Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Maybe. But you have no understanding of the depths of Kashmiri duplicity , Musa thought but did not say. You have no idea how a people like us, who have survived a history and a geography such as ours, have learned to drive our pride underground. Duplicity is the only weapon we have. You don’t know how radiantly we smile when our hearts are broken. How ferociously we can turn on those we love while we graciously embrace those whom we despise. You have no idea how warmly we can welcome you when all we really want is for you to go away. Your thermometer is quite useless here.

That was one way of looking at it. On the other hand, it may have been Musa who was, at that point in time, the naive one. Because Amrik Singh certainly had the full measure of the dystopia he operated in — one whose populace had no borders, no loyalties and no limits to the depths to which it would fall. As for the Kashmiri psyche, if there was indeed such a thing, Amrik Singh was seeking neither understanding nor insight. For him it was a game, a hunt, in which his quarry’s wits were pitted against his own. He saw himself more as a sportsman than a soldier. Which made for a sunny soul. Major Amrik Singh was a gambler, a daredevil officer, a deadly interrogator and a cheery, cold-blooded killer. He greatly enjoyed his work and was constantly on the lookout for ways to up the entertainment. He was in touch with certain militants who would occasionally tune into his wireless frequency, or he into theirs, and they would taunt each other like schoolboys. “ Arre yaar , what am I but a humble travel agent?” he liked to say to them. “For you jihadis Kashmir is just a transit point, isn’t it? Your real destination is jannat where your houris are waiting for you. I’m only here to facilitate your journey.” He referred to himself as Jannat Express . And if he was speaking English (which usually meant he was drunk), he translated that as Paradise Express.

One of his legendary lines was: 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.

In his relentless quest for amusement, he was known to have released a militant whom he had tracked down and captured with the greatest difficulty, only because he wanted to relive the exhilaration of recapturing him. It was in keeping with that spirit, with the perverse rubric of his personal hunting manual, that he had summoned Musa to the Shiraz to apologize to him. Over the last few months Amrik Singh had, correctly perhaps, identified Musa as a potentially worthy antagonist, someone who was his polar opposite and yet had the nerve and the intelligence to raise the stakes and perhaps change the nature of the hunt to a point where it would be hard to tell who was the hunter and who the hunted. For this reason Amrik Singh was extremely upset when he learned of the death of Musa’s wife and daughter. He wanted Musa to know that he had nothing to do with it. That it was an unexpected and, as far as he was concerned, below-the-belt blow, never part of his plan. In order for the hunt to go on, he needed to clarify this to his quarry.

Hunting was not Amrik Singh’s only passion. He had expensive tastes and a lifestyle that he couldn’t support on his salary. So he exploited other avenues of entrepreneurial potential that being on the winning side of a military occupation offered. In addition to his kidnapping and extortion concerns, he owned (in his wife’s name) a sawmill in the mountains and a furniture business in the Valley. He was as impetuously generous as he was violent, and distributed extravagant gifts of carved coffee tables and walnut-wood chairs to people he liked or needed. (Godzilla had a pair of bedside tables pressed on him.) Amrik Singh’s wife, Loveleen Kaur, was the fourth of five sisters — Tavleen, Harpreet, Gurpreet, Loveleen and Dimple — famous for their beauty — and two younger brothers. They belonged to the small community of Sikhs who had settled in the Valley centuries ago. Their father was a small farmer with little or no means to feed his large family. It was said that the family was so poor that when one of the girls tripped on her way to school and dropped the tiffin carrier that contained their packed lunch, the hungry sisters ate the spilled food straight off the pavement. As the girls grew up, all manner of men began to circle around them like hornets, with all manner of proposals, none of them for marriage. So their parents were more than delighted to be able to give away one of their daughters (for no dowry) to a Sikh from the mainland — an army officer, no less. After they were married Loveleen did not move into Amrik Singh’s officer’s quarters in the various camps he was posted to in and around Srinagar. Because, it was said (rumored), at work he had another woman, another “wife,” a colleague from the Central Reserve Police, an ACP Pinky who usually partnered him in field operations as well as in interrogation sessions at the camps. On weekends, when Amrik Singh visited his wife and their infant son in their first-floor flat in Jawahar Nagar, the little Sikh enclave in Srinagar, neighbors whispered about domestic violence and her muffled screams for help. Nobody dared to intervene.

Though Amrik Singh hunted down and eliminated militants ruthlessly, he actually regarded them — the best of them at least — with a sort of grudging admiration. He had been known to pay his respects at the graves of some, including a few whom he himself had killed. (One even got an unofficial gun salute.) The people he didn’t just disrespect but truly despised were human rights activists — mostly lawyers, journalists and newspaper editors. To him, they were vermin who spoiled and distorted the rules of engagement of the great game with their constant complaints and whining. Whenever Amrik Singh was given permission to pick one of them up or “neutralize” them (these “permissions” never came in the form of orders to kill, but usually as an absence of orders not to kill) he was never less than enthusiastic in carrying out his duties. The case of Jalib Qadri was different. His orders had been merely to intimidate and detain the man. Things had gone wrong. Jalib Qadri had made the mistake of being unafraid. Of talking back. Amrik Singh regretted having lost control of himself and regretted even more that he had had to eliminate his friend and fellow traveler, the Ikhwan Salim Gojri, as a consequence of that. They had shared good times and many grand escapades, he and Salim Gojri. He knew that had things been the other way around, Salim would surely have done the same thing. And he, Amrik Singh, would surely have understood. Or so he told himself. Of all the things he had done, killing Salim Gojri was the one thing that had given him pause. Salim Gojri was the only person in the world, his wife Loveleen included, for whom Amrik Singh had felt something that vaguely resembled love. In acknowledgment of this, when the moment came, he pulled the trigger on his friend himself.

He was not a brooder though, and got over things quickly. Sitting across the table from Musa, the Major was his usual self, cocky and sure of himself. He had been pulled out of the field and given a desk job, yes, but things had not begun to unravel for him yet. He did still go out on field trips occasionally, on operations in which he was familiar with the particular case history of a militant or OGW. He was reasonably sure he had contained the damage, and was out of the woods.

The “officers’ biscuits” and tea arrived. Musa heard the faint rattle of teacups on a metal tray before the bearer of the biscuits appeared from behind him. Musa and the bearer recognized each other at once, but their expressions remained passive and opaque. Amrik Singh watched them closely. The room ran out of air. Breathing became impossible. It had to be simulated.