Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Musa would not be in any of those pictures.

On this occasion Miss Jebeen was by far the biggest draw. The cameras closed in on her, whirring and clicking like a worried bear. From that harvest of photographs, one emerged a local classic. For years it was reproduced in papers and magazines and on the covers of human rights reports that no one ever read, with captions like Blood in the Snow, Vale of Tears and Will the Sorrow Never End?

In the mainland, for obvious reasons, the photograph of Miss Jebeen was less popular. In the supermarket of sorrow, the Bhopal Boy, victim of the Union Carbide gas leak, remained well ahead of her in the charts. Several leading photographers claimed copyright of that famous photograph of the dead boy buried neck deep in a grave of debris, his staring, opaque eyes blinded by poison gas. Those eyes told the story of what had happened on that terrible night like nothing else could. They stared out of the pages of glossy magazines all over the world. In the end it didn’t matter of course. The story flared, then faded. The battle over the copyright of the photograph continued for years, almost as ferociously as the battle for compensation for the thousands of devastated victims of the gas leak.

The worried bear dispersed, and revealed Miss Jebeen intact, un-mauled, fast asleep. Her summer rose still in place.

As the bodies were lowered into their graves the crowd began to murmur its prayer.

The smaller, hip-high children in the separate, segregated section for women, suffocated by the rough wool of their mothers’ garments, unable to see very much, barely able to breathe, conducted their own hip-level transactions: I’ll give you six bullet casings if you give me your dud grenade.

A lone woman’s voice climbed into the sky, eerily high, raw pain driven through it like a pike.

Ro rPahi hai yeh zameen! Ro raha hai asmaan…

Another joined in and then another:

This earth, she weeps! The heavens too…

The birds stopped their twittering for a while and listened, beady-eyed, to humansong. Street dogs slouched past checkposts unchecked, their heartbeats rock steady. Kites and griffons circled the thermals, drifting lazily back and forth across the Line of Control, just to mock the tiny clot of humans gathered down below.

When the sky was full of keening, something ignited. Young men began to leap into the air, like flames kindled from smoldering embers. Higher and higher they jumped, as though the ground beneath their feet was sprung, a trampoline. They wore their anguish like armor, their anger slung across their bodies like ammunition belts. At that moment, perhaps because they were thus armed, or because they had decided to embrace a life of death, or because they knew they were already dead, they became invincible.

The soldiers who surrounded the Mazar-e-Shohadda had clear instructions to hold their fire, no matter what. Their informers (brothers, cousins, fathers, uncles, nephews), who mingled with the crowd and shouted slogans as passionately as everybody else (and even meant them), had clear instructions to submit photographs and if possible videos of each young man who, carried on the tide of fury, had leapt into the air and turned himself into a flame.

Soon each of them would hear a knock on his door, or be taken aside at a checkpoint.

Are you so-and-so? Son of so-and-so? Employed at such-and-such?

Often the threat went no further than that — just that bland, perfunctory inquiry. In Kashmir, throwing a man’s own bio-data at him was sometimes enough to change the course of his life.

And sometimes it wasn’t.

THEY CAME FOR MUSA at their customary visiting hour — four in the morning. He was awake, sitting at his desk writing a letter. His mother was in the next room. He could hear her crying and the comforting murmurs of her sisters and relatives. Miss Jebeen’s beloved stuffed (and leaking) green hippopotamus — with a V-shaped smile and a pink patchwork heart — was in his usual place, propped up against a bolster waiting for his little mother and his usual bedtime story. ( Akh daleela wann… ) Musa heard the vehicle approach. From his first-floor window he saw it turn into the lane and stop outside his house. He felt nothing, neither anger nor trepidation, as he watched the soldiers get out of the armored Gypsy. His father, Showkat Yeswi (Godzilla to Musa and his friends), was awake too, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in the front room. He was a building contractor who worked closely with the Military Engineering Services, supplying building materials and doing turnkey projects for them. He had sent his son to Delhi to study architecture in the hope that he would help him expand his line of business. But when the tehreek began in 1990, and Godzilla continued to work with the army, Musa shunned him altogether. Torn between filial duty and the guilt of enjoying what he saw as the spoils of collaboration, Musa found it harder and harder to live under the same roof as his father.

Showkat Yeswi seemed to have been expecting the soldiers. He did not appear alarmed. “Amrik Singh called. He wants to talk to you. It’s nothing, don’t worry. He will release you before daylight.”

Musa did not reply. He did not even glance at Godzilla, his disgust apparent in the way he held his shoulders and in the erectness of his back. He walked out of the front door escorted by two armed men on either side of him and got into the vehicle. He was not handcuffed or headbagged. The Gypsy slid through the slick, frozen streets. It had begun to snow again.

The Shiraz Cinema was the centerpiece of an enclave of barracks and officers’ quarters, cordoned off by the elaborate trappings of paranoia — two concentric rings of barbed wire sandwiching a shallow, sandy moat; the fourth and innermost ring was a high boundary wall topped with jagged shards of broken glass. The corrugated-metal gates had watchtowers on either side, manned by soldiers with machine guns. The Gypsy carrying Musa made it through the checkposts quickly. Clearly it was expected. It drove straight through the compound to the main entrance.

The cinema lobby was brightly lit. A mosaic of tiny mirrors that sequined the fluted white plaster-of-Paris false ceiling, whipped up like icing on a gigantic, inverted wedding cake, dispersed and magnified the light from cheap, flashy chandeliers. The red carpet was frayed and worn, the cement floor showing through in patches. The stale, recirculated air smelled of guns and diesel and old clothes. What had once been the cinema snack bar now functioned as a reception-cum-registration counter for torturers and torturees. It continued to advertise things it no longer stocked — Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut chocolate and several flavors of Kwality ice cream, Choco Bar, Orange Bar, Mango Bar. Faded posters of old films ( Chandni, Maine Pyar Kiya, Parinda and Lion of the Desert ) — from the time before films were banned and the cinema hall shut down by the Allah Tigers — were still up on the wall, some of them spattered with red betel juice. Rows of young men, bound and handcuffed, squatted on the floor like chickens, some so badly beaten that they had keeled over, barely alive, still in squatting position, their wrists secured to their ankles. Soldiers milled around, bringing prisoners in, taking others away for interrogation. The faint sounds that came through the grand wooden doors leading to the auditorium could have been the muted soundtrack of a violent film. Cement kangaroos with mirthless smiles and garbage-bin pouches that said Use Me supervised the kangaroo court.