelling like a throat with that urgent, keening cry. I had seen my share of demonstrations by then, and heard more than my share of slogan-shouting in other parts of the country. This was different, this Kashmiri chant. It was more than a political demand. It was an anthem, a hymn, a prayer. 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 chant that I heard on the phone that morning was condensed, distilled passion — and it was as blind and as futile as passion usually is. During those (fortunately short-lived) occasions when it was in full cry, it had the power to cut through the edifice of history and geography, of reason and politics. It had the power to make even the most hardened of us wonder, even if momentarily, what the hell we were doing in Kashmir, governing a people who hated us so viscerally.