Shalimar the Clown (42 page)

There was beauty in such schemes, elegance and beauty. General Kachhwaha was discussing with himself whether or not the renegade militants might be used against other categories of person, such as journalists and human rights activists. The deniability of such operations was a big plus. The possibilities should be explored.

The battle against the weaklings of the JKLF would be won soon enough. General Kachhwaha despised the fundamentalists, the jihadis, the Hizb, but he despised the secular nationalists more. What sort of God was secular nationalism? People would not die for that for very long. Already the crackdown was having an effect. Soon the two leading JKLF factions would sue for peace. The HAJY group’s Yasin Malik would crack, and so would Amanullah Khan himself. The back channels would open and the deals would be done. This month, next month, this year, next year. It didn’t matter. He could wait. He could tighten his grip on the testicles of the insurgency and let it come to him. Word was reaching him from over the mountains, floating over the ice caps and fluttering down into his ear, that Pak Inter-Services Intelligence felt the same way about the JKLF as he did. ISI funding to the JKLF was being reduced and the Hizb was getting the cash instead. The Hizb was strong, maybe ten thousand strong, and he could respect that. He could despise them and respect them simultaneously. No difficulty there.

Intergroup rivalries played into his hands. Already there had been a case of a JKLF area commander murdered by the Hizb. Once the JKLF was done with, the jihadis would turn against one another. He would see to that. The Lashkar of this and the Harkat of that. He would see to them all right. Also the feared “iron commando” of Maulana Bulbul Fakh. Soon he would have the bastards in his sights.

Anees Noman had taken over leadership of his roving JKLF militant group after the departure across the mountains of the invisible commander Dar. His heroes were Guevara the Cuban and the FSLN of Nicaragua and he liked to cultivate the Latino guerrilla look. When the group was on an operation he affected a beret, Western combat fatigues and black boots, and wanted to be known as Comandante Zero after a famous Sandinista fighter, but his soldiers, who were less solemnly respectful of him than he would have wished, called him Baby Che. In the period after the start of the insurgency his mine-laying skills had led to some notable successes against military convoys and the reputation of the Baby Che group grew. Word of its existence reached the ear of General Kachhwaha in Badami Bagh, and though the identity of Baby Che was uncertain the military authorities had had their suspicions for some time. More than once, however, the proposal to put Pachigam under crackdown so that its subversive associations could be properly explored had been vetoed by the civilian authority. An army attack on the folk arts of Kashmir, on its theatrical and gastronomic traditions, was exactly the kind of story that made headlines. Even in retirement Sardar Harbans Singh was standing up for his old friend the sarpanch of Pachigam. Even in his claw-fingered old age Abdullah Noman could still claim to be protecting his village, just as he always had.

There was no work, however. There was no money. The Noman family’s peaches and honey were distributed free of charge among the villagers. Pachigam was a lucky village, with its fertile fields and animal herds, but everyone knew that great hardship was just around the corner. If the crisis continued, a statewide famine was a real possibility. “We’ll face the famine if it comes,” Firdaus Noman told her husband. “Right now I’m so sick of honey and peaches I might even prefer to starve.” Her sons Hameed and Mahmood agreed. “Anyway,” Hameed said cheerfully, “maybe we won’t live long enough to reach the point of starvation.” Mahmood nodded. “What a stroke of luck! We can choose from so many different ways to die.”

Firdaus Noman awoke one night with her husband snoring by her side and another man’s hand over her mouth. When she recognized the shaggy, beret-wearing figure of the son she had not seen for many years she allowed herself to weep, and when he made as if to remove the precautionary hand from her lips she seized it and covered it in kisses. “Don’t wake him up right now,” she told Anees, looking across at Abdullah. “I want you to myself for a while. And what do you think you look like with that hair? Before you meet your father you’d better start looking like his son, not a wild man from the woods.” She led him to the kitchen, sat him down on a stool and cut his hair. Anees didn’t object, didn’t tell her it was dangerous for him to stay too long, didn’t hurry her up or insist she wake his brothers or his father. He sat on the wooden stool, closed his eyes and leaned back against her, feeling her body move slowly against his back as the dark curls fell from his head. “Do you remember,
maej,
” he said, “when I was the saddest clown in Pachigam, and people actually cheered up when I left the stage?” She made a small dismissive noise with her lips. “You were the most profound of my children,” she said proudly. “I used to worry that you would go so deep inside yourself that you might just vanish completely. But look at you: here you are.”

When the men of the house were awake the family held a kitchen-table council of war. “Because Big Man Misri did us all a favor and rid the world of those worthless Gegroos before he died, the Lashkar-e-Pak now has Pachigam in its sights much more than Shirmal,” Anees said quietly. “This is bad. Even without the Gegroos those crazy LeP bastards have maybe forty or fifty soldiers in the area and there is no question that they will pick their moment and attack.” Firdaus Noman shook her head. “How can a woman’s face be the enemy of Islam?” she asked angrily. Anees took her hands in his. “For these idiots it’s all about sex,
maej,
excuse me. They think it is a scientific fact that a woman’s hair emits rays that arouse men to deeds of sexual depravity. They think that if a woman’s bare legs rub together, even under a floor-length robe, the friction of her thighs will generate sexual heat which will be transmitted through her eyes into the eyes of men and will inflame them in an unholy way.” Firdaus spread her hands in a gesture of resignation. “So, because men are animals, according to them, women must pay. This is an old story. Tell me something else.” Anees nodded in his grave, unsmiling way. “That’s why I’m here,” he said. “My unit has decided that we will defend Pachigam and Shirmal too, if need be. Don’t worry. We have a hundred good guys and can get some friends to assist. But you must be prepared. Hide weapons in every house but don’t try to fight them when they first come. Be patient and take whatever insults they hand out. When we start the battle, then and then only you can help us beat the living shit out of them, excuse me,
maej.
Soldier’s talk.” Firdaus thumped the table, softly. “Little boy,” she said, “you won’t know what the living shit looks like until you’ve seen me at work.”

The Lashkar-e-Pak came to Pachigam on horseback three weeks later, in broad daylight, not expecting any resistance. The leader, a black-turbaned Afghan homicidal maniac aged fifteen, ordered everyone into the street and announced that since the women of Pachigam were too shameless to conceal themselves as Islam required they should take off their clothes completely so that the world could see what whores they really were. A great murmur arose from the villagers but Firdaus Noman stepped forward, took off her phiran and began to undress. Taking their cue from her, the other women and girls of the village also started to strip. A silence fell. The LeP fighters were unable to take their eyes off the women, who were stripping slowly, seductively, moving their bodies rhythmically, with their eyes closed. “Help me, God,” one of the LeP’s foreign fighters moaned in Arabic, writhing on his horse, “These blue-eyed she-devils are stealing away my soul.” The fifteen-year-old homicidal maniac pointed his Kalashnikov at Firdaus Noman. “If I kill you now,” he said nastily, “no man in the whole Muslim world will say I was unjustified.” At that moment a small red hole appeared in his forehead and the back of his head blew off. The Baby Che group was getting to be known for the marksmanship of its snipers as well as for its land mines and it had a reputation to protect.

The battle for Pachigam didn’t last long. Anees’s men had been well positioned and were eager for the fight. The LeP militants were encircled and outnumbered and, in a few minutes, also dead. Firdaus Noman and the other women put their clothes back on. Firdaus spoke sadly to the dead body of the fifteen-year-old Lashkar commander. “You discovered that women are dangerous, my boy,” she said. “Too bad you didn’t get a chance to become a man and discover we’re also good to love.”

The extermination of the LeP group of radicals failed to reassure some of the villagers. The old dancing master Habib Joo had passed away peacefully in his bed some years earlier, but his grown-up sons and daughter, all in their twenties now, sober, quiet young people who had inherited their father’s love of the dance, still lived in the village. The eldest son, Ahmed Joo, came to inform Abdullah Noman that his younger brother Sulaiman, his sister Razia and he had all decided to go south with the pandit refugees. “How long can Anees protect us?” he said, and went on, “We don’t think it’s a good idea to be Jewish when the Islamists come to town again.” Abdullah knew that the Joo children were gifted dancers like their father, they were the future of the Pachigam bhands except that the Pachigam bhands didn’t seem to have a future. He didn’t try to stop them. The next day the village’s dance troupe was further impoverished when the Sharga girls came to say that they, too, were leaving. Himal and Gonwati had been terrified by the stories of the attacks on pandit families and had forced their father the great old baritone to go with them. “This is no time for songs,” Shivshankar Sharga said, “and, anyway, my singing days are done.”

Sad to say, the Joos and Shargas were not saved by their decision to flee. The crowded bus in which they were heading south met with an accident at the foot of the mountains not far from the Banihal Pass. The driver, terrified of being stopped by anyone, security forces or militants, had been charging onwards as fast as possible. He screeched around a certain bend only to discover that one of the huge piles of garbage that were accumulating everywhere in the valley on account of the breakdown of the sanitation system had toppled forward across the road. Frantically, he took evasive action, but the bus ended up on its side in a roadside ditch. The driver and most of the passengers were seriously injured and one of the older passengers, the noted singer Shivshankar Sharga, was dead.

There followed a long topsy-turvy wait in the crashed bus. The air was full of petrol fumes. Everyone who could scream or cry was doing so. (Himal was screaming, while Gonwati wept.) Others, less vocally capable, contented themselves with moans (the Joo siblings fell into this category), while still others (e.g. the deceased baritone) were unable to make any sound at all. Eventually the emergency services showed up and the injured passengers were hospitalized in a nearby medical facility. The emergency room was dirty. The sheets in it were badly stained. Rusty red marks ran down the walls. There were few beds and the mattresses on the floor were filthy and torn. The passengers were placed on the beds, on the mattresses, on the floor and along the corridor outside. One single doctor, an exhausted young man with a thin moustache and a numbed expression on his face, addressed the crash victims, who continued to scream (Himal), weep (Gonwati) and moan (Ahmed, Sulaiman, Razia Joo) while he spoke. “It is my onerous obligation before proceeding,” the young doctor said, “to offer you our obsequious apologies and to seek from you an obligatory clarification. This is odious but indispensable current routine. Heartfelt apology is primarily offered for understaffing. Many pandit personnel have decamped and policy does not permit replacement. Many ambulance drivers also are being accosted by security forces and are being extremely chastised and therefore no longer are reporting for duty. Apology is secondarily offered for shortages of supplies. Asthma medication is unavailable. Treatment for diabetics is unavailable. Oxygen tanks are unavailable. Owing to load shedding certain medicaments are not refrigerated and condition of said medicaments is dubious. Replacements, however, are unavailable. Apology is additionally offered for failure of all X-ray machines, sterilization devices and such equipment as is designed to analyze blood. Apology is further extended owing to supply of blood not tested for HIV. Ultimate apology is regarding presence of meningitis epidemic in this facility, and for impossibility of quarantining same. Guidance at this time is sought from your good selves. Under circumstances as sorrowfully outlined above you will kindly and severally confirm or de-confirm your wish to be admitted to or de-admitted from this facility so that treatment is able to proceed or de-proceed. Have no doubt, ladies and gentlemen, that if you trust in us we will make our best effort.”

Alas! Not one of the Pachigam contingent of five dancers survived, succumbing to an undetected internal hemorrhage (Himal), an untreated and subsequently gangrenous broken leg (Gonwati), horrific and eventually fatal convulsions brought on by being injected with bad medicines (Ahmed and Razia Joo) and, in the case of Sulaiman Joo, acute viral meningitis caught from a seven-year-old girl who happened to be dying in the bed next to him. There were no relatives on hand to collect the bodies and no facility existed for returning the five dancers to their home village and they were burned on the municipal pyre, even the three Jews.

Their characters were not their destinies.

In early 1991, before the spring thaw, Pandit Pyarelal Kaul felt his life detaching itself from his body in a series of small, painless, inaudible pops. Well, that was all right, he thought, he had nobody to teach anymore except himself, and even to himself he no longer had any knowledge to impart. He spent much time in his small library in those final days, alone with his old books. These books, his true treasure, would also be lost when his time came. He ran his fingers along the worn spines of the treasure vaults on the shelves and pulled out the English romantics.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain.
Ah! Poor Keats. Only the very young could imagine that death was a proper response to beauty. We in Kashmir have heard the Bulbul too, he apostrophized the great poet across space and time, and he may prove to be the death of us all.