Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits (29 page)

While I know there are many among the Kashmiri Muslims who want us back, I am also aware of what happened to some of us who chose to stay back. That is why meeting Vinod Dhar was very important.

It is very difficult to get Vinod Dhar on the telephone. The first time I call him, he picks up the phone after the first ring. It is evening, and there is absolute silence on the other end for a few seconds before I hear two ‘hellos’ in quick succession, the second more impatient than the first.

I speak to him in Hindi. For months, I’ve been struggling to get in touch with people whose family members were killed by militants, to record their stories. The problem is that no one really says ‘no’. But everyone is evasive.

‘Yes, yes, come over any time. We will have lunch. My home is your home, after all.’

‘Any time’ is the problem. So I take a deep breath.

‘So when can I come?’

Same response. ‘Any time.’

‘How about tomorrow morning?’

‘Ah, well, the thing is, there is a wedding in the family. So we won’t be here tomorrow. You know this is wedding season.’

‘Ok, so when then?’

‘Give me a call on Monday. We will surely meet then.’

On Monday I call. There is no response. I call again on Tuesday. The phone is answered.

‘Hello, hellooooo, yes, who do you want to speak to … Oh, yes, yes, how are you? Yes, we are back. Let me call you this evening, and then we can meet.’

The call is never returned. The next morning I call again. The phone is not answered. I try five times. Ten times. No response.

Those who agree to meet are keen to talk about their mastery of the history of Kashmir. ‘You see, according to Nilmat Purana …’

Out of respect, I listen to them for a while.

‘Sir, I was asking you about 1990 …’

‘Your tea is getting cold. Here, have a biscuit. You will stay for lunch, won’t you?’

‘Sir … 1990?’

‘When are you here next? We can sit at ease next time and have a long chat.’

‘But, sir, I heard about Nilmat Purana for thirty minutes …’

But the conversation is over by that time. One more biscuit, one more conversation about lunch and you want to escape badly. Dead end.

With Vinod Dhar, I know I have to be more persistent.

‘Vinod ji, I want to meet you.’

‘For what?’

‘I’m writing a book and I was hoping to meet you.’

Long silence. ‘Hello, Vinod ji, are you there?’

‘What will it achieve now, speaking of those days? I am trying to forget it all.’

It sounds as if Vinod Dhar has jumped into a well and speaks to me from there.

You cannot argue with the act of forgetting. Trying to forget. Perhaps I don’t understand the importance of forgetting. Perhaps it is important for Vinod Dhar to forget. For someone who lost his entire family in the matter of a few minutes one cold January night, it is important to forget. For someone who is the lone survivor of a massacre that claimed twenty-three members—from his family and extended family and neighbours.

I spoke to him about how I understood why he did not want to talk about it, but how important it was to talk about it. I quoted Milan Kundera:
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting
.

‘Call me tomorrow,’ he finally says.

The next morning, Vinod Dhar does not answer his phone. An hour later, I call again. This time it is switched off. Two hours later, someone else answers the phone.

‘He is not well,’ the man says. That evening I call again. This time Vinod answers.

‘Yes, I was not well. You were writing a book, you said. But you see there is no point talking about what happened to me. I’m trying to forget it.’

A part of me wants to give up. Then I remember the images I have seen of the dead the morning after, lined up on dry straw. Men, women, children. And the reports of their Muslim neighbours wailing over the bodies. So I chew on the inside of my cheek till it bleeds, gulp down a stiff drink and say, ‘Please Vinod ji, you’ll be doing me a great favour if you meet me.’

There is a pause at the other end. And then, ‘I don’t know what will come of it,’ he says.

‘Consider it a favour to me,’ I say again.

‘Hmm …’ he sighs. ‘Ok, call me tomorrow morning at nine.’

At nine the next morning, his phone is switched off.

I am in a hotel. Its walls are damp and the bed sheets reek of lovemaking. I haven’t told any of my relatives that I am in Jammu. It would be difficult to work if I stayed with them; it would be impossible to step out without them fussing over breakfast and lunch, and dinner. Also, I know there will be questions about my own homelessness, about why over the past year I’ve been coming alone to attend family weddings. I have no answers for them. What I can tell them is something they wouldn’t understand.

How can I share with them the strong imagery in my mind of a home, of how I failed to set it up in reality.

Back in Delhi, in my bedroom, which used to be ‘our’ bedroom, there are still closets filled with her clothes, and shoes, her nail paint, her fragrances. She is no longer there.

For my relatives, who worry about my meals and my other comforts, and who want to ask questions, exile is something that they think of while opening up an old family album, or while watching videos of their visit to Kshir Bhawani, shot on their newly acquired Sony Handycams. They are ‘settled’ in their mind otherwise. Their new houses are their homes. Jammu is their Shahar now. They celebrate birthdays, exam results, new house paint, a new car—everything.

For me, though, exile is permanent. Homelessness is permanent. I am uprooted in my mind. There is nothing I can do about it. My idea of home is too perfect. My idea of love is too perfect. And home and love are too intertwined. I am like my grandfather, who never left his village his whole life. It was deeply embedded in his matrix, too perfect to be replicated elsewhere.

Malcolm Lowry wrote, ‘I have no house, only a shadow.’

I have no home, only images. And in those closets in my bedroom, I could only conjure up images of home. And now, that too is gone.

I think Vinod Dhar will not meet me. I am saddened, but I understand. I have come to Jammu to record his story, but since he is playing truant, I have a lot of time. The four walls of the hotel depress me. I look out of the window. An old man is using a net to fish out leaves from the hotel swimming pool. In a banquet hall next to it, preparations are underway for the evening’s event. Waiters wearing uniforms soiled with curry stains carry crockery and cartons of alcohol.

I step out. I decide to go to the old city, towards the Rajput Sabha where we had spent a few weeks more than two decades ago. I take an autorickshaw and get off at the Matador stand. I want to walk from here through the bustling bazaar. It is morning and many shops are yet to open. In many ways nothing has changed. Shop owners, who have just opened the shutters of their shops, burn camphor in small steel containers to ward off the evil eye. Two priests wearing their peculiar headgear ring small bells and utter some indecipherable hymn and float from shop to shop, seeking alms. The dye shops are open with workers immersing fabric in their boiling, coloured concoctions.

Images from those few weeks we spent at Rajput Sabha come back to me. From the terrace of the Sabha, I would often stand and watch the world go by through the bazaar. To escape the monotony of our room, I used to spend hours on the roof. But today, I am the world. I look up, almost expecting to see a boy, fourteen years old, watching me, to escape his new life.

I turn left and am now standing in front of the main entrance of the Rajput Sabha. But there are no stairs now. I look up. They are turning it into a shopping complex. There is cement and other construction material everywhere. Banners of cell phone companies offering deals have already come up. I stand there transfixed, and I remember a very hot afternoon. There were hardly any people on the street. When I think of that day, I always see it as a phantasmagoria of sorts. In it, I imagine a shopkeeper sitting on a cushion in front of his desk. He has fallen asleep and his mouth is open and a fly flits in and out of it.

The grill door of the Sabha’s main entrance is locked as it always was from lunchtime onwards. And from inside, Vishal comes out and joins me at the entrance. He is wearing a crisp white shirt and trousers and shining moccasins. A sugarcane vendor passes by. He sells sugarcane pieces, kebab-like, chilled under a slab of ice. Vishal passes some money through the grill and buys some sugarcane. We sit on the stairs and chew on the pieces. Vishal was a friend of the Sabha’s caretaker. He often visited, along with some of his friends, and they just sat and gossiped and laughed over the cutouts of actresses the caretaker had pasted in his room. It was Vishal who cultivated in me a life-long passion for singing. Sitting on those marble stairs, he would break into a song from a film of the late eighties,
Awaargi
.

Chamakte chand ko toota hua taara bana daala
Meri aawargi ne mujhko aawara bana daala

A shining moon turned into a fallen star
My vagrancy turned me into a vagrant

Somehow, that song stayed with me. It shaped me, moulded me into its meanings; it became my cast. In one stanza, the poet says—

Mein is duniya ko aksar dekh kar hairaan hota hun
Na mujh se ban saka chhota sa ghar, din raat rota hun

I often marvel when I look at the world
I could not even build a small house: day and night I cry

This image is so clear in my mind, and so magnified, that I forget it happened two decades ago. I turn back. Behind me is a small temple and there are two benches in front of it, and a small see-saw for children. Sometimes, memory has a mind of its own. It takes off on autopilot, and flashes small incidents in front of you—incidents one has not remembered for years. Behind the temple is the shopkeeper’s house on the stairs of which I would stand and watch
Mahabharat
. I close my eyes and just sit there. An alcoholic is sleeping on the other bench.

I take out my cell phone and I dial Vinod Dhar’s number again. The phone rings. On the second ring, the phone is answered.

‘Where are you?’ Vinod Dhar asks.

I tell him.

‘Oh, you are five minutes away. Come to the coffee shop outside the Secretariat. I’ll see you there.’

I pick up my bag and start running.

The Secretariat is a depressing building from where the government functions. In Jammu and Kashmir though, there are two Secretariats. In the winters, the Secretariat operates from Jammu. In the summers, it is shifted to Srinagar. This is known as the Durbar Move. At this time the Secretariat is in Jammu and so is Vinod Dhar.

I enter the coffee shop. It is a small place. Behind the counter, in an open space, there are three stone tables with stone benches on either side. Vinod is standing there. I recognize him from a picture I have seen of him in a news report. In it, he sits on a chair, outside his dwelling in the refugee camp, and looks away from the camera. And now, he is shaking hands with me. His hair is short and he hasn’t shaved for a few days. He wears a sky-blue shirt. He breaks into a boyish smile and leads me to one of the benches. He sits across the table from me. Then he takes a good look at me. ‘I had heard about how journalists can go after someone. Today, I have experienced it with you. I’ve never met anybody who is as persistent as you,’ he says.

Vinod Dhar speaks nervously and he bites his nails as he speaks. And he speaks for the entire time he spends with me. As he speaks, spit accumulates at the corners of his lips.

‘You must be thinking I speak all the time,’ he says five minutes after we have sat down. ‘My psychiatrist says I have aged, but I stopped growing mentally on January 25, 1998.’ That is not entirely true though. Vinod is quite mature. He understands what he has gone through. Recognizing the fact that one particular incident in his life has left psychological scars is an act of maturity itself.

Vinod Dhar was fourteen in 1998. His family and his uncles lived in Wandhama, a sleepy hamlet in Kashmir’s Gandarbal district. His family and three other Pandit families had thought of leaving like everyone else in 1990, but then decided against it. Their sustenance depended on agriculture, and the family elders were not sure how Jammu would turn out to be for them.