Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (22 page)

I carried my youngest sister on my shoulders. Father wore a long overcoat, and a pair of imported leather shoes, which had been gifted to him by an Englishman for whom he had prepared a horoscope. In one of the inside pockets of his overcoat, he put a few coins. It was the only money he had.

In the moonlight, the tall, lean poplar trees appeared to touch the sky. On the way, we saw a number of families moving in the same direction as us. At first they would be frightened at the sight of other people, and then, without exchanging a word, they would keep moving. Apart from a few household items, families carried with them their hopes of returning home soon.

The sun was about to rise, and the sky had turned a pale orange towards the east when we reached Ambardar’s village.

Ambardar’s house was like a mansion—it had a huge wooden door with iron handles, broad verandas and high windows. Ambardar himself was a towering personality—tall, broad-shouldered, with a long face. Around sixty years old, Ambardar wore several rings on both hands and always carried a walking stick with him which had a carved lion’s face as its handle. He owned several orchards and many acres of land.

Ambardar welcomed our family with open arms. He too had heard the news of tribesmen advancing towards Baramulla.

‘They won’t be able to reach this far,’ he said.

Like us, many other families known to Ambardar had taken refuge in his house. After walking all night, we were very tired. My legs were shaking with exhaustion. We washed ourselves at a small stream flowing beside Ambardar’s fields.

The upper storey of his house had a huge room that was used for storing fruit from his orchards. We were told to help ourselves, as it was difficult to cook food for so many people. The children went first, followed by the adults. We pounced upon the fruits, and ate them to our hearts’ fill. We ate pears, apples, and walnuts. We slept on haystacks, under old blankets and quilts that Ambardar provided for us.

We children were quite scared of Ambardar, but he would pay no heed to us. He would pass us occasionally, as we tried to play a few games with other children, in front of the house. He would talk to the elders though. I often noticed him removing dead leaves and other blockages from the water channels going towards his fields.

After three days, we realized how short our stay at Ambardar’s house was to be. It so happened that a planter working in Ambardar’s fields heard news of the tribesmen ransacking the main township of Baramulla. He also told Ambardar that the tribesmen were fanning out across villages, looting and plundering whatever they came across.

Many houses in the village belonged to Muslims. Some of them were landlords, and some worked in the fields and shared the crops with the owners. The news of the Pathans creating havoc in Baramulla spread like wildfire through the village. Ambardar shared this information with the heads of the families who had taken refuge in his house. Upon hearing the news, a lady, whom I remembered as generally being very quiet, broke down.

‘Where will we go now? Oh God, strike me dead. It is much better than finding ourselves amidst these devils from across,’ she cried, as her two children sat bewildered at her feet. The other women tried to console her.

As the men sought each other’s opinion on what options were available to them, my father took charge.

‘I propose that we stay here for now. Let me go and find out what the mood in the village is like. Depending on my findings, we will decide what is best for our safety,’ Father said.

Normally the rest would have argued. But this time fear had sewn their mouths shut. This time they just nodded in agreement. Father put on a skullcap he borrowed from one of Ambardar’s Muslim workers and went out to assess the risk of staying in the village.

On the streets, people moved in groups. Some of them were coming out of the village mosque after offering prayers. Outside a shop, a few men stood talking to each other. Father joined them. A man among the group was telling the others, ‘The Pathans have reached Baramulla. They are planning to advance towards Srinagar. I have been told that they have plans to offer prayers at the Jama Masjid in Srinagar.’

An old man who was in the group said, ‘They have ruined us. They are slaughtering innocent people.’

‘But they are only killing infidels,’ the first man replied.

The old man said nothing.

‘Let us just wait and watch,’ someone else said. Afterwards, the group dispersed.

Father told us later that as he was walking away, someone had caught his hand from behind. He turned to see a man standing there. He smiled at my father and said, ‘Pandit, I know you are from Baramulla. A cousin of mine stays near your house. Listen, these antics won’t help. I am telling you, your lives are in grave danger. Run away as soon as you can. May Allah be with you.’ Then he left.

The news Father brought back with him was not encouraging.

‘I really don’t know what to do; nothing is clear,’ Father told the others.

Now the question was whether to stay put, or move ahead to some other village. The men arrived at the collective decision that they should hide in Ambardar’s fields. The invaders, they thought, would not be able to find them there. Father went to Ambardar and asked him to join the rest for safety, but he declined.

‘Son, throughout my life, I have never slept anywhere outside my house. Now why should I change that in my old age? Don’t worry about me. The greh devtaa will protect me. But you carry on, if you must.’

Greh devtaa
. Ghar divta.
I look at Ravi’s father. He sits there in front of me, his head trembling slightly. I am reminded of that morning in 1990 when we left our house forever, and how Father had turned back to invoke the greh devtaa to protect our house
.

I tell Uncle about my nightmare in 1987 when I saw a marauder, wearing sandals of dry straw, plunging his sword into Ravi’s abdomen. His eyes well up with tears. He doesn’t say anything about Ravi. ‘So Ambardar stayed back, while we walked towards the fields,’ he continues
.

There were twenty-nine of us who hid in the fields that night. The children were asked to not make any noise and just lie still with their parents.

The head of one particular family was a man in his mid-thirties and, like a traditional Brahmin, he maintained a tuft of hair at the back of his head. He asked me if I could procure a pair of scissors or a knife from somewhere. I got hold of a blunt knife and upon his request, I cut off the tuft of hair. He took it from me and buried it under a tree, tears flowing down his cheeks.

The night was horrifying. As we braved the cold out in the open, I could hear the distant howling of jackals. Most of us remained awake. Those who dozed off would wake up every now and then after dreaming that the tribesmen had caught them. A mother tried to sing a lullaby to her restless child, but was asked to shut up by her husband. Another woman buried a ring under a tree. ‘My mother gave me this ring while she was dying. I don’t want the Pathans to take it away,’ she said.

It was around midnight, when suddenly the sound of gunfire reverberated in the air. The howling of jackals died away. We could hear cries from one corner of the village, followed by more gunshots.

We got up instantly, all of us, unsure of what to do. The cries seemed to be nearing us, and this took our courage away.

‘What do we do now?’ asked a man.

‘Let us run away to the next village or the village next to that. But we must leave now,’ my father said.

So twenty-nine of us, six families altogether, began to run. Initially, all of us stayed together. But gradually, the families could not keep pace with each other. Some of them slowed down due to exhaustion and some drifted away. I followed my father, who was carrying my sister on his back by now. My eyes were heavy with stress and fatigue. My chest had turned into a furnace, but stopping could have meant death.

By the wee hours of the morning, our family was the only one that reached the outskirts of a village. We did not know what the situation would be there, so we decided to hide until morning in an orchard nearby. On one end, by the roadside, there stood a row of willows. Beyond them were paddy fields where the crop was ripe for cutting.

It must have been late in the morning when we came out of hiding, treading each step with caution. While walking, Father and I tried to listen for sounds of chaos coming from the village but we could hear none.

We must have walked half a mile or so when we came across a man working in a field. Upon hearing our footsteps, he turned towards us. He stared at us for a few moments and then resumed his work. We also did not try speaking to him. Those were terrible times, and one was not sure whom one could trust. As we crossed him, I noticed that he was stealing glances at us. I told this to my father in a hushed tone.

‘Don’t look at him; just keep on moving,’ Father said. And so I did.

We kept walking through the fields, avoiding roads. We had no destination in mind. Our only aim was to get as far away from the tribesmen as we could.

We must have walked for an hour or so when we heard someone calling out my father’s name. We turned to see a woman with a sickle in her hand. Father recognized her.

‘I don’t remember her name but her husband used to work in Ambardar’s fields,’ father said.

We walked towards her and as we neared her, she said, ‘Damodar Pandit, is that you?’

‘Yes, it is me. We are coming from Ambardar’s village. The tribesmen attacked in the night.’

‘And what about him?’ she enquired about Ambardar.

Father told her about Ambardar’s decision to stay back.

‘
Ha Khudaya
, does he not know that these evil Pathans are baying for the blood of Kashmiris? More so when one happens to be a non-Muslim? But he won’t listen to anyone. You are of his own tribe. You should have made him realize his folly.’

Father said nothing. She dropped her sickle on the ground and cleaned her mud-caked hands on her smock. After asking us to wait there, she disappeared. She returned after a minute or so with a pitcher of fresh milk in her hands. The milk was so fresh that even the froth had not yet settled.

‘Here, at least feed these young children,’ she said as she gave the milk to my mother.

We were famished, and all of us drank straight from the pitcher. After my mother’s milk, if I am indebted to anything, it is the milk provided that day by the kind woman.

Father realized that we had come very far from our home. There was no place left where we could seek refuge. Also, there was no guarantee that we would not be forced to run from that village also. Father decided that it was time to go back to Baramulla, to our home.

‘Let us go home. Whatever has to happen, will happen. We cannot change destiny,’ he said.

‘Do you realize how risky it could be?’ Mother almost shouted at Father.

‘There are a few things which should be left to God, Shobha,’ Father said. ‘We have tried our best to save ourselves; we cannot go further than this. There is no point. If God wishes that we should return to him then so be it. We must surrender to the will of God.’

And so we began our return journey. On the way back, we realized that people were still fleeing from their villages. People from the neighbouring township of Uri, which had borne the brunt of the marauders, told harrowing tales of the tribesmen’s attack.

A woman howled while walking through a field with a child following her. He was crying too. We learnt that the woman’s husband, a shopkeeper in Uri, had been killed by the tribesmen after a group broke into their house. I was terrified when I saw a thin line of blood running down her thighs where her dress was torn. It was torn near her chest too. But she was oblivious to everything now. She was crying and pulling her hair. A woman from her neighbourhood was trying to console her. She was also trying to cover her with a shawl but the woman threw it away repeatedly.

‘The workers of the National Conference were trying to stop people from leaving Uri. They said nobody would touch us. But before they could even finish, the Pathans descended upon our town and we just ran blindly amidst a volley of bullets,’ a man from Uri told Father.

We had walked a few miles when we saw another horde of people approaching. They were almost running. They looked at us and one of them shouted, ‘Run away, run away. They are coming in this direction.’

A cry of panic escaped my mother’s lips and Father hurried us towards the fields along the road. We ran deep into the fields, hoping to find a village where the tribesmen had not entered. As we ran, we were joined by a couple. After a few miles, we stopped to take stock of our situation and catch our breaths. The couple stopped, too. The woman was tall and fat, with a round face, while her husband was lean and had a long face. The man told us that the tribesmen had attacked their village, which was across the bridge in Baramulla and he had fled with his wife, leaving his aged father, who was paralysed, behind.

‘Don’t worry,’ my father tried to reassure him, ‘they will not harm your father.’

‘No, brother, you don’t know them,’ the man replied. ‘They are thirsty for blood, worse than mongrel dogs. They might kill my father because one of his teeth is made of gold. Oh God, I should have at least knocked out his tooth before running away to save my life.’ The man was crying now.