Salman Rushdie - Shalimar the Clown

The village of X, high up near the snow line and the Line of Control, came under crackdown because militants often crossed the border in its vicinity and so it was plain that the villagers harbored them, gave them beds to rest in and food to eat. Reports had been received of the presence in the locality of the so-called iron mullah, Maulana Bulbul Fakh, whom General Kachhwaha had once made the mistake of tolerating, back in the old days of tolerant weakness. Those days were gone, as the notorious priest and his gang of desperadoes would discover soon enough, as their henchpersons in X had already learned-the malevolent youth D, who would trouble the security forces no further, the dotards E (gender m.) and F (gender f.) whose house had been demolished to punish them, and the women G, H and I, upon whom the virile wrath of the Indian forces had been potently unleashed. The bayoneting of the womb of the pregnant woman J was a scurrilous allegation, however: pure fiction. None of the personnel on duty that day had carried bayonets; only automatic weapons, grenades, knives. The enemies of the state would stop at nothing to slander its military protectors. This would no longer inhibit the security forces from doing the needful. The manifestation of the protectors’ virile wrath against the female population was an important psychological tool. It discouraged the menfolk from carrying out the subversive acts which it was in their nature to perform. Consequently, the danger to the security forces diminished. These were strategic and tactical matters and should not be discussed emotionally.

It was just the beginning. Things would move faster now. He was no longer Tortoise Colonel. He was the Hammer of Kashmir.

That dark summer after the Misris perished the fruit in Pandit Pyarelal Kaul’s apple orchards was bitter and inedible, but the peaches of Firdaus Noman were as succulent as usual. The saffron in Pyarelal’s saffron field was paler and less potent, but the honey in Abdullah’s beehives was sweeter than ever before. These matters were difficult to understand; but when Pyarelal heard on the radio that the well-known pandit leader Tika Lal Taploo had been gunned down the nature of the portents became plain. “In the time of Sikandar But-Shikan, Sikander the Iconoclast,” he told his daughter at her Gujar hut in the woods, “Muslim attacks on Kashmiri Hindus were described as the falling of locust swarms upon the helpless paddy crops. I am afraid that what is beginning now will make Sikandar’s time look peaceful by comparison.” In the weeks that followed his prophecy came true and he told Boonyi, “Now that everything I have stood for is in ruins I am ready to die, but I will live on to protect your life from the insanity of your husband, even though neither one of us has anything left to live for.” The radical cadres of the Jamaat-i-Islami party had new words for “pandit”: mukhbir, kafir. Meaning spy, infidel. “So we are slandered as fifth-columnists now,” Pyarelal mourned. “That means the assault cannot be far away.”

In the aftermath of the Muslim insurgency against Indian rule another pandit was murdered in Tangmarg. Posters appeared on the road leading from Srinagar to Pachigam demanding that all pandits vacate their property and leave Kashmir. The first Hindus to respond to the poster campaign were the gods, who began to disappear. The famous black stone statue of Maha-Kali was one of twenty deities who vacated their home in Hari Parbat Fort and vanished forever. A priceless deity from the ninth century fled the Lok Bhavan in Anantnag and was never seen again. The Shiva-lingam of the Dewan temple also mysteriously departed. These exits were timely, because soon after they occurred the fire-bombings began. The Shaivite temple complex at Handwara, near the famous shrine of Kheer Bhawani, was gutted by a blaze. Pyarelal sat beside Boonyi and buried his face in his hands. “Our story is finished,” he told her. “It is no longer the story of our lives, but the story of a plague year during which we have the misfortune to be around to grow buboes in our armpits and die unclean and stenchy deaths. We are no longer protagonists, only agonists.” A few days later in Anantnag district there began a week-long orgy of unprovoked violence against pandit residential and commercial property, temples, and the physical persons of pandit families. Many of them fled. The exodus of the pandits of Kashmir had begun.

Firdaus Noman came to see Pyarelal at his house to assure him that Pachigam’s Muslims would protect their Hindu brethren. “My wise and gentle friend,” she said, “never fear; we will take care of our own. The killing of Big Man Misri and Zoon’s suicide was bad enough, and we won’t let it happen again. You are too precious to lose.” Pyarelal shook his head. “It is out of our hands,” he said. “Our natures are no longer the critical factors in our fates. When the killers come, will it matter if we lived well or badly? Will the choices we made affect our destiny? Will they spare the kind and gentle among us and take only the selfish and dishonest? It would be absurd to think so. Massacres aren’t finicky. I may be precious or I may be valueless, but it doesn’t signify either way.” He kept the radio close to his ear at all times. As the bitter apples fell from their trees and rotted on the ground Pyarelal remained indoors, cross-legged, with the transistor held up against his head, listening to the BBC. Loot, plunder, arson, mayhem, murder, exodus: these words recurred, day after day, and a phrase from another part of the world that had flown many thousands of miles to find a new home in Kashmir.

“Ethnic cleansing.”

“Kill one, scare ten. Kill one, scare ten.” Hindu community houses, temples, private homes and whole neighborhoods were being destroyed. Pyarelal repeated, like a prayer, the names of the places struck by calamity. “Trakroo, Uma Nagri, Kupwara. Sangrampora, Wandhama, Nadimarg. Trakroo, Uma Nagri, Kupwara. Sangrampora, Wandhama, Nadimarg. Trakroo, Uma Nagri, Kupwara. Sangrampora, Wandhama, Nadimarg.” These names had to be remembered. Forgetting would be a crime against those who suffered “whole-hog” burning of their neighborhoods, or seizure of their property, or death, preceded by such violences as could not be imagined or described. Kill one, scare ten, the Muslim mobs chanted, and ten were, indeed, scared. More than ten. Three hundred and fifty thousand pandits, almost the entire pandit population of Kashmir, fled from their homes and headed south to the refugee camps where they would rot, like bitter fallen apples, like the unloved, undead dead they had become. In the so-called Bangladeshi Markets in the Iqbal Park-Hazuri Bagh area of Srinagar the things looted from temples and homes were being openly bought and sold. The shoppers hummed the most popular song of the times as they bought their pretty pieces of Hindu Kashmir, a song by the well-beloved Mehjoor: “I will give my life and soul for India, but my heart is with Pakistan.”

There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.