Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

The procession had to pass a large bunker of the 26th Battalion of the Border Security Force that was positioned less than a hundred feet from where Arifa and Miss Jebeen sat. The snouts of machine guns protruded through the steel mesh window of a dusty booth made up of tin sheets and wooden planks. The bunker was barricaded with sandbags and concertina wire. Empty bottles of army-issue Old Monk and Triple X Rum dangled in pairs from the razor wire, clinking against each other like bells — a primitive but effective alarm system. Any tinkering with the wire would set them off. Booze bottles in the service of the Nation. They came with the added benefit of being callously insulting to devout Muslims. The soldiers in the bunker fed the stray dogs that the local population shunned (as devout Muslims were meant to), so the dogs doubled as an additional ring of security. They sat around, watching the proceedings, alert, but not alarmed. As the procession approached the bunker, the men caged inside it fused into the shadows, cold sweat trickling down their backs underneath their winter uniforms and bulletproof vests.

Suddenly, an explosion. Not a very loud one, but loud enough and close enough to generate blind panic. The soldiers came out of the bunker, took position and fired their light machine guns straight into the unarmed crowd that was wedged into the narrow street. They shot to kill. Even after people turned to flee, the bullets pursued them, lodging themselves in receding backs and heads and legs. Some frightened soldiers turned their weapons on those watching from windows and balconies, and emptied their magazines into people and railings, walls and windowpanes. Into Miss Jebeen and her mother, Arifa.

Usman Abdullah’s coffin and coffin-bearers were hit. His coffin broke open and his re-slain corpse spilled on to the street, awkwardly folded, in a snow-white shroud, doubly dead among the dead and injured.

Some Kashmiris die twice too.

The shooting stopped only when the street was empty, and when all that remained were the bodies of the dead and wounded. And shoes. Thousands of shoes.

And the deafening slogan there was nobody left to chant:

The post-massacre protocol was quick and efficient — perfected by practice. Within an hour the dead bodies had been removed to the morgue in the Police Control Room, and the wounded to hospital. The street was hosed down, the blood directed into the open drains. Shops reopened. Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)

Later it was established that the explosion had been caused by a car driving over an empty carton of Mango Frooti on the next street. Who was to blame? Who had left the packet of Mango Frooti ( Fresh ’n’ Juicy ) on the street? India or Kashmir? Or Pakistan? Who had driven over it? A tribunal was instituted to inquire into the causes of the massacre. The facts were never established. Nobody was blamed. This was Kashmir. It was Kashmir’s fault.

Life went on. Death went on. The war went on.

ALL THOSE WHO WATCHED Musa Yeswi bury his wife and daughter noticed how quiet he had been that day. He displayed no grief. He seemed withdrawn and distracted, as though he wasn’t really there. That could have been what eventually led to his arrest. Or it could have been his heartbeat. Perhaps it was too quick or too slow for an innocent civilian. At notorious checkposts soldiers sometimes put their ears to young men’s chests and listened to their heartbeats. There were rumors that some soldiers even carried stethoscopes. “This one’s heart is beating for Freedom,” they’d say, and that would be reason enough for the body that hosted the too-quick or too-slow heart to make a trip to Cargo, or Papa II, or the Shiraz Cinema — the most dreaded interrogation centers in the Valley.

Musa was not arrested at a checkpost. He was picked up from his home after the funeral. Over-quietness at the funeral of your wife and child would not have passed unnoticed in those days.

At first of course everybody had been quiet, fearful. The funeral procession snaked its way through the drab, slushy little city in dead silence. The only sound was the slap-slap-slap of thousands of sockless shoes on the silver-wet road that led to the Mazar-e-Shohadda. Young men carried seventeen coffins on their shoulders. Seventeen plus one, that is, for the re-murdered Usman Abdullah, who obviously could not be entered twice in the books. 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. 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.

Of all the sugar crystals carried by the ants that winter morning, the smallest crystal of course went by the name of Miss Jebeen.

Ants that were too nervous to join the procession lined the streets, standing on slippery banks of old brown snow, their arms crossed inside the warmth of their pherans, leaving their empty sleeves to flap in the breeze. Armless people at the heart of an armed insurrection. Those who were too scared to venture out watched from their windows and balconies (although they had been made acutely aware of the perils of that too). Each of them knew that they were being tracked in the gunsights of the soldiers who had taken position across the city — on roofs, bridges, boats, mosques, water towers. They had occupied hotels, schools, shops and even some homes.

It was cold that morning; for the first time in years the lake had frozen over and the forecast predicted more snow. Trees raised their naked, mottled branches to the sky like mourners stilled in attitudes of grief.

In the graveyard, seventeen-plus-one graves had been readied. Neat, fresh, deep. The earth from each pit piled up next to it, a dark chocolate pyramid. An advance party had brought in the bloodstained metal stretchers on which the bodies had been returned to their families after the post-mortems. They were propped up, arranged around the trunks of trees, like bloodied steel petals of some gigantic flesh-eating mountain blossom.

As the procession turned in through the gates of the graveyard, a scrum of pressmen, quivering like athletes on their starting blocks, broke rank and rushed forward. The coffins were laid down, opened, arranged in a line on the icy earth. The crowd made room for the press respectfully. 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.