Читать книгу Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir - Basharat Peer - Страница 8

The winter of 1989–90 was the longest, most eventful winter in Kashmir, a season of conflict and rebellion that still remains. January and February 1990 had changed Kashmir in profound ways. On the first day of school, I was struck by the number of empty chairs. Five of our Kashmiri Hindu or Pandit classmates were not there. I felt a little numb. “They have left,” someone said. The words exploded like a tracer, dazzling the whitewashed walls of the classroom, the bare blackboard, the varnished wooden surfaces of the desks where the ones who were absent and the ones who were present had scribbled their initials in a suggestive, romantic arithmetic. Our eyes were fixed on the empty chairs for a long time.

Along with killing hundreds of pro-India Muslims, ranging from political activists to suspected informers for Indian intelligence, the militants had killed hundreds of Pandits on similar grounds or without a reason. The deaths had scared the Pandits, and thousands, including my classmates and their families, had left the valley by March 1990 for Jammu, Delhi, and various other Indian cities and towns.

The talk was of war. During the lunch break, my friends and I shared stories of militancy. We began drawing maps of Kashmir on our school notebooks and painted slogans like WAR TILL VICTORY and SELF-DETERMINATION IS OUR BIRTHRIGHT on the school walls. One of my classmates, Asif, a boy with big black eyes and careless curly hair who was popular with the girls, talked about seeing a militant. “I saw one walking near the bus stop. He was wearing a green military uniform and had a badge on the chest that said: JKLF! And he had beautiful blue sports shoes.” “Force 10 shoes?” I asked Asif. Force 10 was a popular running shoe from an Indian company. “No! No! It was Warrior! Warrior is Chinese. It is much better than Force 10.” Asif began to smile and tell me how the guerrilla’s hairstyle was similar to his own: long curly locks. I hoped at least one guerrilla commander had short, straight, spiky, oiled hair like mine.

The best story was about the magical Kalashnikov. Made in Russia, a gift from Pakistan, it was known to have powers greater than Aladdin’s lamp. I remember standing outside our dining hall after lunch and getting into an impromptu discussion about Kalashnikovs. “It is as small as a hand and shoots two hundred bullets,” said Shabnam, my cousin, who was a year senior to us. “No! It is as long as a cricket bat and fires fifty bullets in a minute,” retorted Pervez, my roommate and an enthusiastic footballer whose village was a major stronghold of JKLF. “My brother touched a Kalashnikov,” said Showket, who was a few years younger. “He says it is very light. Yes, it is as long as a small cricket bat. He told Mother that he wanted to become a militant. She cried, and Father slapped him.”

Pervez told me there were many militants in his village who wore beautiful green uniforms. One afternoon we were on the football field when a militant passed by. Even our snooty games teacher went up to him, smiled, and shook hands. Encouraged, we gathered around. “Can we see your gun, please?” Pervez said. He was the center forward, beaming in his blue tracksuit. The militant took off his loose pheran, a cloaklike woolen garment, and showed us his gun. “We call it Kalashnikov, and Indians call it AK-47,” the militant said. We were enraptured and clapped in delight. From then on we all carried our cricket bats inside our pherans, in imitation and preparation.

The next morning before the school assembly, the seniors told us not to chant the Indian national anthem: “We are Kashmiris, and now we are fighting for independence. We cannot go on chanting the Indian songs, even if the principal might like us to.” At the assembly, the students refused to chant the Indian anthem. Our teachers, who would routinely answer disobedience with corporal punishment, remained silent. Nobody threatened to dismiss us from the school; they knew our world had changed, and so had the rules governing it. The school principal, a short, bald man from Rajasthan who promoted laughter therapy, was not laughing. “If you don’t want to sing it, we can’t force you to. Singing a song does not mean much if you don’t believe in the words you speak,” he said in a grave voice.

Outside our small world, there were endless gun battles between the soldiers and the rebels; grenades were lobbed, and mines were exploded—death, fear, and anger had taken over Kashmir. By the summer of 1990, thousands of young Kashmiri men had crossed the Line of Control for arms training in the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir. When they returned as militants, they were heroes—people wanted to talk to them, touch them, hear their stories, and invite them for a feast. Many more were trained in local apple orchards and meadows, earning them the nickname dragud, or meadow. Like almost every boy, I wanted to join them. Fighting and dying for freedom was as desired as the first kiss on adolescent lips.

In the autumn of 1991, when I was fourteen, I walked with four boys from my dorm to a nearby village, looking for guerrillas. We saw a group of young men dressed in fatigues, assault rifles slung on their shoulders, coming from the other side of the road. They were tall and seemed the most glamorous of men; we were awestruck. The white badges on their green military uniforms read JKLF. Standing there in our white-and-gray school uniforms, I blurted out, “We want to join you.” The commander, a lean youth with stubble, laughed. “Go home and grow up, kids!” I was furious. “If you do not take us with you, we will join HM.” Hizbul Mujahideen, a new militant group, was an ideological rival to JKLF and supported the merger of Kashmir with Pakistan. The guerrillas burst into laughter. We continued our meek protests as they left.

We returned to our dorm sulking, talking about a better way to join. We could talk to Students Liberation Front (SLF), the student wing of the JKLF. Some of the JKLF and SLF guerrillas had begun staying in our dorm. They would join us for a game of volleyball, leaving their guns lying casually on the grass by the volleyball court. Or they would be sitting on the dorm veranda, cleaning the Kalashnikovs as I left for classes. A small, curious crowd would grow around them. One of them, who was barely eighteen, did let me hold a Kalashnikov. I felt its cold steel barrel, ran my fingers along its banana-shaped magazine of bullets, posed with its aluminum butt pressed against my right shoulder. It felt fascinating! But then he took it back the next minute and asked me to move on.

One of the commanders was from my village. He was about six feet tall and had a broad forehead and wavy hair. He was a jovial man who had three daughters and used to work as a plumber in the hotels at a nearby tourist resort, Pahalgam. The villagers called him Tonga because he seemed as tall as a horse carriage. He was a lovable rogue and the stories of his adventures were often told at the village shop fronts. During the tourist season in Pahalgam, he was in great demand. He would fiddle with the supply pipes and insert blockages that stopped the water to hotel rooms. The desperate hoteliers would then pay him a desired price to fix things up. But the tourists stopped coming to Kashmir after the winter of 1990, the hotels shut down, and Tonga joined the JKLF. Every time I would see Tonga, he would ask about my family and tell me to study harder. “I will ask your teachers how you are doing.” And “Give my greetings to Peer Sahib and Masterji.”

But my friends and I were still dreaming up ways to go for arms training. Groups of boys left for training camps in Pakistan every other day. We needed some money for the bus fare to the border towns, we needed winter clothes and good shoes for a potential trek through snowy mountains, but most of all, we needed a guerrilla commander who didn’t know our families and would let us join a group leaving for the border.

One day we were interrupted in geometry class by a knock. The teacher went out and returned to tell me that my uncle was here. A bank manager in his early thirties, Bashir was a fashion icon for my brother and me. I admired his baggy jeans and checked shirts and slicked-back hair, like John Travolta’s in Grease, and the mysterious accent of his English, which he had picked up from some German friends.

I shouted a loud greeting, and we hugged. He was carrying a bag, and I promptly volunteered to carry it. “That is our lunch! Your mother made chicken for us.” He threw an arm around my shoulder. “Let’s go to your room and eat.” The thought of home-cooked chicken after the bland lentils and rice that dominated our hostel menu filled me with great joy.

My room was small, bare except for two beds, two small bookshelves, and two closets for clothes. I laid out a cotton sheet on my bed, and we began eating. Uncle stopped between morsels to watch me devour the pieces of chicken.

I shrugged. “I am hungry.”

He laughed, but something seemed wrong.

“Everything fine at home?” I asked.

“Yes. All is well.”

We continued eating, and I asked, “Why didn’t you go to the bank today?”

“Nothing! I was talking to your father last night, and then I thought I should come and save you from the lentils.”

After lunch we walked about the campus and sat near a rose bed. We talked about my studies. He said my father dreamed of seeing me in the civil service. “Your father struggled very hard to get where he is. He has great hopes for you. I know you will do us proud,” he said. “I met your school principal and he had great things to say about you.” I shook my head.

Uncle stared at the school buildings for a long time. “You will be done here in two years.” “Yes, 1993.”

“You know what? You must go to Delhi.” He went on to paint a romantic picture of the colleges and universities in New Delhi. “You would have a great time there. Your father and I were talking about it last night.”

I shook my head. Yes. Maybe. “How is Baba?” I asked of Grandfather.

“He is getting older by the day. And he misses you a lot. You should come home for a few days. He will be happy.”

I quickly packed my bags, and soon we were walking to the nearest bus stop. A scrawl of graffiti on the wall of a nearby house read: WAR TILL VICTORY—JKLF. “So that is the group you want to join,” my uncle said, smiling.

“JKLF? Me?” I denied everything.

He shook his head slowly. “We know all about it,” and he told me about the meeting waiting for me at home.

The bus passed a few villages separated by empty paddies and conical haystacks, almost golden in the autumn sun. We crossed an old bridge over a stream rushing toward my village. I saw the familiar peaks of the village mountain and a medieval canal running alongside. Before moving to my school, I rarely left the village except for occasional visits to Anantnag or Srinagar. When I went away even for a day, on my return I would be impatient for the sighting of a landmark: an old shingle-roofed hut on the slope of the village mountain. I saw it again.

The bus stopped in the village square. Uncle continued his journey to the next village, where he lived. I grew a bit stiff, dreading the encounter at home. Standing by the bus stop, I took in my house—the one with the green windows stacked with five others in a row on the right side of the road. Abu, the cricket-obsessed butcher, was chopping pieces of lamb; Amin, the short and wiry chemist who always wore an Irish cap, stood outside his shop; Kaisar, the tailor who regaled the village boys with ribaldries, was bent over his sewing machine; Hasan, the baker famed for his wisecracks, sat behind a stack of sesame-seed bagel-like chochevaer; old Saifuddin, my grandmother’s cousin who noted every new presence and kept a severe eye on the goings-on in the neighborhood from his grocery, was watching people alight from the bus; a group of boys I used to play cricket with hung around the stationery store next to the grocery; and a few older men sat at an empty storefront next to Amin’s pharmacy, talking.

It felt like standing on a familiar stage, facing a familiar audience. I shouted greetings at people on the far side of the road and shook hands along the storefronts on our side. Anxious about the encounter at home, I made my greetings a little more elaborate at every stop: the baker, the pharmacy, the butcher, the tailor, and finally, a hop across the road to hug Saifuddin, and repeat the same litany:

“Assalamualikum! How are you?”

“Valikumsalam! I am happy. I am well. How are you?”

“I am happy. I am well.”

“You just arrived?”

“Yes, I just got off the bus.”

“How is school?”

“School is good.”

“Are you working hard?”

“Yes, very much.”

“You must work very hard. You are the future.”

“I will. Thanks.”

“How is business?”

“Thank God! It is all right.”

“How is everyone at home?”

“They are well. You should come for tea.”

When I arrived home, Grandfather made me sit beside him. Father was on his way back home from work in Srinagar. Uncle, Grandmother, and mother formed a semicircle around us. I was silent, unsure what to say. “May I have a cup of tea, please?” I tried. Mother had already poured me one from the samovar. I traced the pinkish flowers embossed on the white porcelain cup in between sips. Grandfather turned to Mother. “Hama, you remember his first day of school.”

She looked up with a forced smile. “Yes! I had dressed him in a white shirt and gray shorts and his red necktie. And then you took him along.”

Grandfather seemed to stare into a distant time for a long moment, and then he laughed a bit and said to me, “I dropped you at your school and went to teach at my school. You had cried and shouted so much that an hour later, your teacher brought you to my office.”

“Most children cry,” I said.

Then he repeated the oft-told story of how, inspired by my Superman comics, I once jumped from the first-floor window. My younger brother helped me tie my pheran like a cape. I broke my right arm. This buildup to the real question was irritating me. I was thinking of walking out. They could see it.

Mother looked at me and said nothing. Grandfather fixed his watery green eyes on me. “How do you think this old man can deal with your death?” he said. His words hit me like rain on a winter morning.

I had nothing to say and stared at the carpet. I imagined myself lying dead on a wooden board on our lawn, surrounded by our neighbors and relatives. My mother had fainted, and someone was throwing water on her face. Father was holding the board, his head was buried in his arms, and his shoulders were shaking.

“You don’t live long in a war, son.” Grandfather’s words brought me back. He had tears in his eyes.

A muezzin’s voice came from the mosque loudspeaker, calling the faithful to afternoon prayers. Mother adjusted her casually worn head scarf, and Grandfather rose to leave for the prayers. “Think about your father! He is coming all the way from Srinagar only because he is worried about you. God knows what will happen on the way,” Mother said.

“I will keep an eye on the buses,” I said, and walked out.

I had been talking to a few neighborhood men for an hour when Father got off a bus, wearing one of his blue suits and carrying a bundle of books. We all stood up; I reflexively rushed to get his books and files. A chorus of greetings followed. “How are you?” “How are things in the city?” “Hope the journey was fine. The highway has become very dangerous.” Father seemed tired but calm.

At home, we took our usual places, and another round of tea followed. Father sorted the books and picked up a commentary on the Quran in English. “You must read it. You will understand religion and improve your English. You must also read the Bible, which is very good for your language skills.” Father went around in circles, talking about the story of Ishmael and Isaac. “You need the permission of your parents even if you want to be a KLF commander,” he said in a half-serious voice. He made it easy somehow.

“I know,” I replied.

“Especially if you are fourteen.” He smiled. “That is four years short of the voting age.” I said nothing.

He looked directly at me and said, “I won’t stop you.” I couldn’t hide my astonishment.

“I won’t stop you,” he repeated. “But maybe you should read and think about it for a few years and then decide for yourself. At that point I will not say that you should or should not join any group.”

I found myself nodding in agreement. “From what I have read, I can tell you that any movement that seeks a separate country takes a very long time. It took India many decades to get freedom from the British. The Tibetans have been asking for independence from China for over thirty years. Czechoslovakia won its freedom from dictatorship; even that took a long time.”

Father continued to argue that rebellions were long affairs led by educated men. “Nehru and Gandhi studied law in England and were both very good writers. You have seen their books in our library. Václav Havel is a very big writer. The Dalai Lama has read a lot and can teach people many things. None of them used guns but they changed history. If you want to do something for Kashmir, I would say you should read.”

I stayed in the classroom. But the conflict had intensified. Fear and chaos ruled Kashmir. Almost every person knew someone who had joined the militants or was arrested, tortured, or beaten by the troops. Fathers wished they had daughters instead of sons. Sons were killed every day. Mothers prayed for the safety of their daughters. People dreaded knocks on their doors at night. Men and women who left home for the day’s work were not sure they would return; thousands did not. Graveyards began to spring up everywhere, and marketplaces were scarred with charred buildings. People seemed to always be talking about the border and crossing the border; it had become an obsession, an invisible presence.

School was quiet, mundane. Breakfast. Classes. Lunch. Classes. Football. Cricket. Homework. The guerrillas occasionally took shelter in my dorm and occasionally joined us for a game of football. Familiarity had shorn off their glamour somewhat.

Shabnam, my cousin, was one of the finest volleyball players on the school team. I began taking volleyball lessons from him and spent more time on the field trying to perfect a serve and a smash. Shabnam had learned his cricket and volleyball from his older brother, Tariq, who had recently finished college. Every time I visited them and my uncle Rahman, I would see Tariq playing cricket on the enormous field near their house, with Shabnam hanging out on the sidelines.

My father was very attached to Uncle Rahman, his oldest cousin, who had raised him after his parents died. Uncle Rahman was a police officer, a tall, dark man with big black eyes who often talked about his long stint as a bodyguard of Sheikh Abdullah. He ironed his uniform immaculately and polished his brown police boots till they shone. He had recently retired and, in his civilian days, donned the seventies double-breasted suits and fezzes that Sheikh Abdullah wore. “You should be an all-rounder. Be the best in the classroom, and be the best on the playground,” he would tell me.

He would walk to the field occasionally to see Tariq play. “Tariq would look good as a police officer,” he often said. Tariq had graduated in mathematics and chemistry, but he was more of a sportsman. He saw me as a bookworm and entertained himself by asking me random questions: How many astronauts were onboard Apollo 13? What is an F-16? What is the symbol for sulfuric acid? I knew all the answers. Shabnam didn’t care much about such things, but he would try to teach me a few things about cricket and volleyball.

With Shabnam’s help, I was swaggering a bit on the school volleyball field. One late autumn day just before a game, I saw Shabnam walking out of the dorm with his bags. He was quiet, and there was a darkness in his eyes. “What is wrong?” I asked.

He dropped his bag on the lawn; his face was pale. “Tariq has gone across the border!”

I knew that crossing the border to be a guerrilla meant being killed. Shabnam went home. A few days later I visited my aunt and uncle. Tariq had left suddenly without telling anyone; Uncle Rahman was chain-smoking his hookah. He seemed to have aged in a few days. My aunt was in shock and trying to deal with it by busying herself with unnecessary chores such as arranging and rearranging the plates and bowls on the kitchen shelves, flitting out to fix the clothes drying on the line in the courtyard, and then disappearing again to buy sugar when there was already sugar in the house. Uncle Rahman watched her in silence and then laughed a little laugh that seemed to scream all his love and all his pain. I fought my tears; he puffed on his hookah again. “When I was in the police, nobody in my jurisdiction dared disobey me. My son has crossed the border without even telling me.” A rivulet of tears escaped his eye and rolled down his rough, wrinkled face. I had never seen him cry.

Soon somebody connected to the group that Tariq had joined sent a message to the family that he had crossed the border and was in Muzaffarabad, the Pakistan-controlled capital of Kashmir, where most arms-training camps for Kashmiris were run. But one could not be sure, and there was no way to confirm that Tariq had indeed safely crossed the border.

Back at school, Shabnam hoped that Tariq was safe and eagerly awaited his return. In his hostel room, Shabnam listened to the Muzaffarabad-based Sada-e-Hurriyat (Voice of Freedom) radio. Every evening the separatist radio station ran a popular show of songs interspersed with propaganda and messages from listeners. When a militant in training wanted to let his family know how he was, he requested a song, and a message was played along with it. The messages said things like: “Tahir Mir from Soura, Srinagar, likes the program and requests this song be played.” His family and relatives heard the message and knew he was safe.

Shabnam and I were sitting on a bench outside our dorm. He had brought out his black Phillips radio, and we listened to the songs and messages. The show’s hosts were notorious for over-the-top rhetoric and propaganda. One of the hosts, who called himself Malik, would prophesize about Kashmir getting independence in a week and how he would travel across the border from Pakistan-controlled Kashmir to the Indian-ruled Kashmir and drink kahwa at the Jehangir Hotel, a prominent hotel in Srinagar, the next Friday.

But Shabnam and I were tense when we listened to the program. We heard the messages and waited for familiar names. For months there was no message from Tariq. Every day Shabnam listened for a message from his older brother; every day he hoped for news and fended off rumors: “Tariq was arrested on the border.” “Someone said he was killed on his way back.” “A boy from Pulwama who returned met him in a training camp.” Every time someone from a neighboring village returned after completing his training, Shabnam or one of my other cousins visited his family seeking news of Tariq. Word of mouth was the only source of news.

One day after dinner, Shabnam was lying on his bed, holding the radio like a pillow, and listening to the show. I was talking to his roommate. The usual songs played: “The Daughters of Srinagar! The Brave Daughters of Srinagar!” A few minutes of messages and another song: “Wake up! The morning is here! Martyrs’ blood has bloomed! The flags of victory are flying! Wake up! The morning is here!” The hosts’ voices droned a litany of names and addresses; I continued talking. And then a sudden loud thump startled Shabnam’s roommate and me; Shabnam had jumped off the bed and stood a few feet away, holding the radio in his left hand. “It is Tariq! It is Tariq! Basharat, he really is alive! It said, ‘Tariq Peer from Salia, Islamabad, likes the show and requests this song.’”

Around a year after he had crossed the border, Tariq returned home. Friends, relatives, and neighbors had descended on Uncle Rahman’s old, decrepit house. I couldn’t even find a place to take off my shoes. The veranda and the corridor had turned into a multicolored jumble of sandals, loafers, and sneakers. I walked into the large room with green walls. A new floral rug had been laid out; men, women, and children sat against cushions along the walls. Shabnam carried a gleaming tin-plated copper samovar, pouring kahwa into the porcelain cups placed in front of every guest; another boy carrying a wicker basket served chochevaer. A hundred eyes were focused on a single face: Tariq’s. He was sitting on a velvet-covered cushion, the one used for Kashmiri grooms. “Mubarak Chuv!Mubarak Chuv!” (Congratulations! Congratulations!) every new guest shouted from the gate. “Shukr Khodayus, Sahee Salamat Vot!” (Thank God! You made it back safe.) Men shook his hand and hugged him. Women embraced him and smothered his forehead with kisses. “Miyon Nabi Thay-inay Vaarey!” (May my Prophet protect you!)

Uncle Rahman sat next to Tariq; he seemed to have accepted the difficult truth that Tariq had become a militant and was on a path of great danger. I walked up to Tariq and hugged him. “You have grown taller!” he said. I smiled. “You have grown thinner,” I replied. His round face seemed sunken; he had cut his long curly hair short, like a soldier’s, but his big black eyes had retained their familiar spark. He looked neat in white kurta pajamas, almost like a groom. My eyes wandered to his fatal bride, the Kalashnikov hidden under a thick green sport coat by his side. Outside, neighborhood boys strained their eyes and ears for signs of military vehicles; the family was afraid that the military might raid if they got word of Tariq’s homecoming from an informer.

The militant son talked. The retired-police-officer father listened, as did the roomful of people. They listened as if Tariq were Marco Polo bringing tidings of a new world. He told us about his journey to Pakistan and back. He and his friends had taken a bus for Srinagar. A point man from the militant group waited for them at the crowded Batamaloo bus station in southern Srinagar. There they boarded a bus for the north Kashmir town of Baramulla. The bus was full of employees returning home after work. The driver played Bollywood songs, and the passengers talked about the militant movement. Some passengers seemed to recognize Tariq and his friends as boys out to cross the border and smiled at them. There were neither checkpoints nor military patrols. The boys spent the night in Baramulla at a stranger’s house with two more groups of young men wanting to cross the border. The next morning the three groups boarded a bus to Kupwara, the town closest to the LoC. The ticket collector refused to accept a fare from them. Kupwara teemed with young men from every part of Kashmir, waiting to cross the border.

Tariq and his friends were introduced to a man who was to take them across the mountains. Men like him were referred to as guides. They were often natives of the border villages who knew the terrain well. Wearing Duck Back rubber shoes, carrying rucksacks full of clothes and food, they left Kupwara in a truck. By evening, they had reached the village of Trehgam, a few miles from the LoC. They waited in a hideout till night fell. In the darkness, they followed their guide. They climbed ridges, crawled past the bunkers of the Indian troops, climbed again throughout the night. The guide had instructed them not to light a cigarette or litter. Cigarettes could invite fire if noticed by a soldier’s binoculars; biscuit wrappers in the jungle could expose their route. They held hands and walked in silence. Dawn came, and they hid in the brush, behind the fir and pine trees growing on the mountains forming the border. They passed the day, apprehensive of being spotted by Indian troops. Night fell. They trekked again till the last Indian check post. It was still dark when they crawled beneath the Indian post overlooking them and reached the Pakistani post on the other side. The next day Tariq was in Muzaffarabad. He was taken to an arms-training camp run by the Pakistani military. For six months he trained in using small arms, land mines, and rocket-propelled grenades.

Tariq wandered around in Pakistan for a few months, waiting for his turn before returning home a year later. “They have Indian movies there,” he said. “I watched some. And you can buy the cassettes for all new songs.” “Really, in Pakistan!” someone said. “Did you watch any?” another person asked. Shabnam and I looked at each other and smiled. A few minutes later, someone asked about the journey back across the mountainous border. Tariq said, “The snow was melting, but still there was a lot of it.” He was bolder on his way back; every guerrilla in his group carried a bagful of ammunition and a Kalashnikov. The trek took three days. The ammunition bags were heavy. “Whoever was tired would lighten the bags. We buried food packages and some bullet magazines in the snow.” Thousands of boys like Tariq had passed through the snows since his journey to Pakistan a year before. He saw the evidence of their encounters with the Indian border troops on the way: skeletons lying under the fir trees; a pair of shoes lying by a rock. They almost got killed when they came face-to-face with a group of boys crossing from Srinagar. They were dressed in military fatigues, as was the fashion among the militants those days. Tariq and his group thought they were Indian soldiers. Their guides whistled, a code signaling they were on the same side. The Srinagar guide responded; the boys shook hands and moved on. Tariq and his friends had an encounter with Indian paramilitaries near the border town of Kupwara. “Three in our group were killed,” he said. “One of them was from Kupwara. He would have been home in half an hour.” The mood changed, and the room was filled with exhortations: “Life and death are in the hands of Almighty God.” “Those who die for the truth always live.” “Thank God! You got home safe.” “My Prophet will protect you!” A bullet had grazed Tariq’s leg, tearing a hole in his trousers. Later, Shabnam showed me the trousers.

Visitors kept arriving, among them an emaciated woman in a loose floral pheran. She stood a few feet from Tariq, staring at his face for a long time. He rose from his seat and hugged her. She was from a neighboring village. Her son had crossed the border for arms training. She had been told he was killed while crossing back. Families whose sons had died while crossing the LoC, where the bodies could not be recovered, held funerals in absentia. People offered funeral prayers with an empty coffin or without a coffin. This woman had had such a funeral for her son, but she had not reconciled herself to the news of his death. She sat in front of Tariq and held his hands. “Tariq, my dear, my son, they told me he was martyred on the border!” The room fell silent; every eye stopped on her sad, grieving face. “My heart doesn’t agree. Tariq, my dear, tell me they are lying. Tell me you saw my rose! You were there, too. You must have seen my rose!”

Tariq embraced her. “Yes, I saw him. He is waiting to cross back. He is waiting for his turn.”

I am unsure whether he told her the truth, but she kissed his forehead again and again and broke down. “My son will come home.”

Homecomings for militants were short-lived. Tariq would visit his parents once or twice a month, but his visits were always hurried and stealthy. He lived in unknown hideouts with other guerrillas, planning attacks on Indian military camps and convoys. Though I had seen guerrillas his age walking around or even preparing to attack a military convoy near my house, I failed to imagine Tariq in battle, firing a gun, hurling a grenade, exploding a land mine, killing. But that was the life he had chosen. And Indian soldiers were looking for him. They often knocked at Uncle Rahman’s door, looking for Tariq, beating Uncle Rahman and Tariq’s two older brothers, seeking information about his whereabouts and telling Uncle Rahman to ask Tariq to surrender or be ready to die the day the soldiers found him.

I saw Tariq for the last time in August 1992, a few hundred meters from my uncle’s house on a plateau that served twice a year as the venue for ceremonial Eid prayers, and the rest of the time as a cricket field.

August 14 and 15 are the Pakistani and Indian independence days. Pro-Pakistan militants hold celebratory parades on August 14, and a day later, the Indian Independence Day is declared a Black Day. On August 15 traffic stops, shops close, schools shut down, identity checks by Indian troops increase, and life freezes. In Srinagar, however, pro-India politicians who form the local state government herd groups of their supporters and force government schools to gather contingents of schoolchildren on a cricket field guarded by hundreds of Indian paramilitaries. Then the politicians hoist the Indian flag. Outside the stadium, the streets remain empty.

On August 14, 1992, Shabnam and I watched Tariq and other guerrillas celebrate Pakistani Independence Day on the cricket field. Thousands had gathered for the spectacle. We sneaked through the crowd to the front row for a better view. Militant leaders made fiery speeches in favor of Pakistan and raised separatist slogans. We stared at the militants in their green uniforms, holding their rifles. They performed military stunts and sang battle songs to a clapping audience. A militant leader raised the Pakistani flag after the songs. His men fired into the air. Then someone said that an army patrol was approaching the village, and the gathering vaporized.

A year after I saw Tariq in the parade, soldiers stopped knocking on his parents’ door. They had killed him in a raid on his hideout.