Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (21 page)

How will I seek my salvation? Who will recite the
Ramayana
for me?

Baramulla, 1947

Every story has a character who plays a significant role. But I have been a mere spectator, being forced to play my part beyond my free will.

Recently, one of the national magazines published a story on Kashmir. They interviewed me, asking me how I was coping with life after the death of my son. In the story, I was called ‘the septuagenarian Prithvi Nath’, but frankly, all these years seem to have passed like a flash of lightning.

Like a torrent, my memory washes away the years, to that moment when, perched in a walnut tree, I plucked raw, green fruit from the branches. That was the year 1947. India had just attained its independence. But nothing had changed in Kashmir. Maharaja Hari Singh was still the ruler of the land, and of our destinies.

Baramulla was still a lively town then—a transit point for English sahibs and mems, travelling in elegant Victorian-era cars, from the dusty roads of Rawalpindi to the elysian environs of Srinagar.

The Jhelum River passed through the town and then was joined by the muddy waters of the Kishanganga, before it flowed across, to the Pakistani mainland.

More than a thousand years ago, a Kashmiri engineer named Suyya concluded that floods in the valley occurred because the gorge near Baramulla was too narrow to handle the volume of the Jhelum. To solve the problem, Suyya hit upon a novel idea. He threw a large number of coins into the river. This led men to jumping into the waters to retrieve the coins. That, in turn, resulted in the removal of the boulders responsible for blocking the water. Later, during the Dogra king Maharaja Pratap Singh’s rule, when a British residency had been established in the Valley, Major de Lotbiniere imported dredgers from America and an engineer from Canada, to do the same job.

I must have been around ten years old, I remember, when I crossed that old bridge in Baramulla to go across the town. My family was small by those days’ standards—Father, Mother, my two younger sisters and me. In the middle of our house’s courtyard, there was a well. It was known throughout the town for its sweet water. My father was poor, but he had a taste for good things. Our house was three-storeyed, and the top storey comprised a big hall. Huge wooden pillars supported the ceiling of the hall, and its many windows invited in the fresh, invigorating air.

My sisters were young. They stayed at home, while I went to the local Paathshaala everyday, wearing slippers, and carrying a slate in my hand. The school was a few miles away from home.

Father was always busy, but his younger brother—we called him Totha—always pampered us. In the morning, he would take me to the milkman to buy milk. Afterwards, he would ask the milkman to dole out a dollop of curd on my palm.

Totha took me on long walks and narrated to me so many stories about Kashmir. He told me how, about a hundred years ago, famines had led to an acute scarcity of food, forcing many families to settle in Lahore. He also told me how the famine of 1877 in Srinagar lasted for two years and drastically reduced the city’s population. They used to say during the famine: ‘
Drag tsalih ta dag tsalih na
.’ The famine goes but the stains remain.

One of Totha’s friends was a man called Maqbool Sherwani. He was an activist in Sheikh Abdullah’s party, the National Conference, and I often saw him riding a white horse. He visited our home often, to speak to Totha. Life was good.

One October morning in 1947, I woke up with a pain in my back. It so happened that while sleeping, I had shifted from the thick mattress, onto the floor. The floor, covered only with a thin mat, had made my back sore. I had a bath with hot water, on my mother’s advice, and felt much better. Soon, I was walking towards my school as usual. When I reached, the morning prayers were in progress and I silently joined the line for my class. In front of me stood my friend Manzoor. I touched his shoulder and he turned to look at me. When he saw me, he took a step away from me and said, ‘Prithvi, I need to tell you something after the prayer.’

‘What is it, tell me now,’ I said curiously. But before he could say anything, our class teacher walked by and Manzoor shut his mouth, while I quickly closed my eyes.

After the prayers, the children rushed to their classrooms. Manzoor ran towards the back of the school, and I followed him. He stopped under a tree.

‘What is it that you want to tell me, Manzoor?’ I asked him.

He was silent for a while and then, lifting a stone from the ground, began scratching something into the tree trunk.

‘Manzoor, is it a joke you’re playing on me? Tell me, what is it?’ I said, my patience giving way.

Manzoor looked into my eyes with intensity. ‘The Kazakhs are coming,’ he said, almost vehemently.

‘Kazakhs! Who are they? Why are they coming to Baramulla?’

‘I don’t know,’ Manzoor said as he threw the stone. ‘Let us go to the classroom, otherwise the teacher will whip us with nettle grass.’ And he ran towards the class, while I tried to figure out what he meant. A minute later, having failed to understand what he was talking about, I followed him to class.

During the lunch break, I tried to find Manzoor, but he was not to be seen anywhere.

By the time I reached home, it was early evening, and I had forgotten all about Manzoor’s revelation. After a meal of rice and fish curry, I went off to play. By the time I returned, the sun had dropped low in the sky, and it was beginning to get dark. I was very tired, and after helping myself to another serving of rice and fish, I went off to sleep.

As I was slipping away into sleep, I heard a knock on the front door and, from the sounds coming from the other room, I understood that Father had returned. I knew he would wash himself, and sit down to eat his dinner. Father preferred to eat at home. So when he returned, he would always be hungry. I heard Father and Mother speaking to each other.

Suddenly, I was startled awake by a shrill cry. At first, I thought I was dreaming, but after a few moments, I could clearly hear a commotion outside my house. I threw the quilt aside and ran out, barefoot and rubbing the sleep from my eyes, and saw that a few people had assembled in our neighbour’s courtyard. In the middle of the courtyard our neighbour’s son, Shyamlal, sat on the ground. He was wailing and beating his chest.

‘What happened? Is all well with your family? Where is your father?’ my father asked him.

Shyamlal did not answer. He kept wailing. ‘Everything will be destroyed. Everything will be reduced to ashes.
Thrath ha se peye
—lightning has stuck us!’

‘Stop this. Tell me clearly what has happened,’ Father said.

‘The Pathans are coming, the Pathans. They will kill us and take everything.’

‘Are you sure you are not feverish? Pathans? What on earth are you talking about?’

‘They are coming. This is not gibberish; they are coming from there,’ Shyamlal pointed towards the mountains. ‘They are coming to loot and kill us.’

The news spread like wildfire. Men came out of their homes, onto the streets, forming small groups, and discussed this new development. In no time, the news spread that Pakistan had sent tribal invaders from their Northwest Frontier Province to attack Kashmir. We soon learnt that the invaders had already wreaked havoc in the villages near the Uri township, and now they were advancing towards Baramulla. It would take just a few days, or maybe even less, for them to reach and attack Baramulla.

The thought of invaders sent shivers down the spines of people throughout Baramulla. Everyone was in a dilemma, and it was writ large on their faces—Would they have to leave their homes and run away? Would it be insane to stay? Or did it make sense to flee to Srinagar? Nobody had a clue.

Shambhu Nath made his stand clear.

‘I cannot leave Lakshmi here. In her condition, it is not possible to take her to Srinagar.’ Lakshmi was Shambhu Nath’s cow and she was pregnant.

The shadow of fear loomed large over us, eclipsing the tranquillity of the town. In difficult times, everyone thinks about their own kith and kin. In no time at all, a few houses were found to have been locked up. These families had fled to unknown destinations, without telling anyone. A man who lived in the street behind ours lamented that his own brother’s family had not even informed him before fleeing.

People who stayed back huddled inside their houses, taking extra precautions to lock the doors. Nobody could sleep. Families kept some of their valuables, mostly jewellery, ready, in case they had to flee. A few men kept kitchen knives under their pillows, so that they could put the womenfolk to death in case the tribesmen attacked.

It was then that a man came to our rescue. He was a senior officer at the Mahura power station, and the only Kashmiri Pandit in Baramulla who owned a car. He was middle-aged, and carried a baton in his hands. He was often seen walking past St. Joseph Chapel. The next morning he called for a meeting of members of the Pandit community.

Many people assembled at the school grounds to hear him. He was seated on a cane chair, a shawl draped carelessly over his shoulders.

‘Look, things are not going to work this way. You are unnecessarily creating panic. I have thought about it, and I think I know what needs to be done,’ he said. Everyone sat silent, looking at him.

‘I have decided that I will go to the Mahura power station. If the Pathans are coming towards the town, they will have to cross Mahura. If I spot them, I will cut off the electric supply. That will be the signal for you to run away to safety.’

The idea seemed acceptable to all. Mahura was quite far and from there it would take the Pathans some time to reach Baramulla.

‘But I have heard that they are not Pathans but Kazakhs,’ said someone.

‘It does not matter who they are. Remember one thing, they are outsiders. Everyone outside Kashmir has his eyes set upon this land. They want to molest Kashmir. They want to loot it. If they had their way, they would turn the course of the Jhelum. They would want to turn this land into a desert,’ he responded.

And then he rose to leave.

‘Keep an eye on the power supply,’ he said as he drove away. Soon his car became invisible, leaving behind only a trail of dust.

Men went back to their homes to tell their families about the officer’s plan. The roads turned desolate. I heard a baby crying somewhere, but the sound stopped so suddenly that I thought his family must have stifled the cries. Girls stopped playing hopscotch in the streets and boys could no longer be seen climbing trees.

Who could cook and who could eat in such circumstances? Mother boiled some rice, and my sisters and I ate some with a piece of onion pickle. Father and Mother ate nothing. Father recited some hymns softly. In between, he would look up at the lightbulb. Afterwards, he just kept staring at it, with Mother sitting next to him. The fear, coupled with anxiety, had become unbearable.

Later that evening, the lights went off.

Jaayen to jaayen kahan
… Whenever I hear this melancholic song by Talat Mahmood, I am reminded of that October evening in Baramulla. The lights went off and with them, our hopes were extinguished too.

There was absolute chaos in the town. Shambhu Nath set Lakshmi free, as he prepared to flee to safety with his family. There were tears in his eyes as he put a tilak on Lakshmi’s forehead and garlanded her. As he patted her, he was inconsolable. Finally he folded his hands in respect and left without looking back. Lakshmi followed her master for a while, but then stopped. With a calf in her womb, she stood exhausted, her legs trembling.

Father decided to move us to another village, where one of his acquaintances happened to live.

‘Ambardar will give us shelter,’ he said. Mother packed the previous night’s leftover rice and a few pieces of onion pickle in a muslin cloth. After locking the house, we set off towards Ambardar’s village.

Confusion reigned on the roads. Families ran helter-skelter to safer places. Most of them set off on the road to Srinagar. A few families hired houseboats that would take them to Srinagar via the river route. Some of them fled to nearby areas like Sopore, assuming that the tribesmen would not strike there. They took along with them household items like carpets, utensils, and bedding. Some of them carried the idols of their deities in wooden boxes. I saw an old man holding his hookah under his arm. A young girl cried over the shoulder of her father. A rag doll had fallen from her hand, and her father would not even stop to pick it up.