Arundhati Roy - The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Mid-sentence he lost the race against the cold. He stopped writing, folded the letter and put it in his pocket. He never completed it, but he always carried it with him.

He knew he didn’t have much time. He would have to pre-empt Amrik Singh’s next move, and quickly. Life as he once knew it was over. He knew that Kashmir had swallowed him and he was now part of its entrails.

He spent the day settling what affairs he could — paying the cigarette bills he had accumulated, destroying papers, taking the few things he loved or needed. The next morning when the Yeswi household woke up to its grief, Musa was gone. He had left a note for one of his sisters about the beaten boy he had seen in the Shiraz with his mother’s name and address.

Thus began his life underground. A life that lasted precisely nine months — like a pregnancy. Except that in a manner of speaking at least, its consequence was the opposite of a pregnancy. It ended in a kind of death, instead of a kind of life.

During his days as a fugitive, Musa moved from place to place, never the same place on consecutive nights. There were always people around him — in forest hideouts, in businessmen’s plush homes, in shops, in dungeons, in storerooms — wherever the tehreek was welcomed with love and solidarity. He learned everything about weapons, where to buy them, how to move them, where to hide them, how to use them. He developed real calluses in the places where his father had imagined phantom ones — on his knees and elbows, on his trigger finger. He carried a gun, but never used it. With his fellow travelers, who were all much younger than him, he shared the love that hot-blooded men who would gladly give their lives for each other share. Their lives were short. Many of them were killed, jailed or tortured until they lost their minds. Others took their place. Musa survived purge after purge. His ties to his old life were gradually (and deliberately) erased. Nobody knew who he really was. Nobody asked. His family did not know that. He did not belong to any one particular organization. In the heart of a filthy war, up against a bestiality that is hard to imagine, he did what he could to persuade his comrades to hold on to a semblance of humanity, to not turn into the very thing they abhorred and fought against. He did not always succeed. Nor did he always fail. He refined the art of merging into the background, of disappearing in a crowd, of mumbling and dissembling, of burying the secrets he knew so deep that he forgot he knew them. He learned the art of ennui, of enduring as well as inflicting boredom. He hardly ever spoke. At night, fed up with the regime of silence, his organs murmured to each other in the language of night crickets. His spleen contacted his kidney. His pancreas whispered across the silent void to his lungs:

Hello

Can you hear me?

Are you still there?

He grew colder, and quieter. The price on his head went up very quickly — from one lakh to three lakhs. When nine months had gone by, Tilo came to Kashmir.

TILO WAS WHERE SHE WAS most evenings, at a tea stall in one of the narrow lanes around the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, on her way back home from work, when a young man approached her, confirmed that her name was S. Tilottama, and handed her a note. It said: Ghat Number 33, HB Shaheen, Dal Lake. Please come 20th. There was no signature, only a tiny pencil sketch of a horse’s head in one corner. When she looked up, the messenger had vanished.

She took two weeks off from her job in an architecture firm in Nehru Place, caught a train to Jammu, and an early-morning bus from Jammu to Srinagar. Musa and she had not been in touch for a while. She went, because that was how it was between them.

She had never been to Kashmir.

It was late afternoon when the bus emerged from the long tunnel that bored through the mountains, the only link between India and Kashmir.

Autumn in the Valley was the season of immodest abundance. The sun slanted down on the lavender haze of zaffran crocuses in bloom. Orchards were heavy with fruit, the Chinar trees were on fire. Tilo’s co-passengers, most of them Kashmiri, could disaggregate the breeze and tell not merely the scent of apples from the scent of pears and ripe paddy that wafted through the bus windows, but whose apples, whose pears and whose ripe paddy they were driving past. There was another scent they all knew well. The smell of dread. It soured the air and turned their bodies to stone.

As the noisy, rattling bus with its still, silent passengers drove deeper into the Valley the tension grew more tangible. Every fifty meters, on either side of the road, there was a heavily armed soldier, alert and dangerously tense. There were soldiers in the fields, deep inside orchards, on bridges and culverts, in shops and marketplaces, on rooftops, each covering the other, in a grid that stretched all the way up into the mountains. 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.

At every checkpoint the road was blocked with movable horizontal barriers mounted with iron spikes that could shred a tire to ribbons. At each checkpost the bus had to stop, all the passengers had to disembark and line up with their bags to be searched. Soldiers riffled through the luggage on the bus roof. The passengers kept their eyes lowered. At the sixth or perhaps the seventh checkpost, an armored Gypsy with slits for windows was parked on the side of the road. After conferring with a hidden person in the Gypsy, a gleaming, strutting young officer pulled three young men out of the passenger line-up— You, You and You . They were pushed into an army truck. They went without demur. The passengers kept their eyes lowered.

By the time the bus arrived in Srinagar, the light was dying.

In those days the little city of Srinagar died with the light. The shops closed, the streets emptied.

At the bus stop a man sidled up to Tilo and asked her her name. From then on, she was passed from hand to hand. An autorickshaw took her from the bus stand to the Boulevard. She crossed the lake in a shikara on which there was no sitting option, only a lounging one. So she lounged on the bright, floral cushions, a honeymooner without a husband. It was to make up for that, she thought, that the bright flanges of the boatman’s oars which pushed through the weeds were heart-shaped. The lake was deadly quiet. The rhythmic sound of oars in the water might well have been the uneasy heartbeat of the Valley.

Plif

Plif

Plif

The houseboats anchored next to each other cheek by jowl on the opposite shore — HB Shaheen , HB Jannat , HB Queen Victoria , HB Derbyshire , HB Snow View , HB Desert Breeze , HB Zam-Zam , HB Gulshan , HB New Gulshan , HB Gulshan Palace , HB Mandalay , HB Clifton , HB New Clifton —were dark and empty.

HB, the boatman told Tilo when she asked, stood for House Boat.

HB Shaheen was the smallest and shabbiest of them all. As the shikara drew up, a little man, lost inside his worn brown pheran that almost touched his ankles, came out to greet Tilo. Later she learned his name was Gulrez. He greeted her as though he knew her well, as though she had lived there all her life and had just returned from buying provisions in the market. His large head and oddly thin neck rested on broad, sturdy shoulders. As he led Tilo through the small dining room and down a narrow carpeted corridor to the bedroom, she heard kittens mewling. He threw a sparkling smile over his shoulder, like a proud father, his emerald, wizard eyes shining.