The river is brown and muddy and holy. The train roars over the bridge. The waters are sparkling with industrial froth. Naked children jump into the river. India, God’s naked country, is passing by. Mustard fields sway in the wind, they are the braids of air. Waves of tractors and bullock carts. (The fields make me think about yesterday’s news: mass suicides by starving farmers in the South.) Chimney smoke rises from an oil refinery. The smoke will blacken the white marble of the Taj. A pesticide factory flashes by. (The farmers killed themselves by drinking eight liters of agricultural pesticide.) Garbage. Streams of plastic. Hills of bottles, bags, wrappers. Cows chew on the plastic. Cell-phone towers. A cloud of butterflies, a little girl in a wrinkled pink frock is trying to catch them. A uranium mine. A huge banyan tree, the size of a village. Roots and knots everywhere. Nothing grows under a tree so thick. Thin dogs on a street. Fat goats. A butcher shop, condensation on the window. A temple, the gods are dancing. A ruined mosque. A herd of water buffaloes. Diseased mosquitoes hover on them. A mall building under construction. Water tanks. A receding platform, a receding city. A wave of nano cars. Then nothing. Only a profusion of signs. STD. BITS. ISD. HIV. C-h-i-l-d Beer. B-r-a-c-k-f-a-s-t. OK-TATA. 502 Bidi. Gandhi Spinal Hospital. FICCI welcomes the American President. Eat Cricket, Sleep Cricket, Drink only Coke. Veg-Non-Veg.
M-a-c B-u-g-e-r-s. D-o-m-i-n-o-s. L-a-t-i-n (not ‘latrine’).
God help us.
In Kashmir in autumn there are leaves which turn yellow but don’t fall. They cling hard to trees. The plane leaves fall, but there are trees (whose names I do not recall now) with yellow leaves that cling to branches. Last year’s leaves cling to this year’s tree. Even the strongest wind cannot separate them. What force bonds them tight?
When young I used to think if I picked up a terminal disease I would kill myself. But now my ideas on this have changed. I would like to cling to whatever life is left within me.
But.
There is one thing he wrote in the journal that burns me, and no matter how hard I try to forget, the thing still burns me. If someone else had said such things about me, I would not have given it much importance, but Kishen wrote those things with his own hand. That is why I was angry. I was angry at him and angry at myself for not expressing my anger. Despite his words I continued feeding him in the hospital while he was convalescing. I never brought it up.
I am reading the journal again and my hands shake.
Chef’s allegation involves General Sahib.
The other day I was sitting with a soldier in the hospital canteen, he writes, and the soldier uttered something vulgar about the nurse. She is a cockteaser, he said. She has a tattoo on her belly. I grabbed him by the collar. She is mine, I said. Leave her alone. Are you sure she is yours, Major? the soldier asked. She only does it with the officers. The soldier’s remark fumed me, increased my anger, he writes. How do you know she has a tattoo on her belly when she only does it with the officers? When you were away to the glacier, Major, she went to the border post with General Kumar and they spent the night in the same bunker. Two months later Sahib sent her to the Delhi HQ hospital for a while. The staff in Delhi told us that the rose tattoo had become a grotesque-shaped flower when her belly had swollen, and even more grotesque when it shrank. Things do not shrink back the same way, he said.
The General sent me to Siachen so that he could fuck with her, Chef writes. She says nothing has happened. I don’t believe a word. She is lying. She has never lied to me before, that bitch.
Chef records a long string of dialogue in bad handwriting at the bottom of the page:
She: ‘We slept on separate beds in the bunker. Nothing happened.’
Me: ‘What about the tattoo?’
She: ‘How many times do I have to tell you – tattoos on the belly get distorted with time.’
Me: ‘It was abortion.’
She: ‘Not true.’
Me: ‘What has the General paid you to keep quiet?’
She: ‘You are mad.’
Me: ‘If the General is innocent, then I know who did it.’
She: ‘Who?’
THE GENERAL’S RATION
No questions asked.
AN OFFICER’S RATION
Wheat flour/rice/bread 450g, sugar 90g, oil 80g, dal 40g, tea/coffee 9g, salt 20g, porridge 20g, custard powder 7g, cornflour 7g, ice cream/jelly 7g, condiments 600g/month, vegetables 170g, potatoes 110g, onions 60g, non-citric fruits 230g, citric fruits 110g, eggs 2, chicken 175g, meat dressed 260g, milk 250g, milk (for those who do not eat eggs) 1250g, cheese 50g.
A SOLDIER’S RATION
Wheat flour/rice/bread 620g; sugar 90g, oil 80g, dal 40g, tea/coffee 9g, salt 20g, condiments 600g/month, vegetables 170g, potatoes 110g, onions 60g, fruits 230g, meat dressed 110g, milk (veg) 750g, milk (non-veg) 250g.
I wish I were young again, he writes. Pretty Kashmiri girls, beautiful army wives, nurses – they all fall so easily for the boy. He doesn’t even have a full beard. Yet. He is fucking around that lun, that prick. Kip.
Perhaps the words were written under the influence of rum. But rum is no excuse.
None of it was true. General Kumar had not done it. Chef had no proof. Sahib was a man of highest morals. I, on the other hand, had yet to be with a woman. Other than my erotic reveries I had no experience. My body was simply going to waste. Chef was – that bloody bastard was simply writing lies about Sahib and about me.
Despite his lies I continued to cook for him when he was in hospital. I served him my ration of rum. I fed him his own recipes. I would take the tiffin-carrier to the hospital on bike. He never spoke. He did not speak to anyone. He looked so frail on that metal bed I could not hold anything against him. He lay on the white bed, wrapped in a blanket, his tattooed arm jutting out, stitches on his wrist, and I knew exactly what he was thinking. He was thinking life had ended before it began. The glacier had sucked him dry, that field of snow and ice, that hazaar thousand ton of snow, layers on top of each other, had sat on top of him and demolished his erections. He could no longer get it up; it had become a bonsai. On his tongue clung the taste of a woman’s body and the smell of its hollows, but the glacier had numbed him, and he and his bonsai had even forgotten what it felt like to drown in a woman’s fluids. No, up there, twenty thousand feet high, his brain, his organs, were drowning in his own blood. He was thinking there was no justice in the world.
Something fell from his hospital bed. His wallet in which he kept his wife’s photo. I picked it up and placed it beside him, and noticed he did not bat his eyes and he kept looking at me with bitterness. His breathing grew heavier, but he did not blink. He was thinking here is a young man, a tall cedar, and he is sleeping around with women twenty-four hours. Kashmiri women were delicate beauties, and the little ‘virile Sikh’ boy was sleeping around with them, and now and then older army wives, the memsahibs, invited him to their residences and made advances. I felt he wanted me to tell him about my sexual experiences. He wanted to listen to it all but he hated to talk to me. What he did not want to hear from me was the truth, I thought. I was twenty and still a virgin. Me, Kirpal, a virgin.
Outside the sun was brightening the plane trees, and fresh wind was blowing in the valley, and I realized it was time to head out to the bazaar. The streets were red, and on the way I saw women sweeping the leaves into huge piles, filling their big sacks with leaves, and I knew why. They made charcoal in their homes, mixing leaves and sawdust. They used the charcoal in braziers in winter to keep warm. On the way to the bazaar I slowed down my bike and watched the women sweep the leaves. Their breasts alive inside beautiful pherans. I felt empty. I felt like a one big nothing. I was not even worth a soldier’s ration.
Forgiveness is a strange animal, I say to myself. Not many people on this earth know how to ask for forgiveness, and very few know how to truly forgive. I returned to the hospital to ask for forgiveness. I did not really need a bandage, the cut I had on my finger was minor. Some of the wards were absolutely dark. One or two were lit up with emergency lights. There was no power in the hospital, and the whole place smelled of dead cockroaches and chloroform. I waved at her. She ignored me; the sound of her heels clicking throughout the ward was unbearable.
Finally, I stopped her in the corridor.
‘Nurse, I have been meaning to say “sorry” to you.’
‘Say it quickly.’
‘I was wrong. The way I used to look at you was wrong. It will never happen again.’
She held my arm and I felt she had already forgiven me. I like you a lot, she said, and immediately after saying that she entered the dimly lit ward. The guard saluted her. I lingered until she took a cigarette break and stepped out on the lawn. Only then, when she was gone (and the guard was looking in the other direction), did I step into the ward.
There was a blanket on his face. The only light came from the window in the corner. The blanket heaved up and down. Chef stirred, but did not flap it open. This made my task easier. In a low voice I apologized on two counts. First, for reading his journal, and second, for liking his woman. Nothing happened between us, Chef. I just told her that I liked her. I did nothing.
I do not recall exactly the words I used, but I apologized and placed the red journal by his pillow and quickly made it to the door. The guard looked at me suspiciously, but didn’t utter a word.
Outside in the corridor a man was tapping the floor with his crutches. A thin boy from the Madras regiment in a wheelchair was playing with his saliva, slowly shaking his head left to right and right to left like a machine. The nurse was standing with two or three other nurses. They eyed me curiously.
‘I was only trying to have a word with Chef,’ I explained.
‘Who?’ she asked.
‘Kishen.’
‘But he is not here,’ she said.
‘Not here?’
‘Gone.’
‘He left?’
‘He put in a request with the colonel for a return to the Rose Glacier.’
‘Why did they let him go?’
‘Because no one else wanted to go.’
‘So who is on the bed?’ I raised my voice.
I rarely raise my voice. Perhaps that is why the power returned in the hospital.
There was a commotion in the corridor. Officers are coming. Officers. There I saw the colonel and his platoon marching in. The doctor was walking parallel to the colonel in his trussed jacket. The colonel was carrying an inspection stick, and the doctor was smoking a Marlboro.
‘Power is very unreliable, sir,’ said the doctor to the colonel. The others followed them to the ward. The officers took a long time inside and ordered tea and pakoras.
Half an hour later the hospital orderly stepped out of the ward with an empty tray.
‘Major, what tamasha is happening inside?’ I asked him.
‘We really live in a foreign land, Major. They are dealing with an enemy.’
‘An enemy?’ I asked.
‘Yes, Major. They need an interpreter inside, and no one knows Kashmiri here.’
‘I do.’
I knocked on the door.
‘Permission to enter, sir?’
‘Kip… Kirpal?’
‘If you do not mind, sir, I know the language. I took lessons, sir.’
‘Shahbash,’ said the colonel.
He beckoned me inside.
The officers, in proper uniforms and black boots, looked at me in relief as if I had just saved them. The captive lay on the bed. He was a she. The first enemy I ever saw was a she, and already I had apologized to her moments ago on two counts. The first thing I noticed was the unconscious movement of her head. Rapid breathing. Terror in eyes. Peasant feet. The toe ring gleamed in flourescent light. There was a cut on the left foot.
The colonel asked me to occupy the chair next to the enemy’s bed. I took a deep breath, then the interrogation began. It was my first time as an interpreter. I asked the questions slowly, she stammered her responses. I do not recall the many unintelligible things she brought to her lips. But the essence has stayed with me.
Name?
Nav?
Irem.
Father’s name?
Moul sund nav?
Maqbool Butt.
Citizenship?
Shehriyat?
Kashmiri.
Colonel: Ask again.
Citizenship?
Shehriyat?
Kashmiri.
Married?
Khander karith?
Awaa.
Yes.
Husband’s name?
Khandaraas nav?
Raza Nomani.
Any issues?
Kahn mushkil?
Khandras manz ché mushkilat aasani…
She says, sir, all marriages have problems.
No, what we mean is, does she have children?
Bacchi chhoi kanh?
Na.
No issues, sir.
There was a pause.
Mrs Irem, why are you in India?
Irem, tsé kyazi koruth border cross?
Khooda yi chhum guanha sazaa.
She says, God is punishing her for sins.
The enemy woman started breathing more heavily. The colonel muttered something. She was gasping for breath. The nurse offered her a glass of water. But.
The woman fainted.
The doctor held her wrist for a few seconds, then let it go.
In that entire ward (especially on her bed) my eyes could not locate Chef’s red journal. Small insects were climbing up the wall by her bed. I anticipated a trial, a long court martial, at least an inquiry. Empty-handed I returned to the General’s kitchen, and my spine shivered with panic when the ADC phoned me:
‘General Sahib would like to see you, Kirpal. Report right before golf. Fifteen-thirty hours.’
With great anxiety I walked to the golf course. I had committed a serious crime. But the General looked in a beautiful mood. He was dressed in civilian clothes. He asked other officers to leave us alone. He was holding an expensive golf stick, and he picked up a white ball.
‘You see this, Kirpal.’
‘Golf ball, sir?’
‘Good.’
‘Sir.’
‘You see the dimples, Kirpal?’
‘See them, sir.’
‘Why is the ball dimpled?’
‘No idea, sir.’
‘Guess?’
‘To make it go slower, sir?’
‘Faster.’
‘Sir is joking.’
‘I do not joke, Kip.’
‘Sir.’
‘Colonel Sahib phoned me. He reported this morning’s proceedings at the hospital.’
‘Sir.’
‘Good job.’
‘Thankyousir.’
‘Now is your chance to pick up your second rank, and maybe a medal.’
‘Sir.’
‘Understand me?’
‘Not exactly, sir.’
‘Find out everything about that enemy woman.’
‘How, sir?’
‘You are a smart chap.’
‘It is an unusual assignment, sir.’
‘Delicate assignment, Kirpal.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘Certainly.’
‘Sir, if I may, when will I go to the glacier?’
‘Things are shaping up. I’ll look into this personally. And, Kip -’
‘Sir?’
‘Everything must remain confidential.’
‘Sir.’
‘What did we talk about?’
‘Balls, sir.’
‘Dismiss.’
He narrowed his eyes and hit the ball with his club and I clicked my heels. On the way to my room I thought about all the balls that get lost from the golf course. How many lost golf balls belonged to the army? I wondered. If dimples allowed the balls to go faster, was there a way to make them go slower? Suddenly I started thinking about fast and slow. Fast and slow in cooking. Fast and slow in the kitchen. This is exactly what we were trying to do in the kitchen.
Men in the barracks already knew more about her than I did. She had crossed the river from the enemy side to our camp. One version said she was a suicide bomber, and that her target was schoolchildren. Another version was that she worked for ISI, the enemy spy agency. A third version claimed that she had come to incite the youth of Kashmir to become militants.
I returned the next day. She was wearing a loose pheran, and a third of her body was thickly bandaged. Her head was covered by a scarf. She looked beautiful even in sickness.
‘There is a cut on your foot,’ I said. ‘Why is it not bandaged?’
She stirred her feet as if to say, I know. She withdrew her feet into the blanket as if they were little rats.
‘Who did it?’
She did not say anything, so I turned and walked towards the window.
Outside, the troops were marching in the parade ground and the air was dusty.
‘In Pakistan you people eat dogs,’ I said.
Dust was rising on the road outside. The troops: one-two, one-two, one-two.
‘You people eat dogs,’ I said loudly.
‘No,’ she said.
I turned.
Her gaze was fixed on the floor.
‘You eat chicken feet… snakes… lizards… you crave…’
Chef Kishen had written that the enemy ate cows and buffaloes, and the most repulsive dish on their tables was made by slow cooking a young bull’s testicles.
‘I know why you are here,’ she broke her silence.
Her Kashmiri had a strong Muslim inflection. (The Kashmiri I had learned sounded more like the Kashmiri of pundits.)
‘Why?’ I asked.
Her eyes were red. She pulled Chef’s journal from her blanket. I walked to the head of the bed, and grabbed it from her.
‘Did you read?’ I was angry at her.
‘The person who wrote this,’ she said, ‘is sometimes very angry and sometimes extremely happy.’
‘The journal is written in Hindi.’ I raised my voice. ‘You lied yesterday. You know Hindi.’
She looked afraid as I uttered those words, raising my voice.
‘No, Saheb,’ she said.
‘You Pakistanis cannot be trusted,’ I said.
‘I never attended school, Saheb,’ she said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘I cannot read and write, Saheb.’
‘Do not call me sahib,’ I said. ‘Just answer me. If you did not read it, then how can you say that he was sometimes angry and happy?’
‘The pen moves fast, then sometimes slow. One can tell,’ she said.
Her speech was almost inaudible, and she spoke very slowly. Her words, like a damaged cassette in the tape recorder. This angered me, but I continued to let her speak.
‘You do not need to know the language, Saheb, to figure out if the writer of words is angry, sad, or happy.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘You are illiterate.’
She could not read and write and this made me happy. Her face was intelligent, but she could not read from left to right or right to left and this made me happy. She had no access to Kishen’s intimate thoughts. But as I was walking back to the General’s kitchen I felt sad that so many people in our land and in the land of our enemy cannot even read and write. I felt pity for her. She was a smart woman but really she was leading the life of a donkey.
She had not touched the tray of food next to her bed. On the wall behind her there were more crawling insects than last time.
‘The food, Saheb,’ she said, ‘is not fit for humans.’
Then. I do not know what made me say: ‘I will make sure that you eat well. I will make sure you find out the meaning of real Indian hospitality.’
The opportunity to prepare her a proper meal arrived very soon. General Sahib flew to Delhi to meet the COAS, the Chief of Army Staff; and the doctor was away on Internal Security duty. I persuaded the nurse to unlock the doctor’s room in the hospital. The room had a beautiful view of distant mountains. They looked completely blue, the Pir Panjals, casting no shadow. Things that are far away always look blue for some unknown reason. Blue is the color of our past. Blue is the color of our wretched past, I say to myself.
It was not my finest accomplishment, but I did my best to feed the ‘enemy woman’. I cooked in the General’s kitchen, and served her in the doctor’s room in the hospital with the nurse present. I do not understand why she still is the ‘enemy woman’. To this day, sometimes the phrase slips out of my mouth.
Her name was Irem.
She removed her shoes before stepping on the thick carpet in the doctor’s room. Like most Kashmiris she gave the carpet the respect it deserved. The nurse on the other hand kept her dirty shoes on, and I remember the condescending look she gave her patient. There was an open-air cinema not far from the hospital, and most of the staff and guards and non-critical patients were watching a Bombay film there. So the hospital was half empty. The nurse had a shot of rum, and for Irem I made lemonade, and watched from the window.
Music from the open-air cinema wafted into the room. The song playing was about the fickle anger of beautiful women. Irem hesitated to sit on the sofa. So she sat on the carpet, her gaze fixed on the patterns of spiders, lizards, and scorpions embroidered on the beautiful carpet. The colors of the carpet came from vegetable dyes made of roots and berries. The green and indigo and red, although a bit faded, drew me towards them.
The nurse started talking to me in English. I am sleep starved, she said. As if she was the only one who didn’t get to sleep. Irem felt increasingly uncomfortable in the room, I could tell. She held her glass as if it was the only thing that could comfort her. Terror was loose in her eyes still. It seemed to me that her lips were moving slightly. There was a cut on her upper lip. She wiped away the condensation with her hand and rolled the lemonade glass the way Buddhists roll prayer wheels in Ladakh.
The nurse stared at her, and the patient started staring at the wall.
There is a photo on the wall.
Irem rises to her feet, and without paying attention to us walks slowly towards the wall and stands before the big black and white photo.
There are five or six women in Islamic garments standing on a sheer cliff. Only their backs are visible. Two or three are praying; one is looking at the immense sky, another is surveying the valley below – the poplars, the willows, the plane trees, the fruit orchards, the lake, and the timber-framed houses. Another stands barefoot, her arms uplifted, palms open in prayer. A ribbon of a cloud is passing by, and it is unclear if the cloud is touching her palm or the folds of the mountain.
It’s strange, I am looking at Irem’s back and she is looking at the women in the photo. Perhaps there are more than six women. The tall one is hiding the short one, and they are all standing on a cliff. Irem moves slightly to her right; now I see more clearly. At the bottom left corner, a lonely shoe. One small push and it would fall into the valley.
Slowly Irem is becoming a part of that work of art. I do not feel like disturbing. But my breath is becoming heavy.
The nurse begins tapping her feet.
‘Irem ji,’ I say, switching to Kashmiri, ‘I have cooked Rogan Josh for dinner. Halal for you. Non-halal for us.’
No response.
So I start telling her about the recipe I had followed, and then I recall at precisely that moment she turned and muttered something. I ask her to repeat it, and she says: One never uses tomatoes in Rogan Josh.
The nurse asks me to translate.
No tomatoes in Rogan Josh.
This makes her laugh. She laughs at me, the nurse. The enemy doesn’t laugh.
‘How is that possible?’ I say. ‘A dish without tomatoes is like a film without sound.’
‘No tomatoes,’ says Irem.
‘Irem ji, please write down your recipe of Rogan Josh for me.’
But as soon as I open my mouth, I realize my mistake.
‘I am sorry. You cannot write.’
The nurse stares at us.
‘But, why is the Rogan Josh so red? If there are no tomatoes then why is it red?’
Irem remains silent.
‘Tell me,’ I insist. ‘Please.’
‘The color comes from the mirchi.’
‘But why is the dish so intensely red?’
‘Redness comes from the Kashmiri chilies,’ she says. ‘And mawal flowers.’
‘I accept. But, in the absence of tomatoes where does the khatta taste come from?’
‘Khatta is due to curds only.’
‘I am hungry,’ the nurse roars in English, unable to comprehend Kashmiri.
Irem would not sit on the sofa or in the chair. She sat on the carpet. So I spread a white calico sheet on the carpet and transferred the dishes there, and that is how it all began. She closed her eyes and lifted her palms and said a small prayer to Allah and started eating slowly, then picked up speed. Suddenly she remembered she was not alone in the room and slowed down again. She used her left hand to eat, and once or twice licked her fingers.
During dinner she opened up to us and shared her story. She was no longer hesitant.
She had jumped into the river to end her life. To end one’s life is against religion, she said. It is a sin. But the life she was leading was worse than death. Her husband and his mother criticized her constantly for not being able to bear a child.
It was a sunny October morning, she told us, and there was taste of bitter almonds in my mouth and suddenly I knew what I was going to do. I walked to the high rock by the river, and jumped in. Before I jumped I saw a vision of angels and prayed to Khuda to please kill me. Now, I am being punished by him for wanting to commit khud-qushi.
I did not drown. Instead I floated down the river to the Indian side, where I was fished out by a border guard. I told the guard that I was from border-cross and that I was not a rebel. Where is your passport and visa? he asked me. Why have you entered the country illegally? he asked me. It was then he handed me over to the military, and the military sent me to this hospital, she said.
Irem’s pheran had a strange embroidery on it. She had jumped into the river wearing that very pheran, and it had clung to her body during her journey from the enemy’s land to our land. That night, after listening to her story, I biked to the General’s residence not only with the tiffin-carriers and cutlery, but also with Irem’s pheran. She had stained the pheran during dinner, and the nurse had asked me to drop the garment at the washerman’s hut on the way.
Cycling to the General’s residence I kept returning to everything that had transpired during the dinner. It was like replaying a black and white film again and again. Every attempt was unsatisfactory. So I would start again. Fail again. Start again. I took the pheran to my room. When my assistant was not around I smelled the garment. It smelled of the sweat of a beautiful woman. The embroidered pattern on the hem was almost like a leaf. I did not know the name of the pattern, but a few months later a different woman would reveal to me the name of it. It is called paisley, she would tell me. Back in those days (and nights) the more attention I paid to paisley, the more I felt that the pattern ought to be a symbol of something.
That was the first night Kashmir felt like home to me. Despite that I lay in bed with my shoes and uniform. The assistant reminded me once or twice to change my clothing, but I asked him to bugger off, and I kept recalling the five minutes I spent absolutely alone with Irem. The nurse had stepped out to attend a patient in the ward, and I had spent five full minutes alone with Irem.
‘I am sorry,’ I said. ‘This morning I raised my voice.’
‘No problem,’ she said.
‘Is there something you would like me to do?’
‘No.’
‘I would like to help you.’
‘No.’
‘Please tell me.’
‘If possible, bring me the Qur’an.’
‘But?’
‘But what?’
‘You cannot read.’
‘I can hold the Qur’an.’
There was an awkward silence. Her eyes were red. She needed the book more than she needed my food.
‘There are many varieties of Muslims?’ I asked. ‘I have heard about the Shia, the Sunni and the Sufi. What kind of a Muslim are you?’
‘Homeless,’ she said.
Her response eased some of the tension between us.
‘You see that mountain up there, where the bright lights are?’ I pointed through the window. ‘That is where my room is.’
She nodded.
‘I have lived there, in the barracks, for a while now. Sometimes when I am down in the valley, or here in the hospital at night, the mountain up there looks like a huge aircraft. When the lights are turned on in the evening it appears as if the aircraft is ready to depart.’
She remained silent. I kept talking. Now that I think about it what a fool I made of myself. To this day I have not figured out how to stop talking when in the presence of a beautiful woman.
‘On certain nights,’ I said, ‘I hear the sound of sirens, ambulances rushing towards this hospital, and I feel as if the aircraft is about to explode.’
She moved closer to the window, carrying her plate of Rogan Josh. There was a slight limp in her walk.
‘You talk like men in Bombay films.’
The way she said this so fearlessly, so unexpectedly, impressed me a lot.
‘The mountain is visible from our side also,’ she continues. ‘From the other side of the river, we too get to see it. The children in our village point at the memorial at the very top of the mountain. Have you been there?’
‘No,’ I say.
She turns. She is so beautiful. I can’t point at a concrete detail of her face and say that is why she is beautiful. I just turn away my eyes.
‘Mihirukula’s memorial,’ she says.
I force my gaze and desperately try to find a flaw in that beauty. I fail. Then, I succeed. There are big gaps between her teeth. Her teeth are not beautiful.
‘Mihirukula?’
‘The White Hun’s memorial,’ she says.
‘The Hun?’
She speaks very slowly, revealing her teeth. She tells me something women don’t usually tell men they have just met. There was a garden in our village. Now it is a ruin. The White Hun came with a huge army of elephants. Elephants? I clarify. Yes, she says. Elephants. One of them fell from the cliff, 10,000 feet below. The Hun loved it. He was amused by the shriek of the falling animal. With one little finger he commanded his men to kick off four hundred elephants purely for his amusement. Trumpet-like sounds. For days afterwards my ancestors heard the echoes of dying creatures.
Then all was silence.
In my village the ambulance sirens remind us of elephants, she says.
Why did you tell me this?
She tries to sit down. The plate falls from her trembling hand, staining her iridescent pheran. Then the spoon lands in slow motion on the carpet. Why did you tell me? You Kashmiris from top-man to bottom-man are all anti-India. Her eyes turn red like a brick. Saheb, I am not like that, she stammers. Some militants in our village are planning to kill. But I don’t want Kashmir back if most of us end up dead.
‘Who are the men going to kill?’
‘The biggest officer of your military.’
‘The General?’
‘I think so.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I heard it in the village. Please save him. His car must never pass the Zero Bridge.’
‘Not a word more.’
The nurse was angry with Irem when she returned. There was Rogan Josh on the carpet, and its long trail was visible on Irem’s pheran. She asked me to step out for a minute, and when I re-entered the room Irem had changed into a striped kurta-pyjama. She looked uncomfortable in the oversize pyjama-kurta. The drawstring dangled. I turned my gaze downwards and focused only on the carpet, her feet, and her words.
Next morning I woke up with the enemy’s pheran under my pillow. It had a mysterious odor. I sent my assistant to the bazaar and washed the pheran along with my clothes, and dried it on the line in my room, hidden between my clothes. While ironing I was very careful not to break the buttons at the back. Two were missing. While ironing I thought, isn’t it funny that in the Hindi language the word for iron and the word for woman is one and the same. I sprinkled water on the garment and ironed till all the wrinkles disappeared.
In the evening I looked at the mountain again. The plane trees were turning color. The mountain carried no memory of the falling elephants. If there was something falling it was a red leaf, falling very slowly, without a shriek. I cycled down the mountain with the neatly folded pheran in my kit. When I see her, I thought, I must tell her to stand by the window again, and look at the slopes in the light of the evening. What makes some leaves linger on trees in autumn? I wanted to ask many questions. I wanted to know what was she like before she got married? What was she like as a girl?
How did other strangers respond to her? What were the foods she disliked? Did she have enough to eat? Who taught her to cook? I wanted to ask her all these questions and know all the answers.
When I got to the hospital I parked my bike and walked into the ward. But she was gone. I did not know what to do. So. I cycled to the Hazratbal Mosque via the Zero Bridge. There were people on the bridge. Two cops were guarding the structure, the green trusses. The river was muddy and overflowing. The mosque was in the low-lying area just six hundred yards from the bridge. Flooding was a possibility. An old woman was feeding pigeons inside the compound of the mosque and I removed my shoes and walked barefoot on marble towards her. She was old, but still beautiful. Women in Kashmir were always beautiful. I had no idea how to buy a Qur’an and as I proceeded towards her I noticed the men looking at me suspiciously as if perhaps in my turban I had come to steal the relic. Their eyes were fierce. Their bodies were wet and dripping; it seemed as if they had just stepped out of the hamaam. The old woman pointed her finger towards the store in the street. You do not buy Qur’ans inside the mosque, she said. Then she resumed feeding the pigeons. Patiently she tore the bread into tiny morsels. There were thousands of them, pigeons, shitting in the same compound where they were being fed.
Allah u Akbar
Allah u Akbar
Allah u Akbar
Allah u Akbar
Ash-hadu Alla Ilaha-ill-allah
Ash-hadu Alla Ilaha-ill-allah
Ash-hadu Anna Mohammadan Rasul-allah
Ash-hadu Anna Mohammadan Rasul-allah
Hayya-Alas-Salat
Hayya-Alas-Salat
Hayya-Alal-Falah
Hayya-Alal-Falah
Allah u Akbar
Allah u Akbar
La-ilaha ill-allah
The boy at the store was not paying attention to azan. He was solving math problems. His Philips radio was playing qawalis, Shahbaz Qalandar, and to this day I am able to recall the problem he was struggling with. Years before I, too, had to deal with the same complicated equation in school.
X3 + Y3 = L3 + M3 = 1729
I coughed. He looked up. His nose was running.
‘Do you sell the Qur’an?’
‘How many?’ he asked as if I was going to buy them by the dozen.
‘Kid,’ I said, ‘first explain to me the proper way to give respect to the Qur’an.’
‘Are you buying?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘One.’
‘Then I will teach you,’ he said.
The boy wrapped the book in a velvet cloth.
‘Wash your hands before praying,’ he said.
‘Same thing,’ I said. ‘We do the same in Sikhism.’
He didn’t seem interested in learning about my religion and returned to math. I almost told him the correct answer, but changed my mind. 1729. The smallest number that can be expressed as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.
X = 1
Y = 12
L = 9
M = 10
The man who first solved this problem was the South Indian mathematician Ramanujan. He was a genius and he solved this problem on his deathbed at the age of twenty-nine. In school the teacher used to tell us many stories about math. She also told us that zero – the most important ingredient of math – was invented in our own country, only later the concept migrated to Arab countries.
It was getting dark. I cycled back to the camp with the Qur’an in the front carrier. In my kit there were apples and a trout wrapped in a paper. Nearing the camp I noticed something I had seen several times before but had never thought to be important. Not far from the bridge the road rises sharply, and from an elevated spot, while pedaling breathlessly, I saw sudden points of light, I witnessed the precise moment the electric lights were being turned on in our country and in the enemy’s country. The enemy turned on their lights (on the brown mountains it had occupied) at precisely the same time, I realized, we turned on the lights on our mountains. Both sides declared night at the same time, I thought, despite the time difference. I stopped my bike and waited by the railing for a long time, and thought about the kitchens on both sides of the border, the culinary similarities and differences, and I thought about rain, which was now falling, too, on both sides, making the lines fuzzier and fuzzier.
General Sahib’s residence hummed with its yellow lights. It was the second brightest place on our side of the border, I noticed. The brightest was the Governor’s mansion on the hill, shimmering with mystery.
That night as I served tea in Sahib’s room, I felt I was at two places at once. I was on the Zero Bridge looking at the bright lights of Sahib’s residence and I was inside as well, inside the residence holding a tray. The General was back from his travels. Perhaps he, too, felt he was in two places at once. I knocked at the door.
‘Come in.’
Sahib separated himself from the book he was reading.
‘Kip!’
‘Sir.’
He requested me to switch on the fluorescent light.
‘I must tell you,’ he said, ‘the turmeric you add in the tea is helping my stomach ache.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘And Kip -’
‘Sir.’
‘More on the enemy woman?’
‘She is clean, sir.’
Sahib took slow sips of tea as I told him Irem’s drowning story.
‘Something else?’
I wanted to, but I could not reveal the bombing story because I was afraid for Irem.
‘No, sir.’
‘Why are you trembling?’
‘Sorry, sir. Been cycling in the rain, sir.’
‘Any knowledge of terrorist activity?’
‘No, sir,’ I lied. ‘But, we must investigate more.’
‘Why?’
‘Sahib, perhaps if we slow down the investigation.’
‘Slow?’
‘So far I have investigated very fast, sir. But I plan to proceed slowly from now on. The way it is with the golf balls, sir.’
‘Kip. Sunno. Your assignment is over.’
‘Over, sir?’
‘No need to interrogate the enemy any further.’
‘But, sir, I have just started.’
‘Kip, we have excavated enough information. Now the interrogation must stop.’
I kept my eyes fixed on the spine of the book now shut on the table top.
‘Sir.’
‘The colonel will soon issue a commendation certificate to you.’
‘But, sir -’
‘You may go now.’
‘Sir.’
Every morning I would check with Sahib’s car driver about the routes he was planning to follow. The Zero Bridge, because of the rain, was never on the route and this was reassuring. But I was really worried, and for that reason I cycled in civilian clothes to the city post office and mailed an unsigned note to the army HQ warning about a possible attack on General Kumar. The letter had immediate effect. The army beefed up security around the bridge, interrogated the locals and raided many Kashmiri houses in the area. A journalist wrote confidently in the national paper, Peace has returned to the valley. Days later when the General’s black military car (with a flag and four stars) passed the Zero Bridge nothing happened. Three seconds later the bridge exploded.
The river carried away the ripped parts, the blown-up arches, and for days the waters looked high and muddy and black, and not just because of the rain.
The driver of the car told me later: Major, the moment the bridge exploded I felt as if my heart had leaped out of my chest. But I also felt the invisible hand of God protecting us. I cannot forget the roar, the rain of wood and metal and fire. The car started flying. Then booom, it fell. I kept driving. The General shouted (from the back seat): Tej. Tej. Fast. Faster. My foot was on the gas, hammering it. Look at this hole in the body of the car, Major. God gave us only a little hole in the rear, and a few damaged parts inside. God made me drive fast. Are you with me, Major?
Yes, yes, I said.
God is great, Major.
She is clean, I said to myself. Irem is clean.
In the kitchen the trout stared at me for many days. Fish can be cut any which way. So it is better than meat, I thought. No quarrel about halal or non-halal. Trout I had thought was the best way to have conversation with the enemy. But Sahib asked me to stop all conversation.
Outside, it kept raining against the window, corroding the cutlery inside. The rain mocked me, for many days rain lashed. The eyes of that fish mocked me. But. The inclement weather had a reverse effect on my cooking. The mushiness in the air prevented the drying. I sprinkled fresh coriander and roasted caraway seeds on the tender, moist fish. The orderly, who was my friend, delivered the tiffin-carrier in the hospital. He delivered the holy book as well. She did not send any message for me. But she had kissed the Qur’an, the orderly told me.
‘She refused to eat the fish, Major.’
‘Did she say something?’
‘The nurse was standing close to the bed and the enemy woman said (using signs and gestures) that she had no intention to eat for the next forty days.’
‘Why don’t you say it is Ramadan?’ I raised my voice.
‘Did I do something wrong, Major?’ he apologized.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Major,’ he said.
‘Please leave me alone.’
‘She said one thing else, Major.’
‘What?’
‘When she is eating normally she feels hungry around noon. But now that she is eating abnormally, I mean now that she is fasting, at noon she feels thirsty only.’
‘What else?’
‘That’s all, Major,’ he said. ‘Now I will go away.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Don’t show me your face again.’
I see myself unable to sleep, waking up with a dry throat. In my dream I am hungry, I have not eaten for days and I am in a classroom in Pakistan and the teacher (who is eating a kebab) is angry with me. On the blackboard words are written in Urdu in thick chalk, I notice as the teacher walks towards my bench, holding a stick in his right hand. The sound of his boots approaching me is growing louder. Now we are standing face to face, his kebab breath gets trapped in my nostrils. The teacher is wearing a military uniform, medals on his breast. General President Musharraf? I ask. Open your palm, he says. What’s my crime? You are sitting next to a female student, he says. I turn my neck: the girl. I survey quickly her face. She is absolutely silent, her lips sealed tight. She is not eating. I feel sick to my stomach. Open your palm, he says. The General hits my palm with the stick. The girl shuts her eyes, her body shakes. The stick keeps hitting me over and over. Suddenly the girl starts laughing. Don’t laugh, I say. Don’t laugh at me, I request. Not here.
All through rain (and Ramadan) there were dinners. The kitchen grew very busy because of a stream of visitors who came to congratulate Sahib for having survived the explosion. The chief of security was suspended and four other officers responsible for the protection of the bridge were imprisoned. Many more local houses were raided to hunt the terrorists.
Gen Sahib had little time for himself. He was also preoccupied with a high-level court martial. The court martial would bring its own stream of officers to the residence. I found myself a bit stressed, sleeping barely four or five hours. The ADC instructed me to cook Punjabi karhi-chawal, mitha shalgum, and saag maki-di-roti for Brigadier Pash, the presiding officer of the court martial. Pash’s nickname was BapuGandhi; the Brigadier was renowned for his honesty and vegetarianism.
‘Here comes the famous Brigadier Pash.’ Sahib shook his hand in the drawing room.
From behind the curtain I overheard the conversation between the two men.
‘Is there an evidence?’
‘Not on paper -’
The glasses tinkled and plates clattered and spoons rattled, but I can’t forget the syllables of Gen Sahib’s crisp voice.
‘The man is innocent,’ he told the presiding officer. ‘Make sure his career is not stained.’
‘But, sir,’ said the Brigadier. ‘I am assuming the army wants to know. Even if we are not interested – the whole thing has been recorded on a spy camera. Three press reporters posing as arms dealers from the UK and the USA visited Colonel Chowdhry’s residence and offered him bottles of whiskey. If you are going to bribe me chutiya, the colonel told them, at least bribe me with 5 crore rupees and Blue Label. Black Label won’t do. Then there is the coffin scam -’
‘This is a set-up, Brigadier Pash,’ said General Sahib. ‘Don’t you see? Images these days can be manipulated by technology. There is no written evidence, no real evidence against him. The colonel would never sell our boys for the price of Blue Label.’
The civilian papers were filled with news of Col Chowdhry of 5 Mountain Division. He had been involved in several scams, the latest one being the coffin scam. The colonel had bought hundreds of aluminum coffins from an American company at 200 dollars apiece. He had charged the army 1800 dollars apiece. More dead Indian soldiers at the front meant more profits for the colonel and his politico friends in Delhi and Washington. One or two papers held General Sahib responsible for the coffin scam. But Sahib was innocent really. The colonel had taken advantage of Sahib’s trust. Despite that, Sir was trying to save the man.
‘Do keep him under a watch. But don’t start anything new. He is clean. Let him go.’
‘But, sir, are you asking me to lie?’
‘We must protect the morale of our army.’
‘If I lie, sir, I’ll feel bad. And if I tell the truth, I’ll feel bad. What should I do, sir?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing, sir?’
‘Eat the food, Brigadier. Do you like the saag?’
‘Excellent, sir.’
It rained for thirty-nine days. Then it stopped and one night it started raining again. From the kitchen window I heard the sounds and inhaled the smell of falling leaves. During day the trees looked wet and bare and dead, but at night the pointed branches moved as if alive. Rain fell on the yellow lights of Alpha Mess and the Quarter Guard where the court martial was to take place. The trials didn’t mean much to me then, I am embarrassed to admit, not as much as sleep, and sleep was a rare commodity in the army.
Something happened in the hospital.
Irem found a strand of hair in the dinner I sent her a week before the Eid. The guards told me: The enemy woman wept uncontrollably, Major. The nurse had to give her a needle. The enemy took that strand of hair out of the bowl of dal, Major. She raised her hand high and held it in the light and looked at it like a detective and then she started weeping, Major.
I didn’t know what to do with Irem. While cooking, I listened to Chef Kishen’s German music. It went fast, then slow. Fast, and slow again. The notes swelled and shrank, and made me move deeper and deeper inside something beautiful. Then I was rising like a fish in a dead lake, the ripples spreading. During break I walked down to the hospital with the tape recorder in my kit. Troops were marching in the rain. They were marching on the muddy road, too, lined with military vehicles. Drops were dancing on the license plates. I did not care about my fears. It seemed natural to go to her. I stepped into the ward. She had fewer bandages and looked stronger sitting up in the metal bed, her head covered by the same scarf, and for the first time I realized that her features resembled the Bombay actress Waheeda. The same chiseled face, the same nose, the same cheeks. In Irem’s left hand there was a golf ball. She was concentrating on the ball. Outside the window rain was falling on bare trees. I figured the ball must have entered the room through the window. She was examining the ball’s dimples. Without moving her eyes she greeted me.
‘Salaam.’
‘Salaam,’ I said.
She kept studying the ball.
‘With balls like these,’ I explained, ‘the sahibs play golf on the lawns.’
Her fingers tried to squeeze the ball gently the way people squeeze fruits before buying.
‘The dimples are there for a reason,’ I said.
‘I know,’ she said.
‘You know?’
‘They make the ball go faster.’
‘Who are you?’ I asked.
She smiled but stopped short of responding to me. Outside the trees looked dark and wet and naked.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘You are a smart woman. But there are things you do not know. And that is why you waste your tears. I have come to reveal something about myself to you. If you do not know it already, then you must get to know it,’ I said. ‘In one single breath I would like to tell you. Here. Look at my face.’
She fixed her gaze on my boots, not my face.
‘Look at my face,’ I said.
It seemed natural to do what I did next. I removed my turban. I revealed the knot of hair on my head. She raised her eyes and surveyed me curiously.
‘I have long hair.’
I don’t recall if she dropped the ball or it fell on its own from her hand. The ball bounced several times on the floor before rolling and then coming to a stop, becoming absolutely still.
My hair tumbled to my knees.
‘That is why you found the strand in the dal,’ I explained. ‘You wept for one big nothing.’
‘So they inform you of everything about me.’
‘Because I would like to know you,’ I said.
‘Liar.’
‘No.’
‘What do you want to know about me?’
‘Everything.’
She eyed my long hair with enormous curiosity. It was the first time she looked right through me.
‘There are women who envy me,’ I said, ‘because I have hair longer than theirs.’
She continued gazing at me with the same curiosity. She looked right through me, and slowly her hands unknotted the scarf on her head. Slowly she let it go.
‘Hair,’ she said.
My gaze followed the movement of the scarf as it fell on the floor.
Then I heard her forced, convulsive laughter. I raised my eyes and observed: they had shaved off her hair. She broke out laughing before she wept. Like a child. Why did they shave off her hair? I asked myself. Why did we shave her head?
My eyes, too, welled up. Me, wearing very long hair, and this woman mourning the loss of her hair. Her scarf on the floor, and my turban on the table. I felt as if the two things, the scarf and the turban, were talking to each other.
Before I walked back to the kitchen I retrieved the tape recorder from my kit and left it by her bed.
‘I am leaving this music machine for you,’ I said. ‘The top is broken, so be careful. Look at my fingers. Here. This is the button you push to play. Push the last button to eject. Like this.’
Her gaze remained fixed on the broken top.
I pressed the button.
She listened to the music. A bit startled at first, the expression on her face changed many times until she smiled. I noticed again the small insects climbing up the whitewashed wall by her bed. The insects were vibrating too. I wanted to ask her many questions, and I had imagined she would request in that Muslim Kashmiri inflection of hers ‘Play it again! Play it again!’, but listening to those sounds she fell asleep.
mein bowznaav bayyi akki latté
akki latté bayyi
bowznaav
mein
winekya…
Sleeping, her hand lay extended. It appeared as if her hand was drawn, there was the sense of a painting. Her hand was woven into the foreign music. When the tape stopped her breathing became audible. There was a certain contradiction between the happiness on her sleeping face and the happiness of her dreams and her unhappy waking hours. What was she dreaming of? Was it wind or water or snow?
I returned to the kitchen with her untouched plate. She didn’t eat that day. If by shaving her hair off we meant to humiliate her, we had succeeded.
In November General Sahib flew on a helicopter with the Defense Minister to inspect the two battalions on Siachen Glacier. He took me along. Kip, he said, Minister Sahib and I will inspect the troops and you inspect the kitchens on the glacier.
Yessir.
In the helicopter it was cramped. The pilot made me sit on the seat right behind Sahib. The Minister and the General talked about matters connected to the security of our country, using code words like Peak 18 or NJ9842. From one white mountain to the next we flew like an eagle and I felt an intense pressure in my balls. My vertigo was growing more and more intense. Sahib, I almost cried out to him. Sahib, I can’t take it. He didn’t hear. I focused my gaze on his polished shoes and socks, and perhaps it was his black socks which comforted me. I shut my eyes and started thinking about the kitchen trainee. Two days ago the man had come to the kitchen and on his first afternoon he had used Sahib’s charcoal black sock to strain tea. I had scolded him on the spot. Major, I did nothing wrong, he had defended himself. Major, this is how we strain tea in our village. Bewakuf!
‘Why are you laughing, Kirpal?’ demanded the General in the helicopter. In my nose was trapped the smell of dirty laundry tea.
‘Sahib, it is just that I cannot be myself in the presence of such high mountains, such everlasting snow.’
The helicopter moved up in spirals and my lungs felt the lack of air. Suddenly we fell a few hundred feet. The machine dropped altitude without warning.
‘Minister, sir, the chap lost his father during the recon operation of NJ9842,’ said the General.
‘My sympathies with you, my boy,’ said the Minister.
The helicopter landed on the glacier helipad. Siachen is the second coldest place on earth. Two senior officers whisked the General and the Minister to a special tent.
Kishen appeared out of the thick fog and cold to receive me. He had one star less and I had one star more on my epaulettes, but the whole operation was a farce. He was my senior and I his junior, but our ranks held a different meaning. Our ranks said that I was his senior and he my junior. Kishen clicked his heels and saluted me and said ‘Welcome’ and to that welcome added the word ‘sir’. I extended my hand nervously. He hesitated to shake it at first, but changed his mind and crushed my hand like cloves of garlic.
He took me inside the white arctic tent. We sat down. Wind was howling outside, flapping the canvas. The kerosene bukhari was burning. His face was visible in the flames of the bukhari. There were dark rings beneath his eyes. He suddenly appeared older than his age.
‘So you have come,’ he said.
‘Sir.’
‘Don’t call me, sir, you little…’
‘Can we begin the inspection?’
‘You little Sikh, you think you have come here to inspect the rat’s alley? Do we have a cockroach problem in the kitchen? Do we know how to make Japani food? What are you going to do? How are you going to start?’
‘General Sahib asked me to…’
‘You toady of the General.’
‘Can we begin?’
‘What begin?’
‘The General would like to know the problems in the kitchen.’
‘What problems? We got no problems.’
His mind was elsewhere. Just then a brown dog entered the tent. It shook the snow off and came to sniff me. For no reason it jumped and licked my parka. I patted its head and suggested a walk, and to my surprise Chef stood up. We muffled ourselves and stepped out, and I still recall the sound our rubber boots made on brittle ice, and the dog’s panting. Wind struck our cheeks and he kept moving his arms up and down in the air, under the sky, and we were so high up we had essentially become the sky, and he moved his gloved hands up and down in air, and said this is how in Chef Muller’s country they conducted music. I am conducting music, he said.
This music makes me think of the epic Mahabharata, he said. When they grew old the Pandavas headed towards the mountains, climbing higher and higher towards the Gates of Heaven. No one followed them, only a stray dog. The brothers fell one by one on the steep trail. Only Yudhister, the eldest, and the dog made it to the Gates. You can enter, said the gatekeeper. But the animal is not allowed in Heaven. The dog followed me all the way, protested Yudhister, my brothers gave up, but this creature was my constant companion. I will not enter alone.
‘Did he?’ I asked.
Chef was silent. He walked me through loose snow to a deep crevasse, and pointed at the seracs (on the other side), and said that the crevasse was really the mouth of the glacier, and the seracs were its white teeth. This is how the glacier eats, he said.
The dog started running around the crevasse.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said.
‘How deep is it, Chef?’
He took a pebble out of his parka and dropped it.
We heard a sound twenty seconds after the pebble was lost in the crevasse.
‘What do you think about the glacier?’
‘From the helicopter it looked like a giant man’s tongue outside his mouth, licking a woman’s navel. Siachen was a big tattoo on a pregnant belly.’
He stared at me.
‘You read my journal,’ he said.
I didn’t respond.
‘You little Sikh, you ma-dar-chod, you read my journal?’
It was so cold words froze in my mouth. Suddenly I saw the glacier as a huge living organism about to claim me, about to claim us all. This organism paralyzed my thoughts. Father, I cried. Father, I screamed.
‘Hit me,’ I said. ‘Please hit me.’
He put his arm around my shoulder. I felt it barely because of all the layers between us.
‘Hit me.’
‘I have already hit you,’ Chef laughed.
It was a wild laugh. White fumes came out of his mouth. His lips were cracked.
‘Hit me,’ I said.
‘I already hit you. Not enough? It hurts real hard where I hit you. Don’t you know? Don’t you? I hit you with my writing.’
‘I am confused,’ I said.
‘You read my notebook because you wanted to read it. But I would have given it to you anyways. I, too, wanted you to read it.’
‘You are joking, Chef?’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘But, why? Why did you want me to read it?’
‘Because…’
Before he could respond I felt my anger rising.
‘Because otherwise men are strangers to one other,’ he said. ‘Even if we carry the same wounds, we remain strangers. We can’t express ourselves properly. Not even our anger. I was able to write certain things down because I was writing them for you. I was angry at you. Angry at myself. Angry at so many people. But.’
‘But, what?’
‘I am no longer. I request only one thing. Please don’t be angry at me. You are not just one man. I have always seen you as two. You are my beloved, and you are also my witness.’
‘Witness?’
‘Now I can leave.’
‘Where?’
‘When I am gone, you must not mourn me.’
It was then he shared with me the plan. Standing by the crevasse he shared the details in strict confidence. I begged him not to carry it out. I am not going to be a party to this, I said. Listen to me, he said. If your father were alive, he would have done exactly what I am going to do. Exact same action. Listen to me, you Sikh. I was your teacher. When a teacher opens his mouth the student listens. When a teacher asks for dakshina the student must provide the fees. Do you know the Mahabharata? he asked. It is very long, I said. What do you mean long? You kids don’t read it these days, but let me tell you in the Mahabharata most people believe that the main story is brothers fighting brothers over the kingdom. Nothing can be further from the truth. The real story is that of the black boy. The low-caste boy. The boy was born a talented archer and he approached the Brahmin teacher to advance his skill. The Brahmin used to teach archery to the king’s sons. He said no to the black boy. So, the boy returned to the jungle, he made a clay figure of the Brahmin, and in the presence of the clay figure and a solitary tree the boy taught himself archery, he became more skilled than the king’s sons, as a result they grew jealous and their teacher grew worried, so the Brahmin approached the black boy and demanded his fee. The boy was pleased, the teacher had accepted him finally as his student, he was willing to give anything the guru asked for. One is supposed to offer one’s life if the teacher asks for it. The Brahmin did not ask the boy his life, all he wanted was the boy’s right thumb. That very instant the student took a sharp knife and cut off his right thumb (which was as black as his face) and offered it to his teacher. He became a cripple, he was never able to practice archery again. Understand? I am not asking you, Kirpal, to offer me your thumb or the fingers of your hand, all I need you to do is this one thing. Be my witness.
I could not return Chef Kishen’s gaze, which penetrated through me. Life is so precious, I said. I know, he said. Will any harm come to General Sahib? I asked him again. No, he assured me, no harm, not a single hair that belongs to him will be harmed.
By the end of the day Chef was gone.
Khatam.
Finished.
Everything is ready. The inspection of two battalions on the glacier is done. The snow-scooter ride is over. There was a fog on Siachen the previous night, I heard. Now the fog has gone, the peaks are visible, K2 is visible, the sun is bright, so bright it brings black dots in front of eyes. The sky is cobalt blue.
The General and the Defense Minister have started eating lunch. The two men are in the Officers’ tent. The colonel sends a boy to the kitchen. The Defense Minister would like to have a word with the cook. I look at Chef Kishen. He has done the cooking with his own hands. I look at his four assistants, then at Chef again. He surveys me with piercing eyes. I notice the determination in them, and that is why I decide to go ahead with the plan.
I go bundled to the Officers’ tent. There is sushi in front of them. I overhear the General explaining to the Minister the art of growing bonsai trees. I overhear the Minister’s question on ‘tent windows’. Gen Sahib’s response: ‘The Swiss have developed new technology, sir. As I mentioned before, from here we are able to see the men outside, but they can’t see us… Yes, yes, Kip, come in.’ I salute. ‘Shahbash, Kip! Good food!’ I tell Sahib that Chef Kishen did all the cooking. If anyone deserves praise – it is him. Not me. Briefly I survey the sushi on the table, and my mouth waters. Cuttlefish. Hamaguri. Sashimi-Salmon Rose. The General asks me to bring along Kishen.
I return to fetch him.
They are ready.
Chef Kishen’s four assistants salute him. They call him Commander. The Commander is in full military dress. His shoes are impeccably polished.
It is minus 49 outside. Useless tears in my eyes.
On the way Commander Kishen stops by the Soldiers’ tent, and stands before the red letter-box. From his pocket he pulls out two letters, one addressed to his children, and the other to his wife. He laughs a bit. Like a good man who is forced by circumstances to commit evil in a Bombay film.
They march to the Officers’ tent. I go with them.
Savdhan.
Vishram.
They march over the crunching snow, faces hidden, aprons whipping.
Left. Right. Left. Right.
Dayan. Bayan. Dayan. Bayan.
White plumes come out of our mouths.
We stop outside the Swiss tent.
I enter. The Commander and his assistants wait outside. Then: ‘Sir, Chef Kishen here,’ he says. ‘Permission to enter?’
‘Permission granted,’ says the General.
‘Sir, my junior staff members are with me. Permission to enter?’
‘Permission granted,’ says the General.
‘Kya naam hai terah?’ asks the Defense Minister.
‘Chef Kishen, sir.’
‘Oh the embassy-wallahs gave him this name. Kishen was trained there. The chap knows cooking very well, sir.’ The General turned to the Defense Minister.
‘Good food,’ says the Minister. ‘Shabash.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Were you trained at the Japanese Embassy?’
‘Years ago, sir.’
‘I must say this is one of the finest sushis I have ever had. The fish melted in my mouth right away.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Kishen, what food do you think is best for this glacier area?’
‘Sashimi, for officers, sir.’
‘Certainly.’
‘To make sashimi, sir, the cut is important. It is the cut, sir, that is most important. Knives are very important.’
‘You chaps know it all.’
‘Permission to display the knives, sir?’
‘Permission granted.’
The table is bright. Strong light filters through the tent window. The Commander’s assistants place the knives one by one on the square of light. The two sahibs examine the shiny knives.
When the knives are returned, the Commander gives a quick nod to his assistants. They rush towards the General and the Minister and tie them with ropes to the post and seal their lips with a tape. They do exactly the same thing to me. Everything is going according to the plan. I am to behave as if I am not with them.
The colonel (standing guard) outside senses something fishy inside the tent. He tries to enter, but is rebuffed. He tries again. ‘You asshole. If something happens to the General…’ One of the Commander’s four assistants says loudly that no harm would come to the General and the Minister and Chef Kirpal. We have three demands, he tells the colonel. Demand one: Gather the two battalions of troops outside the General’s tent. Demand two: Commander Kishen will address the troops, and the troops must listen to him in complete silence. Demand three: the media and press must be allowed to witness the address.
The colonel is a rational man. He agrees to the demands.
He sounds the emergency bugles. He assembles the entire two battalions below the General’s tent in twelve minutes. From inside the tent we can hear the sound of boots hitting snow and ice. I see a five-three-five troop formation.
Half an hour passes by. Still no sign of media.
‘Colonel, you asshole… don’t play games with us.’
‘Media is on its way,’ he says fast. ‘I have radioed them thrice.’
The Commander steps out. One assistant follows behind him. Inside we hear the metallic click of a rifle’s safety being released. But there is no fire. Three assistants keep an eye on three hostages inside the tent.
Soon a helicopter is hovering in the air. It lands. The flaps of the tent flutter. We hear the rotors come to a stop. TV and paper reporters and photographers have arrived. Sitting so close to me the General and the Minister look like two little rats. I try to free myself. My ropes are not as tight as theirs. Freeing myself is not part of the plan. I feel for once like changing the foolish plan.
Outside, Commander Kishen begins his address. The wind is howling like mad. He begins softly but soon raises his voice. The wind. He begins by thanking all the men who had died defending our country.
Thank you, soldiers of 8th Battalion, 7 Mountain Regiment; and 23rd Battalion, 15 Corps, says the Commander. The army is the soul of our country, he says. But that old tradition of camaraderie and humanity has died out in our regiments. We have officers who have opened big hotels and malls in Delhi and Gurgaon. We have officers who make money out of selling rations, make money out of recruitment. We have men who are involved in coffin scams. More dead Indians at the front means more profits for officers and their friends in Delhi. The question I ask today is: Are we dying for nothing? Did so many of our fellows die for nothing? One big nothing? We feed the army, we work hard, and those at the very top have failed us. I would like you to protest this. I would like you to think hard. Ask what are we doing on this glacier, on these Icefields? Ask why do we want to melt away this glacier? The kerosene and other poisons we discard on the glacier end up flowing in our holy rivers. For a long time we Indians have believed that the gods live up in the mountains. Why are we now wrecking the home of our gods? Why do we need Kashmir? Ask. Does Kashmir need us? We shit on the glacier, and the shit freezes and we have to break it with the rifles. And I say the same thing to the bastards on the other side. What are they dying for, the Pakistanis? This ice is no place for human beings. It has wasted the lives of our finest soldiers. We shit on…
He is trying very hard to explain himself, something that he has been processing for a while. But the soldiers of the two assembled battalions are not very responsive. Soon more cheetah helicopters start hovering over the glacier. The soldiers boo and whistle and create a racket, and the Cheetah helicopters create a racket, blowing snow in their eyes and creating deafening noise. Minus 55.
The soldiers are unable to hear him properly. Two more helicopters appear. They shake the whole bloody glacier.
I am trying to free myself. The rope is coming loose.
The Commander’s address has not gone down well. He and his assistant enter the tent. In the corner there is a jerrycan of kerosene. I try to shout. Words don’t come out. The Commander douses himself with kerosene. The other assistants do the same. Don’t do it, I try to beg them, convulsing in my chair. The Commander strikes a match and sets himself and the assistants on fire. Bloody bastards, I realize: they have changed the plan; they were going to untie our ropes and hand themselves in. Fire was not part of the plan. I struggle. I scream. My hands break free. The flames are spreading. I leap towards the captives and untie their ropes. The General runs with the Defense Minister out of the tent. What have you done, Chef? I scream. The storm troopers start shooting. The General shouts: Do not shoot! The troopers enter the tent, followed by the colonel, who tries to drag me out. I resist. The plates fall down. He overpowers me. The last thing I hear is loud barking of a dog.
There is a helicopter waiting. Rotors running. The colonel rushes the General and the Minister and me to the Cheetah helicopter.
From the air we see flames and smoke and troops scattering. The wind is so severe it separates the tent into two. From the air we see two little oranges, one on the Indian side and the other rolling towards the Pakistani side of the glacier.
The smell of burning skin never really leaves you, I say to myself on this train.
Is it possible to cook well when one is completely sad? Or when one is completely happy? I ask myself. In our country where half of the children are malnourished, and cannot even read and write, is it all right for some people to eat well? I close my eyes trying to answer, but all I see are the shadows. The shadow of Chef Kishen in the kitchen, and the shadow of General Sahib on the carpets, and the soldiers on the glacier. My eyes ache when I think about the glacier. The sun is out. The sky is cobalt blue. Blue is too bright for me.
My head is aching. My brain is. Am I already dead?
India keeps passing by.
Outside, the land is impoverished, not planted. No river, only a polluted stream. The land is parched and yellow and flat with an occasional rise, then flat again. Flatness is terrifying. An occasional animal flashes by. A defecating man or woman flash by. The town of Pathankot passes by. Troops and tanks go by. Now the foothills are visible. Distant mountains, the Pir Panjals, are visible. Now we are far away from the Delhis and Bombays. Far away from the maximum cities, far away from a million people and their miseries, and a hazaar million melancholies. Kashmir is close by. I can smell it. Akhni. Yakhni. The mehek of saffron. The beauty. The sadness of mountains. The disquiet of plane trees. The accumulation of snow. Large flakes and powder fallen on cobbled streets. In winter all streets look alike, all houses alike. Snow is whirling in the air. Smoke rises from the braziers. Embers in wicker kangris. Beauty, I am coming. I am on my way. I have not forgotten your fragile pastries. The ridges on your leavened bread. Half-eaten pomegranate in General Sahib’s fridge. Cherries so big they redden Rubiya’s hands, Irem’s fingers. Kashmir, you are real. You are my half-chilled soup, minced cilantro, my zaman pilaf. Bittersweat chukunder. Rista. Aab gosht. Gurdé Kaporé. Kidney and testicle curry. Kaléji. Sheermal. Lavasa. Tsot. Maythi paratha. Kabuli chana. Nargissi kebab. Tamatar muli. You are a sudden red mirchi. You give me pleasure and pain, both at once. You are my dream, my desire. My North, my Brain. My pounding headache. You are my weed, my cancer. My egg yolk.
You are colder than death, colder than love.
Kaschemir. Cashmere. Qashmir. Cachemire.
Cushmeer. Casmir. Kerseymere. Koshmar.
I can smell you. Paradise.
Ice.
Paradice.
I can’t see a thing.
Did I dream a glacier?
Am I dead?
What am I doing here? Minutes ago I woke up in this air-conditioned bogie. The windows are double-glazed.
‘What am I doing here?’ I ask the khaki-clad man. ‘Why on earth am I in this carriage? I was traveling second-class. What happened?’
‘Sahib, around 10 o’clock, three or four hours ago, you had stepped into the bathroom of that second-class bogie you were traveling in.’
‘Yes, yes.’
‘You passed out in the bathroom, Sahib.’
‘I collapsed?’
I look down. My hands are dirty.
‘Seizure, Sahib. Fortunately there was a doctor in the bogie. On his recommendation, we the railway staff moved you on a stretcher to this air-conditioned bogie.’
‘Shookriya,’ I say. ‘Thank you. I must pay for the extra ticket.’
Some people who work for the Railways are exceptionally kind. I am not talking about the corrupt TT’s and the crook Ministers, but workers like this attendant. He is one of those rare people who do not expect a tip. Just like soldiers in the army.
‘No, Sahib. I will not accept extra money.’
‘But you must. I insist.’
‘Don’t worry, Sahib. You served in the army.’
‘How do you know I served?’
‘The whole train knows you served. News travels fast on trains, Sahib.’
Even on trains there is no privacy, I say to myself.
‘Has the train covered time?’ I ask. ‘If it does not cover, I will miss the bus.’
How and when they moved my body and luggage to this compartment, I have no recall. He is the first man on the train I feel like talking to. The man is wearing a khaki uniform. Says he used to work as a lineman. The Railways made me a lineman. For thirty-one years I worked as a lineman. For thirty-one years I was unhappy. But when I started growing old the Railways transferred me inside the train, Sahib. We were so overworked, he said, sometimes on two hours of sleep we changed the lines, gave signals, and it was a lot of responsibility. So many lives depended on me. I could not imagine making a mistake, Sahib. Making even one would equal mass murder.
The air inside the bogie is refreshingly cold. From very hot I have moved to very cold. I do not say this to him. Instead I ask the attendant for a blanket. When he returns with my blanket I ask: Now that you work inside the train, are you not worried that some other lineman on two hours of sleep might make the same mistake you feared the most?
‘No, Sahib, it will not be my mistake. Working inside the train is much better than the duty of a lineman outside.’
‘So, you are not afraid that you might die?’
‘If I think about death all the time, I will not be able to work, Sahib. Now if you will please allow me.’
He disappears to his cabin (as I found out later) to play cards with the second attendant.
I hear the hum of air-conditioning, and many foreign accents, in this bogie. From my berth I can see two foreign women, dressed in Indian salwar-kameez. The more they try to look like Indians, the more they stand out. The women are quite fair and beautiful. One has blue eyes.
First: Canadian?
Second: No. From Texas.
First: But you carry a Canadian flag on your bag?
Second: The American flag lands me in trouble.
First: My name is Veronica. I am from Mexico City.
Second: Willow from Texas. From across the border!
They shake hands.
One of them says: The only bloody thing in India on time was the train.
Who said it? Willow or Veronica?
My head is pounding. My body is shivering. I beckon the attendant.
‘Please, it is very cold,’ I say to the man.
Not as a complaint, but by way of making a simple request.
‘The temperature is pre-set, Sahib.’
‘Can you do something about the noise at least? I have a bad headache.’
‘AC makes a lot of noise, these coaches are old, Sahib. This one is from the time of the British. The air-conditioning was installed where the iceboxes used to be in these bogies. Those days the compartments were kept cold by using blocks of ice, Sahib. When the train stopped at big junctions, coolies standing on platforms would transfer ice to the boxes, sahib.’
‘Please, my head is pounding.’
Willow and Veronica are both carrying cell phones. They seem to have developed a quick friendship. I don’t know who took more initiative. Willow or Veronica, or maybe both? They laugh a lot. At first I thought they were laughing at the poverty of our country. I was wrong. Laughing was basically a way to forget all the difficulties they were encountering dealing with the civilians in our country. They laughed a lot about toilets and latrines.
Just to hear them has made me feel young again. I am not dying, I say to myself.
Tuh-dee Tuh-dee Tuh-deeee Tuh-deeee
Tuh-dee Tuh-dee Tuh-deeee Tuh-deeee
Catering-wallah comes into our bogie. The women order hard-boiled eggs. He says he has no more eggs left. I have potato cutlets only, he says. They buy the cutlets. Too bad you don’t have eggs, I demand. And the man smiles and produces a perfect hard-boiled egg.
‘You did not sell the girls the eggs?’ I ask.
‘Sahib, I have only one egg, and they are two. I could not choose who gets the egg, so I decided not to give either one of them the egg.’
One girl makes eye contact with me. I translate from Hindi to English. I tell her the catering-wallah’s exact reasoning, and the moment I finish they break into a fit of laughter.
‘Where in India are you from?’ asks one of them.
I am at a loss for words.
‘Not an Indian,’ I say. ‘Brazilian.’
Then silence.
Aren’t they nice, my shoes. They will outlast me. They will continue to live. They will not be cremated. I do not want to be cremated. There is nothing sacred about fire. I have no fondness for burials either. I like the towers of silence. The Parsees leave the bodies of the dead for the vultures. The birds eat while flying, one is neither on this earth, nor in the heavens yet. Sometimes a limb falls on ground from the beak of a flying bird and worms on earth feel graced, a river or a jungle gets nourished.
What will happen the day I die?
Clouds will collide with mountain tops. Thunder. Then nothing.
Once gone, I do not want to return to this earth. No more reincarnations.
Five or six of us had an audience with His Holiness in Dharamshala, Willow tells Veronica. The Dali Lama told us a story. (She meant Dalai Lama, but she pronounced Dali Lama.) A monk who served eighteen years in a Chinese gulag was finally released under the condition that he would not return to Tibet. When the Lama first met him, the monk said that he was in great danger and several times he didn’t think he would make it. The Lama asked him what kind of danger was he in? The monk replied that he was in great danger of losing compassion towards the Chinese.
Good story, says Veronica.
I urge you to please replace China with America and Tibet with Iraq. There is a real danger, Veronica. Danger of losing compassion towards the Americans.
This time the women did not laugh.
When people talk religion and politics, I turn my thoughts to food. The catering-wallah’s egg is over-boiled. It has the odor of sulphur. The pleasures of eating food cooked by others! I can’t eat this egg. I will throw it away. No food is better than bad food. But.
The girl-woman is beautiful.
Willow or Veronica?
Maybe both.
They disappear to the toilet for a while; one returns in an oversize red T-shirt. No. 1 International Terrorist – it is written on the T-shirt. Under the writing is a photo of a face which resembles the American President.
The girls start laughing again. I feel very tired. Their laughter reminds me of the bleak laughter of the Kashmiri people. They are real jokers, the Kashmiris. I hear them everywhere. Impossible to escape them. The Kashmiri laughter wounds me wherever I go. Kashmir was a beautiful place and we have made a bloody mess of it. Will the Kashmiris, too, lose compassion for us Indians? I ask myself. Will I lose compassion towards certain people?
There are, and there were, people who occupied my mind all the time – and they ruined me. They made me what I am today, and I bow before them, and am thankful, but, it is certain, these people have also managed to ruin me. They had a weakness for giving commands and I had a weakness for accepting them more or less. Sometimes just to please them I would do whatever they felt like doing and I would pretend I liked whatever they liked. Chef used to go biking and I would say I too like biking but really if I could help it I would have slept longer, there was so little time to sleep in the army.
I wish I had a mind of my own, a free mind. I wish I had led a life separate from influence. I was like a child, and my fingers were in the hands of two or three important people and they pulled me this way or that.
After Chef died I did not read the papers for a while. But when I did, there was no story about him anyway. He died for a big nothing. There was nothing on TV. The press and the media had reported nothing to the nation. That is why I think in the larger scheme of things the man died for one big nothing.
On the other hand there were reports about the colonel who had staged fake battles on the glacier, and filmed them, to get a gallantry medal. The papers were also filled with ongoing talk about the coffin scam. But there was no mention of Kishen. The government censored the story. Chef’s fate was similar to the fate of the Pakistani troops and officers who died in the war. Pakistan had sent them to India posed as freedom fighters, and when they died Pakistan did not even acknowledge them as dead soldiers. Muslim troops in our regiments buried the dead Pakistani soldiers, because the enemy army refused to accept the bodies back. Pakistan maintained a fiction. They had to. And what Chef said that morning during his address on the glacier was the truth, but we had to maintain the lie. In the barracks rumors flowed like rum. But after his first suicide attempt, people started saying they did not know him at all. Those who had consumed his delicacies started saying Kishen? Who is Kishen? He was the most serious and sincere of us all. But he was dead. Not a single watch lost a second in our country. This country produced him. This miserable, melancholic, cowdungofacountry produced him. Then it took him away. He did not kill himself. It killed him.
Now this is killing me.
The reason I wanted to read the papers and watch TV was to find out how his parents and loved ones had responded. Not to get the details I already knew, but to find out about his family. I walked to the hospital, and I saw the nurse in white. She was always in white, but that day the color took special significance.
She knew he was gone. And she was expecting me. She asked me if Chef had mentioned her.
I did not respond.
She wept. She held my arm and wept.
‘He talked about you a lot,’ I said. ‘He only talked about you.’
‘Was the fire an accident?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I lied, ‘it was a kitchen accident.’
‘What a way to die,’ she said.
She was grieving him. But I do not think anyone should grieve him. For once he did exactly what he felt like doing. He had designed the complete menu. It was a perfect glacier meal. Chef dared to question the universe.
He questioned the Siachen coffin scam and the ration scam, which ran into five thousand crore millions of rupees, I didn’t tell her. The colonel, the brigadier, the major general and other senior officers involved in the scams were not even charged. Instead they received early retirement with full pension and benefits. Now they run big hotels and malls, and reside in fashionable glass towers and drive yellow Hummers. Two or three represent our country in foreign lands as ambassadors. Isn’t this the biggest shame on this earth that the man who wanted to improve the army is forgotten, not even acknowledged, and the men who destroyed it every month receive fat pension checks and benefits? Why was I born in this country?
The cancer that has grown inside me is not my fault. This country caused it. Despite that it has no shame. There are voices inside me, voices of people close to me, and they keep saying that I am personally responsible for bringing the disease and illness on myself. But it is not my fault at all.
I walked to the ladies ward. There was no one inside. Normally when Irem was not there, her shoes or at least her few belongings were visible under the metal bed. Now the ward was empty. I stood by Irem’s bed. Her name and number were gone and insects were climbing the wall. The nurse told me that the captive had been moved elsewhere.
‘Where?’
She did not know.
‘They are looking for you.’
‘For me?’
‘You must report at the colonel’s office.’
There was a fog and I followed the gravel road to the khaki office building. The colonel was alone in the room, so I did not have to wait long. His office orderly announced me, and although the colonel didn’t look up I marched in anyway. His cap was lying on his desk, and he was reading a thick file.
‘Jai Hind, sir,’ I said.
No response.
I noticed the circles left on his desk by cups of chai and coffee.
I coughed.
Suddenly he raised his head, stared at me and snapped his fingers and asked the office orderly to bring the thing. I noticed the colonel’s trussed jacket, his curly hair. Coconut oil glistened on the curls.
The orderly unlocked the Godrej almirah in the room, and pulled out the thing.
‘Play it.’
The orderly played my tape recorder.
‘We confiscated this from the enemy woman in the hospital ward,’ said the colonel.
‘Sir.’
‘You gave the enemy woman this American music?’
‘German music, sir.’
‘Yes, yes, I know. The enemy played it again and again for two full days – very loud – this music. Why did you give it to her?’
‘Sir, I thought, sir, music would ease the tension. General Sahib had asked me, sir, to conduct interrogations delicately, sir.’
‘The interrogations are over, Kirpal.’
‘Sir.’
‘This was a serious breach of order, Kirpal. I am giving you the last warning. General Kumar knew your Father Sahib. I knew him too. He was our finest officer. You have been pardoned because of your father. This must never happen again. Understand?’
Then he buried his face in the file again. I looked at the tea and coffee circles on the desk, and his cap. After a while I coughed.
‘You are still here?’
‘Sir, where is the woman sir?’
‘Woman?’
‘The enemy woman, sir?’
‘Not here.’
‘Sir.’
‘Dismiss.’
I now know the name of the music she heard. Chef Kishen had received that tape from Chef Muller in the German embassy during his training, but he did not know the title of the music. For many years I did not know the title either. It was only last year I found out. I visited the German embassy in Delhi. The yellow-haired girl at the embassy sent me to Goethe House, where the music librarian asked me to sing that piece of music.
I tried.
TUH-dee TUH-dee
TA-deeee TA-deeee
TUH-dee TUH-dee
TA-deeee TA-deeee
‘Try again,’ she said.
Daam Dum De-daaam De-daaam
Daam Dum De-daaam De-daaam
‘One more time,’ she said.
‘This one goes slowly,’ I said.
Daaah Daaah Da Daaah It Vit
Daaah Daaah Da Daaah It Vit
‘More,’ she said.
‘The tune is almost a military march,’ I said.
TUH-dee TUH-dee TA-deeee TA-deeee
TUH-dee TUH-dee TA-deeee TA-deeee
‘This sounds Turkish to me,’ she said. ‘There is no such thing. In German tradition there is no such thing.’
‘But, I have heard the music,’ I said.
My hands moved up in the air, then down and up again. I found myself conducting – just like Chef Kishen had done on the glacier – as I sang or tried to sing that music.
Da Da Da Da
Da Da Da Da
Da Da Da Da
Deee da Daaa
‘The Ninth.’ She jumped from her seat.
‘The Ninth?’
‘Beethoven,’ she said.
‘Bay-toh-behn?’
‘Beethoven,’ she said.
‘Beethoven.’
‘Yes.’
‘He wrote that music just like that?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It took him thirty years to write it. He made many errors. But, finally he found perfection.’
She gave me a headset and I listened to the complete Ninth at the booth. She told me where to buy works by Beethoven.
‘But I am only interested in the Ninth,’ I answered.
‘Maybe.’
She gave me a book, so I read it. The man was completely deaf when he wrote that piece of music. Tuh-dee Tuh-dee Ta-deeee Ta-deeee. I simply could not believe it. It is like a cook who can’t smell or taste trying to create a new dish to make millions of people happy. Tuh-dee Tuh-dee Ta-deeee Ta-deeee. This has stayed with me all these years. The Ninth has stayed. It is not just music. It is real. My whole wretched life is embedded in it. And I do not care if it comes from Germany. I am dying, but I have heard the music. My fear, my fury, my joy, my melancholy – everything is embedded in this piece. The Ninth is real. It penetrates my body like smells, like food. And yet: it is solid and massive like a glacier. Shifting. Sliding. Melting. Then becoming air. When I listen to this music so many places penetrate me. So many times. So many sounds. Voices. The voices do a tamasha, and I am able to say it for the first time. The Ninth is real. It is the kiss, the most powerful and delicate kissforthewholeworld.
Da Da Da Da
Da Da Da Da
Da Da Da Da
Deee da Daaa
In November General Sahib was approved by Delhi to become the next Governor of Kashmir. Sahib was a good choice for the post. He was the ‘Hero of Kargil’ and the ‘Hero of Siachen Glacier’. The State needed urgently a gentleman-soldier at the very top to restore order. Sahib arranged to take me (and the gardener Agha) along to the Raj Bhavan, his new residence in Srinagar. It was a rare honor. Kishen would have been proud to see me occupy the highest kitchen in Kashmir.
On the night of his appointment General Kumar delivered a speech on radio and TV.
My fellow Indians,
This troubled and beautiful land is ready for peace. Our task is not going to be easy, many challenges lie ahead, but together we will find a solution. In my opinion the first thing we must tackle is the question of governance and power. How will I, as your administrator, use power? Let me reassure you that I will act in an enlightened, just, and humane way. I will lead by reason and cooperation and set an example not just for the poor countries, but also for the rich… Thomas Jefferson once said, let me quote: ‘The less power we use the greater it will be.’ I convey my warm greetings to all of you and wish you peace and prosperity. Jai Hind.
This speech made a great impression on me. Those first few days I worked even harder to please Gen Sahib. One day he asked me especially to cater the wedding banquet for the preceding Governor’s daughter. Her name was Bina. The girl was stunningly beautiful and well-educated. She had spent years in London and New York and was getting married to an Indian boy who had also spent time in New York and London. Both had moved back home because they did not want to be treated second class in those foreign lands. Bina took great interest in Indian art, buildings and food. She had even gotten involved with the Department of Tourism to write glossy brochures for foreign visitors. She handed me, during our second meeting, a brochure she had written herself about the Governor’s residence.
More than anything else I remember the smell of wood inside the Raj Bhavan. The richly decorated papier-mâché ceilings. The fifty-five rooms. Dimly lit corridors. Red curtains. Crystal chandeliers. It was easy to get lost in the labyrinths of the building. The interiors were done entirely in walnut and deodar and rose, and the kitchen was large, airy, always filled with light. From the west window it was possible to see the ruins of the Mughal garden on the slopes of the mountain, also General Sahib’s old residence.
Bina’s tourist brochure was an elegant piece of work, and whenever I try to describe that residence I bring it to mind. For me describing buildings is harder than detecting the ingredients in an exotic dish and certainly more difficult than describing human faces. People hide their true selves behind a face, but buildings hide even more. The Raj Bhavan, Bina had written, is perched on the beautiful Zabarwan hill and quivers with the fragrance of crocuses, and irises, and narcissi. The steep road to the compound is lined by majestic plane trees (also known as bouin or chenar). The mansion commands a stunning view of the Dal Lake, the ancient ruins, the snow-clad mountain ranges, and the Hazratbal Mosque. On the east side is a large cherry orchard, and on the west the Royal Springs Golf Course.
The banquet, I must say, was my best accomplishment to this date. We had a pre-banquet dinner as well, which I cooked on a small scale for eight chosen guests – the old Governor and his daughter met me before the dinner to decide the menu and I had to use some tact to convey that most of their choices were simply wrong, and whenever the old Governor started insisting on a dish, Bina (like Rubiya) would wink her eye and smile as if saying to me, just ignore him, he is being fussy for nothing.
Bina took me aside and said if I could give the banquet a paisley theme she would do anything for me. I did not know what paisley was, and she told me that it was the pattern on the blouse she was wearing. You mean that tear-shaped thing? I asked. It is also a comma, she said. It can be seen as a mango. It can be many things. Touch it, she said. You mean you want me to touch your blouse? Yes, she said. Is this silk? I asked. It was very soft. She said it was different from the silk people bought in showrooms. This is called peace silk. This silk is made without killing the silkworms.
In the kitchen I thought about paisley for a long time, and thanks to Bina I finally found out the name for the embroidery I had seen on Irem’s pheran. Her pheran had paisley all over, not just on the borders.
The ruins of the Mughal garden, as I said before, were visible from the kitchen window, and they, too, for some unknown reason (in my mind) became associated with paisley. Sometimes wild animals appeared in the upper terraces and made strange sounds. While cooking I would ask, How is it possible for such beauty and such extreme forms of cruelty to co-exist? I would think about the beauty of the gardens in Kashmir and the Mughals who had built them. The Emperors were such learned men, scholars they were, they kept journals and ate good food. They took cuisine to perfection. They took architecture to perfection. They built the Taj, and yet how cruel they were. Not just cruel to others, but son to father, and brother to brother. How could these two things co-exist in the same person, in the same kingdom, and I felt there must be something wrong about Chef Muller’s theory. Muller had told Kishen that it was possible to identify the qualities of a person from what they ate. How can people who eat the finest delicacies commit the most horrible crimes? I would ask myself.
Two days before the banquet, a curfew was imposed on the city because of militant violence. Bombs and IE devices exploded in downtown. I needed prawns and fish and ingredients for cioppino – the Italian soup – and many other things. Bina was nervous, but the captain who escorted me into the city told her not to worry. He ordered the pilot jeep to accompany the Governor’s black car, in which I sat on the front seat, and my two assistants sat on the back, and two military trucks moved ahead of the car and two moved behind, and a windowless armored vehicle raced on the side, and that is how I went to the bazaar to shop for the banquet. The shops were closed because of the curfew, so we knocked and woke up the shopkeepers one by one, and I told them not to worry because we meant no harm, and if they refused to charge I paid them anyway.
On the wedding day the Prime Minister himself flew to the Raj Bhavan, and the Defense Minister was also present along with other high dignitaries and eminent personalities. General Chibber, General Raina, Shri Bhagat, Mr Modi and Dr Jagdish Tytler. Colonel Chowdhry and Patsy Memsahib. The white American ambassador and his black secretary and the chief of the World Bank. Business tycoons. Only government journalists were allowed, the event was not announced to the public, and after the meal the Prime Minister demanded that I show my face, and I appeared in a liveried dress meant for special occasions. I walked straight to the drawing room, somewhat nervous, but the PM put me at ease by telling a Sikh joke, and we all laughed.
‘Well done, Kirpal ji,’ he said. ‘One day when Governor Sahib is not around, we will have to steal you!’
Later many guests recited poetry, and the Prime Minister recited his own poems, and a bureaucrat translated, and the PM said that it was the most perfect translation of his poems from Hindi into English, and the foreign guests applauded with loud clapping. Sahib opened the most expensive French wine to honor poetry, and the more he drank the more the PM changed and looked different from his photos in magazines.
It was a grand affair. Because the number of guests was over three hundred, we had to set up a special scullery tent in the area close to the servants’ quarters. We hired temporary staff. We had to get security clearance for all of them – whether they were Muslims or non-Muslims, but mostly they were poor Muslims. We managed to sneak most of them in without the clearance. There were around a hundred waiting staff.
Golf-ball-sized goshtaba. Tails of sheep. Paisley-shaped naans. Moorish eggplant. Murgh Wagah. Rogan Josh. Pasta with roasted chestnuts and walnuts. Paella valenciana. Pavlova salad. Oysters. I remember it fresh like yesterday. The bartender came from Bombay (with his special English brandy). Bollywood stars flew in. Red carpets lined the walkways. Red shamiana tents were pitched under chenar trees. The Hindu priest had a PhD in Sanskrit. Bina changed her dress thirteen times. She and the groom circled the fire seven times. The air smelled of an epic wedding, flowers everywhere. Columns and spheres and disks and mandalas of pansies and marigolds and jasmines and daffodils and roses. Wild roses. The kitchen door was open and I heard footsteps. From behind the curtains I saw the outgoing Governor, in profile, and the incoming Governor guiding the special guests to the glass cabinet in the drawing room. General Sahib pointed at the famous photo from the ’71 India-Pakistan War.
In the photo General Aurora of our army is sitting next to General Niazi of the Pakistani army. The Pakistani defeat is very fresh. India has taken 90,000 Pakistani soldiers into captivity. General Niazi is signing the surrender documents.
‘I was present during the surrender, sir,’ said General Kumar Sahib. ‘Gen Niazi looked absolutely humiliated.’
‘Kumar Sahib, what happened right after the surrender?’ inquired the PM.
‘Gen Niazi removed his rank, sir, and emptied his pistol, and he handed the pistol to our victorious Gen Aurora.’
‘But how did the pistol end up here?’ The PM demanded an explanation.
‘Gen Aurora made me the custodian of the pistol, sir. This is still a very reliable firearm!’
‘Reliable or not,’ said the PM seriously, ‘this pistol must go to the War Museum in Delhi.’
The General laughed mildly, and opened the glass cabinet and the pistol passed through several hands.
Holding the pistol, the PM said: ‘Wherever they are there is trouble.’
‘But we know the reliable way to contain them, sir,’ said the old Governor.
‘People of Kashmir are unhappy with Delhi, sir,’ said General Sahib, the new Governor.
‘Well, we are unhappy with them too!’ said the PM.
Then they all laughed.
Single malt was served on the rocks.
Finally I could no longer see their faces. Bloody bastard, I said. The dessert is still not ready. Bina was a bit worried about my ability to tackle Italian desserts, but I reassured her. She approved my suggestion to serve tiramisu at the banquet.
‘Sculpt it like paisley!’ she reminded me just outside the scullery tent.
‘Bina,’ I said, ‘this is an excellent way to make the Italian mithai our own! Bina, please don’t worry. I will make you happy. I will make all the three hundred guests extremely happy. Chef Kishen taught me the most authentic recipe from Florence, Tus-canny.’
‘You mean Tuscany?’
‘I think so.’
The night before I had started looking for bottles of rum. Rum is one of the most essential ingredients. You can do without vanilla, you can do without cinnamon, but you can’t do without rum in tiramisu. Cocoa, coffee, cream, sponge fingers, mascarpone cheese, eggs, sugar, and rum. The old servant told me that the bottles were stored in the corner room in the Raj Bhavan, and it took me a while to find the right room in those labyrinths, but I did find it finally, and after procuring two bottles I drank a big burra-peg, standing underneath a big chandelier, to deal with the stress and hard work, and then, I do not know how, I lost my way in the building, and found myself going down the stairs and up the stairs, clutching a bottle, and down again to a room with worn furniture and faded wallpaper and carpets and thin walls. I think it was around two o’clock in the morning. Voices were coming from the neighboring room. It was as if two people were having a good time. Through a little hole in the wall I peeked in and saw a figure who resembled the outgoing Governor’s son. I do not remember his name, in my mind he is Bina’s brother. He was with a girl in that room. I half-finished the bottle and kept looking through the hole. The girl was very fair. Kashmiri girls are always very fair. But. There were dark marks under her eyes. She was giving him a blowjob. After some time he spread his semen on her fair skin and milk-white breasts. She had huge aureoles. Her hair was wild. But she did not seem to be liking it. When he was done he opened the door. As she followed him, he said, I will live up to my promise, you whore, I always live up to my promise. I did not do this to you for nothing, he said, and I hid behind a crate, unable to follow them, scared because I knew the whole area was under heavy surveillance, and there were loaded guns. Please release my brother, I heard the woman’s voice say. Let her out, Bina’s brother ordered the sentry. I went back to my room and swallowed two more mouthfuls of rum.
After the wedding and the banquet Bina (now Mrs Ramani) left with her husband to honeymoon in Gulmarg. Gulmarg means meadow-of-flowers in Kashmiri. Her parents kissed her goodbye, and so did her brother. She was wearing a blue peace silk with paisley and of course she looked very beautiful. She thanked me by planting a kiss on my cheek. She recommended to her father, the ex-Governor, that I be sent on a well-deserved holiday to my home to be with my people. At that point I could not ask for anything better.
I am such a pea.
I don’t like mutters.
Mutter-paneer, mutter-aloo, mutter-gobi.
There is a small area the size of a pea in our brains. I read it in the paper. This area is just behind the eye. Compassion and empathy lie in this area. When the area gets damaged we torture others more easily, and with less mess to ourselves.
In Delhi, while on leave, I could not stop thinking of Kashmir. I would shut my eyes or try distracting myself, but the more I tried the more forcefully the images flashed before me.
When will you get married? Mother would ask, and the question would annoy and sadden me. All my uncles and aunties wanted to hear were tales about the heroism of our soldiers at the border, and I found the June heat unbearable, and the June mosquitoes unbearable at night. Images of mountains and mosques and Raj Bhavan disturbed my sleep. Sometimes I would think about Irem. Sometimes the beauty of the valley and Sufi music filled my dreams. I would see Kashmiri women in pherans pounding dried red chilies. I cut short my holiday and returned on this very train.
Srinagar had become a war zone during my absence.
The streets trembled with armored vehicles.
Militancy was at its peak again.
The enemy was training more men and brainwashing more boys, and wave after wave crossed into Kashmir to set off bombs at public places, even inside army camps. Fifty new battalions were raised by our army to contain the insurgents. For every four civilians we had one soldier. But things were going badly. During those dark days no one on the General’s staff was a Muslim. The only Muslim in the Raj Bhavan was the old gardener, Agha.
Nothing is ready. Nothing.
It is early, no fire in the kitchen yet. I am still planning the day. There is a knock. I see a wrinkled hand. The rear door opens. Agha, the gardener, is standing in front of me. Teeth gone. Skullcap on head, three-day stubble like a dusting of snow. A rag of a sash around his neck.
As usual he doesn’t step in.
‘Do you have something to polish this with?’ he asks.
He is holding an old fountain nozzle. The metal is layered with green patina.
‘Come in,’ I say. ‘It is getting cold.’
To my surprise he starts removing his shoes.
‘You can keep them on.’
He ignores me and walks in bare feet. The kitchen floor is so cold he is standing on the tips of his toes.
‘No Problem,’ he says.
‘This might work,’ I say, handing him the bottle of acid I normally use to polish the sink.
‘Good,’ he says and picks up an old rag and starts work on the nozzle.
His presence makes me uneasy. He keeps muttering poetry while polishing.
‘Now you may leave,’ I say.
‘No Problem,’ he says.
He does not leave.
‘Do you have a minute?’ he asks.
‘It has to be quick,’ I say.
‘Why did you remove your turban?’ he asks.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘My hair is short now.’
‘What will your father say?’
‘He is dead, Agha. He is buried in the glacier.’
The gardener stops polishing.
‘Fathers never die,’ he says.
I lift my hand to my face. The beard is gone now, my cheeks are smooth. The turban is no longer on my head, but I sense its weight. It was a big part of me and I removed it. I look at my hands. All the muscles of my hands. The pores of my skin. The tips of my thumb and middle finger. The whorls, the roughness, the cuts. My hands are freezing. They start shaking. I strike a match. It doesn’t work. Agha helps me light up the stove.
‘Do you still have a minute?’ he asks.
He has no patience.
‘Please be quick,’ I say.
‘No Problem,’ he says.
‘Yes, yes, be quick.’
‘My son disappeared two days ago.’
‘He will come back,’ I say.
‘No,’ he says.
‘Did he become a militant?’ I ask.
‘He simply disappeared.’
‘Sorry, I must get back to work.’
The nozzle is shining now, reflecting Agha’s face.
‘No Problem,’ he says and walks slowly to his old shoes and shuts the door behind him. A cold draft hits my cheeks.
Later in the evening when I am done with the dinner I spot him sitting by the marigolds in the garden, smoking a hookah. His breath stinks of nicotine.
‘No Problem,’ he says.
He looks more dead than alive.
‘What do you mean?’ I say. ‘Your son.’
‘He is gone.’
‘No, no. But how do you really feel? Not just about your son, but the situation in Kashmir?’
‘Bad things are expected during the turmoil,’ he says. ‘Why should the most beautiful place on earth be spared bad things? People are turning mad here. This place is becoming a pagal-khana, a lunatic asylum.’
‘Where do you suspect your son is?’
‘They should stop torturing our boys,’ he says.
‘They?’
‘Military,’ he says.
‘Where?’
‘In the hotels,’ he says.
‘You are a joker, Agha,’ I say.
‘No Problem,’ he says.
His words disturbed me a lot. I found it difficult to cook. Difficult to sleep. It was true. Our army had occupied many hotels in Srinagar. But they were the new residences for our officers and jawans, I had not imagined them as sites of torture. I decided to visit. Part of me wanted to disprove Agha. Barring a few bad apples our army was basically good. The only way it was possible for me to access the hotels was by taking extra initiative. General Sahib was pleased by my proposal, and he granted me the permission to inspect kitchens in all the army-occupied hotels. I became a part-time inspector of kitchens.
Hotel Athena. Hotel Duke. Hotel Nedou. Oberoi Palace. More than thirty-six hotels now belonged to the army. Before inspection, I would read the tourism department’s write-up for that particular site, then a special vehicle would take me to the hotel (cycling was no longer safe) and I would arrive unannounced just before meals and taste the food and inspect the kitchen hygiene, and then excuse myself for a few minutes, and during that brief time I would hurriedly check the rooms.
Agha was wrong.
Our army was out shooting films. Everything was being done in the open, there was nothing to hide, the rooms were clean, certain scenes were being shot inside the hotels, others outdoors. Light. The most important ingredient in cinema is light. One needs the right kind of light to screen a film, just like one needs the right kind of light to shoot a film. (I remember, in Grade 3, I watched a film shot in Kashmir. The hero fought the villains first in the Mughal garden, then in the colonial-style hotel with red shingles. There was something magical about the quality of light in Kashmir.) Because of the new assignment I witnessed the shootings of many films. I was able to understand the connections between light and cinema. I was also able to compare the art of filmmaking with the art of cooking. A dish does not last more than a meal, but a film is for ever. Some people give up eating meat after watching the slaughter of a goat. But no one gives up the movies after witnessing a shooting.
If I were asked to give a collective title to all the films our army was shooting in the hotels, it will be called Masters of Light or Colonel Madhok’s Diary of a Bad Year. There was a scene which involved a man tied with a rope to an iron pillar. A captain shoved a cricket bat up the man’s anus. Light was warm and soft in the room. There was a boy crawling like an infant in a pool of his own shit and urine. There were naked men in the semi-darkness of sparkling Diwali lights. Two or three German shepherds snarled at their privates, men’s penises squirming. In Hotel Nedou I discovered men standing under light so harsh and bright it burned their skin, and a machine kept emitting sounds like ping, ping, ping while giving shocks to the testicles of a Kashmiri tied to a wet mattress. In Hotel Athena I found hair and nipples and electrodes in cold outdoor light. Downstairs, close-up of a detached hand in underexposed light. Blackout. Pigs. Blood. Semen. In Oberoi Palace four male nurses were force-feeding two men in the fading light of the evening. There were tubes stuck up their noses and into their throats. But, I was not looking for men.
Only one person.
Irem.
From the tourist department I got a list of all the hotels in the valley, and finally I visited every single one, but I failed to find her.
Then something else happened. Sahib did not go for his morning walk that day because of light rain. When the rain stopped Sahib stepped out and sat on the bench in the garden. He ordered tea. Through the open kitchen window I observed everything.
The ayah took the tea tray and the daily paper to the garden. I had added ginger in the tea. Normally I would add a clove and crushed cardamom, but that morning I added ginger as well.
Sahib motioned with his hand, as if to say, leave the tray on the bench.
She planted the tray and placed a roll of paper between the tray and Sahib’s crossed legs. He unfolded the Times.
‘Please ask Agha to see me.’
She walked to the edge and beckoned the man raking the leaves in the garden. Not far from the yellow pile his transistor radio was playing rag malar. He stopped and literally ran to the bench.
‘Salaam, Sahib.’
‘Agha, how is the garden?’
‘The begonias have bloomed, Sahib, and the faulty fountain nozzle has been repaired, but it is no longer like the old one.’
‘Something more important?’
The gardener’s canvas shoes dropped a cake of mud as he shifted on green, neatly trimmed grass. He kept his eyes downcast.
‘Your son is dead, Agha,’ General Sahib raised his voice. Sahib rarely raised his voice.
The gardener remained still.
‘Do you hear me?’
The gardener still didn’t move.
‘You didn’t even tell?’
Agha held his face between his hands.
‘Show him the paper.’ Sahib turned to the ayah. ‘He can’t read, but he knows the photo.’
Agha studied the front page.
‘Look at your son. Is he in heaven now? Overnight he made you the father of a martyr. Thirty-seven people inside the bus terminal, Agha – all Kashmiris.’
‘My son DEAD, Sahib.’
‘The bus was to leave for Pakistani Kashmir. Fifty-six miles after fifty-six years. Fifty-six wasted years, Agha. And your son plants a bomb. Shabash.’
‘Passenger not hurt, Sahib.’
‘Passenger not hurt, Sahib,’ he mimicked. ‘Two majors, just out of the academy, killed. Finish. Khatam.’
‘Sahib -’
‘From this bench I used to watch your son. Only a few months ago he watered the trees in this garden. But one thing I will not say, I will not say he was misguided. He well knew the consequences.’
The gate opened. The guard posted outside the Raj Bhavan opened it. The nurse from the army hospital entered, and propped her bicycle by the fence. By the time General Sahib looked over his shoulder she had disappeared into the house.
‘You were going to lose your pension as well, Agha. But I have urged the colonel to reconsider.’
‘No, Sahib?’ He stood up.
‘Agha, the army fears for my life. We must let you go.’
‘But, Sahib, I am not my son.’
The General stood up. He turned and started beckoning the uniforms. The ADC rushed to the bench.
‘Talk to Agha.’
Agha would not leave. Two of the guards forced him to pack his things and threw him out. His feet crushed red and yellow leaves on the narrow path he followed.
The General walked to the gate and looked at the bend in the road for a long time until Agha disappeared.
Later he entered the mansion and climbed the stairs over the kitchen and walked slowly through the dimly lit corridor. In the bedroom he sat in a chair not far from the huge painting on the wall. The dead woman looked down at him from the painting.
I served breakfast in the bedroom.
Porridge. Upma. Papaya.
Orange-pomegranate juice.
Toast with unsalted cheese.
His daughter was lying on the bed. Rubiya was on a special diet. The kitchen had to prepare two separate dishes. One for sir and one for the girl. The nurse examined the girl. Sir moved his chair close to Rubiya and checked her pulse.
‘What is my daughter’s wish?’ he asked.
‘Papa,’ she said. ‘I want to grow up fast.’
‘And,’ he asked, ‘what will she become as a grown-up?’
‘Emperor,’ she said.
‘Emperor or Empress?’
‘Emperor,’ she said.
‘His Highness!’ He saluted her.
‘Papa, I will kidnap people!’
‘Who will His Highness kidnap?’
‘You,’ she said.
Sahib fell silent for a moment. Then he laughed. Being the Governor was a busy job filled with travel, and certainly the girl felt deprived of his presence. Rubiya was such a lonely child – she used to eat porridge and curds and khitchri, and now she is getting married. I am happy for her.
I am on the train because I am happy for Rubiya.
Civ-i-ans. Whatistheword? I am
sur-rounded by civilians in this compartment. What presighly is wrong with me? P-r-e-c-i-s-e-l-y? The tumor is in the speech area of your brain, Kip, the doctor explained. Sala asshole.
I can no longer pronounce certain words correctly. But, I can spell them:
R-a-d-i-o.
Yes.
Transformer?
No.
Tranjister?
No.
Spell it.
T-r-a-n-s-i-s-t-e-r.
Days later I found Agha had forgotten his transistor radio in the Raj Bhavan. He had packed his things hurriedly the day he was fired. I found the radio on in the scullery room. Agha was the only Kashmiri on the staff, and no one knew where he lived.
There were food stains on the silver skin of his Philips radio. Agha, you clown, I said, changing the batteries. The new batteries didn’t improve the reception. But, in the slot at the bottom I found a little note scribbled in Kashmiri. Agha could not read and write. So he must have dictated the lines.
His note led me to the Guest House at the tail end of the Raj Bhavan complex. It used to be the British Resident’s summer house, but now served as a lodge for high-ranking guests. The building faced the lake, and it had a proper roof terrace. Agha’s note said that the reception will improve on the roof, but it will get better downstairs. Unable to follow the logic, I started climbing down. The reception, as I had expected, became worse and worse. Begum Akhtar was singing ghazals. On the radio her voice sounded like a rejected Indian Idol.
Downstairs was clean. Not a particle of dust. Big portraits of six or seven old Governors looked down from walls as white as snow. I turned off the crackling radio and entered the first room. It was called the Husain Room. The room was devoted entirely to M. F. Husain’s paintings of horses. The canvases were huge, twelve feet by eight feet. One almost touched the naked bulb on the wall. I felt dwarfed by the navy-blue and apple-red horses. Reared up on hind legs they looked absolutely alive and stunning. In college the teacher had told us that Husain was the best modern painter in our country, his work was also on display in the National Gallery. No one knows why he is possessed by horses… He is completely self-taught and his personal life is as eccentric as his art. Husain always walks barefoot, she told us. Did you know? Not only inside the house, but also outside. Even in the hot and bustling streets of Bombay he walks barefoot, and that is exactly how he arrives at the lobbies of five-star hotels and foreign embassies and airports and even English-style clubs. He has all the money in the world to buy hundreds of shoe factories, but he shuns shoes as if foreign objects. Why are you like this? a journalist asked once. When I wear shoes I feel I am eating supper with wrong people, answered the painter.
Standing in front of the horses I removed my shoes and socks. My feet were able to breathe again. I felt connected not only to the painting, but also to the painter. When does a painter know that the painting of a horse is done? I asked myself. In kitchen we are able to tell precisely when a dish is done, but when is the horse done? There was something incomplete about the horses on the canvas, but it seemed to me that the fragments were completing themselves in my head. Cooking is different from painting, I thought. The key ingredients are never absent. Father knew horses… when I turned eight he made me feed a horse in the barracks… the animal’s lips had grabbed the apple swiftly from my hand.
The next room was called the Sher-Gil Hall. Briefly I stood before a dazzling composition, Two Nudes. The women looked mysterious despite being naked. However, it did occur to me that the round breasts of the first nude really belonged to the second, and the pointed breasts of the second nude really belonged to the first. The longer I stood there the less I thought about the lips or thighs or breasts, and the more I experienced the warmth and the cold those two women carried inside. They appeared so alone. The reason the painter Husain walks barefoot, I thought, is because he must feel lonely. His art springs out of immense loneliness, I thought.
Diagonally across from the Two Nudes were the stunning black and white portraits of musicians, Hari Prasad Chaurasia, the flute player, Zakir Hussein, the tabla player, and Vilayat Khan, the sitar player, and many others. The next room was dark and smelly. No windows. There was a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling on a single wire, and in that dim fragile light I noticed the form of a woman as if sitting on a toilet bowl.
Sorry, I said and stepped out in panic. In the corridor I felt a hand on my shoulder.
‘Cook! What are you doing here?’
The guard was armed with a light machine gun.
‘Nothing, Major,’ I said.
‘Nothing?’
‘Major,’ I explained, ‘I was looking for you only. Would you taste the dish I have prepared? Took me fifteen hours of hard work. I offer my new dishes to all the staff members and guards. This is how I learn how good they are!’
‘But, why are you carrying your shoes?’
‘This place is like a shrine, Major. That is why.’
He looked utterly confused and stared at Agha’s radio.
‘Here,’ I said, handing him the radio. ‘Listen to the latest cricket score. Let me bring you the dish.’
‘Bring it to the roof terrace,’ he yelled.
I rushed back to the kitchen, and brought him a bowl of wild mushroom risotto, and a tall glass of cherry-blueberry l-a-s-s-i. The guard moistens his lips and lowers his nose. He smells the risotto. Italian, I say. Foreign food, Major. You are a good man, he says. But you must never enter the art rooms. Only officers. Honest mistake, I say. Why are you trembling? he asks. Is it any good? I ask him. You are the ustad of cooking, he says. Serious, Major? I ask. Tell me. What do you think about the Two Nudes? He stares at the bowl. Come on, I say. You must have seen the painting. He tunes Agha’s radio to the sports channel. India is playing West Indies in Barbados. The reception is crystal clear. Then I pour him rum.
‘What do you think about the horses, Major?’ I ask.
Horses, he says. The painter knows nothing about horses. How could one forget to show the most important thing, the horsehair… You are a good man, he says, but I don’t want you to feed anyone else in this building. Is there a guest? I ask. There is the woman, he says, spooning the risotto. She’s in the room next to the paintings, Major. She is a dangerous suicide bomber, he says. What is she doing here? Why is she not in a regular prison? I ask. He nods. I do not know. Perhaps she is here because this is the least likely place to find her, this is the cleverest way to dupe the enemy. She is still being interrogated. Officers come now and then to interrogate her.
Next day I visit the Guest House again. With new dishes. Duck vindaloo and cardamomed mango. The guard and I have lunch upstairs on the terrace. Major, I would like to interrogate her, I say. He laughs. His breath stinks of rum. And what are you going to ask her? Hazaar things, I say. Like what kind of food the enemy eats, what kind of dishes the enemy’s General eats. How does he eat? How many times a day? Is he prone to diarrhea? Constipation? Does he fart? I will ask her very important questions. Plus I have Governor Sahib’s orders to interrogate her.
‘You have what?’ he asks.
‘Gen Sahib’s permission and order to ask her the questions.’
‘Major, in that case, I will open the room for you.’
But, that was not the real reason he unlocked the door.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘Try some gulab jamun.’
The room had the worn look of colonial times. The carpet was dark and moldy and the bathroom door open. Close to the ceiling there were huge military bootprints stamped on the wall.
She was talking to herself. In Kashmiri.
When she felt my presence her body stirred a little. She did not raise her bent head. Her hair had grown back and it was wild and she did not have on the headscarf. I sat in the chair across from the bed. Her gaze remained fixed on the floor. There was a table in front of my chair. I opened my bag and pulled out two glasses and plates and spoons, and Coke and fish and biryani and placed everything on the table. Now and then sounds of guards marching outside penetrated the room, and sounds of dogs barking. The muezzin’s call from a distant mosque penetrated as well.
I served her.
Not a single word had been exchanged between us so far. She ate slowly the fish and biryani, and I adopted her speed. Now and then I looked at her but our silence made the looking harder. I fixed my gaze on the bottle of Coke on the table. Bubbles at the top were bigger than the ones at the bottom. I wanted to ask her many questions. Instead, I was at a loss for words.
I heard her finish, and looked up. She was staring at me. The steel plate, still in her hand, was shining in the light.
‘More biryani?’ I asked.
She kept staring at me.
‘I know you,’ she said.
My hair was short now, no beard, and I had removed my turban. But she had recognized me.
‘Why did you?’ she asked.
‘Because-’
The dogs were barking louder outside.
‘I’ll tell you later,’ I said.
To prove to her my identity I had walked into the room with Chef’s journal in the bag. But she had recognized me and there was no need to provide more proofs. That is why it was inappropriate to show her an object she could not even read.
‘Do you recognize this?’ I handed her the journal.
She seemed indifferent.
Then I said something I shouldn’t have.
‘He is dead,’ I said.
‘Who?’
‘The man who wrote these pages.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’
I moved to the edge of her bed.
‘Why did you cut your hair?’
‘Irem, you are for me -’
‘Why did you?’
The next ten or fifteen minutes I told her everything about Kishen. Everything. I don’t know why. Things I found difficult sharing with men in the barracks, I revealed to her in one single breath. At first she paid little attention to what I was saying, lost in some other world. Is she afraid? I asked myself. But somewhere down the line she grew drawn to Chef’s address to the soldiers on the glacier.
‘The biryani you consumed was really out of Chef’s recipes,’ I said.
‘Same to same man who taught you Rogan Josh?’
I liked the way she said same to same.
‘Same-to-same man whose journal you read,’ I joked.
She was quiet again.
‘No tomatoes in Rogan Josh,’ I said.
Then I opened the journal. I didn’t read everything. I censored many passages. But there were words even I had no control over. Forgiveness is a strange animal: I felt the need to ask her forgiveness. Otherwise I could not sit next to her. Could she forgive me for being from the enemy side? I read the journal to her: Like most Indians I grew up prejudiced against Muslims. But unlike most of my country men I do not believe in caste. My difficult posting on the Siachen Glacier has taught me how tiny and fragile the human body is. It is a waste of time to be prejudiced. A waste of breath.
She walked to the window. There was no window. She pretended there was a window. She stood there as if she was looking at the view outside. I knew what was outside: my cycle leaning against the plane tree, and next to it was the nurse’s cycle. The nurse and I had failed to connect, but our cycles had met and they were making love to each other.
Thinking about the cycles I surveyed Irem’s back, her long hair and its entanglements. She was facing the so-called window. We were six meters apart. Light was dim, same naked forty-watt bulb hanging from a naked wire. From where I sat, she looked healthy and plump. I stared at her hair and feet and back, her entire form. To amuse her, I think, yes, it was to amuse her, or perhaps to ease the tension I said she had grown fat, and suddenly her breathing grew heavy, and although I could only see her back I felt she was trying to grasp on to something, but there was nothing around her. She tried again, and again she failed. Then she turned. She pivoted, suddenly uncom-fortable, trying to protect herself from my gaze. The color of her face changed, and then parts of her body convulsed with bleak laughter, as if she was laughing at me. It was only then I realized she was heavy with a child.
‘God,’ I said.
I was at a loss for words.
‘So… you are… you are not infertile!’
I did not know what else to say.
‘Who?’ I almost whispered. ‘Who did it?’
She did not respond. She was not going to respond. It definitely could not be her husband in Pakistan. Who? Who was I going to report it to?
I was standing not far from the General’s portrait on the wall, and all of a sudden I thought about the nurse’s cycle propped against the plane tree outside. She was in the Raj Bhavan to give medication to little Rubiya. I thought of persuading the nurse to help Irem.
‘The nurse,’ I said.
‘What about her?’
‘She will take care of you?’
‘How?’
‘She will make your body normal again.’
‘I do not want to be normal.’
‘Please listen to me.’
‘I am.’
‘I want to help you. But I will only do so if you agree.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Would you like saffron?’
‘Saffron?’
‘Saffron, I have been told, causes miscarriage, and it works quickly, not causing much pain.’
‘Please go away.’
‘Think about it,’ I said. ‘Please.’
‘Why are you humiliating me?’
‘Humiliating you?’
‘By asking again and again the same-to-same question.’
‘You do not know what is good for you,’ I said.
‘Thank you for the biryani,’ she said.
‘Tomorrow. I will come again. Same time. I will knock on the door, and I will ask the same question. If you say yes, the nurse will help you.’
Then I picked up the empty plates and glasses from the table and stepped out. I felt very disturbed. I remember focusing on her back as I was stepping out. She was looking out of the so-called window. I almost turned, but restrained myself. I stood outside her door for a long time as if I wanted to listen to the sound of the 1.5 hearts beating inside her. I did not know what to do. To tell someone? To tell someone and put her at more risk, and to put myself at risk?
Next day at the same time I knocked on the door and asked her the same-to-same question. But. She said no. I urged her to change her mind. The nurse would do it without telling anyone. The nurse will make you normal again. But she said no. She wanted to keep the child. She told me something women normally tell only their husbands. She told me the baby was kicking inside her belly. The baby was crying and asking her to give her a name. Don’t be so emotional, I said. I have already given her a name, she said. What name? I asked.
Two days later I returned to the room again and begged her to allow me to take her home across the border. She said she did not want to return home. Her family was not going to accept her now. I am damaged, she said. Khuda is punishing me, she said, for my sins. Why did I not die? I should have died. It would have solved all troubles. I am not going to commit any more sins. I am going to keep the child.
There was a long silence. I walked to her and seized her hand. She was sitting on the edge of the bed. Again I urged her to allow me to take her to Pakistan. But the moment I uttered the word ‘ Pakistan ’ she fell back on the bed. Her whole body convulsed, and her two hands started opening the drawstring of her salwar, and there she was partially unconscious and partially unclothed on the bed, with the naked bulb above us. It was at that point the ayah entered the room. I do not know from where she came and why, but she saw. She saw us together. Then walked in the guard, and then marched in the colonel in his trussed jacket.