Читать книгу Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir - Basharat Peer - Страница 9

The fighting had changed the meaning of distance. I came home almost every weekend from school. The black sliver of the road made its way through an expanse of rice and mustard fields, willow groves, grand Iranian maple or chinar trees alongside a flamboyant stream, and the huddled houses of a few small villages. But the six-mile ride on a local bus was dangerous. Military and paramilitary trucks drove on the same road, carrying supplies between various camps or going on raids in the villages. Guerrillas hiding in the fields by the road would often fire at the military convoys or detonate mines planted in the road. Soldiers would retaliate after such attacks, firing in all directions and beating anyone they could lay their hands on.

One weekend on my way home, I was standing in the bus aisle near the driver. Kashmiri buses are like noisy cafés; almost everyone knows everyone else, and voices of varying pitches fill the vehicle. The driver played a Bollywood song, its melancholy lyrics floating over the din. A mile into the journey, a paramilitary convoy overtook our bus and hovered just ahead of us. The voices in the bus lowered, and the driver turned off the music. Soldiers had realized that driving close to a civilian bus would keep guerrillas from attacking them. Anxiety filled the bus. Our driver began praying feverishly: “God, I have three small children, please don’t make them orphans today. Please get us safely to our homes today.” We drove in silence, waiting. The minutes passed, and the paramilitary convoy gathered speed. Our driver slowed, and the distance between us grew. We were in a village called Siligam, midway between my school and my house, when I heard a loud explosion. The driver slammed on the brakes, and in the distance, we saw a paramilitary truck skid off the road and land in the fields. I heard a barrage of bullets—the lighter sounds Kalashnikovs; the heavier, retaliatory bursts, light machine guns. The driver swung the bus around and sped back as fast as he could. Everyone crouched under the seats.

I sat on the floor, gripping a seat. The roar of the engine rose above the sound of bullets being fired. I was thinking where a bullet might hit me; I desperately hoped it would not be my face, my head, or my right hand. I became intensely aware of my body. I felt the tension in my spinal cord, the nakedness of my neck, the stiffening of my legs. Where would a bullet hurt the most? I buried my head in my knees and closed my eyes.

We were driving away from the battle. I began listing the guns that could still hit us. We seemed out of the killing range of an AK-47 and a carbine submachine gun, but a self-loading rifle, a light or heavy machine gun, and a 51 mm mortar gun could easily hit us. A little while later, the driver stopped the bus. I stood up in a quick, involuntary motion. Two men hugged the driver. “You saved our life,” another man said, and shook his hand. An old man began to cry. A woman patted his back and consoled him. I smiled at everyone. We got off the bus and drank from a roadside stream. The driver and a few other men smoked cigarettes.

We had just gotten back on and begun to drive back to the bus yard in the village of Aishmuqam, near my school, when a convoy of paramilitary trucks hurtled toward us. The convoy stopped, and so did we. Armed soldiers circled the bus, and an angry paramilitary officer ordered us out. We stood in a queue on the road. I was close to the door and the first one to get down. I was in my school uniform and carried a school bag. The officer raised his gun like a baton. I waited to be hit by the weapon. I could not remove my eyes from his. He lowered the gun and pushed me with his other hand. I knew he was going to shoot me. But then he grabbed my arm and shouted, “You are from the school near our camp. I see you pass by every day. Now get out of here.” He let the bus and everyone on it go. As we arrived at the bus yard, a crowd gathered.

Two hours later, another bus arrived, and its driver told me, “You are lucky that no soldier was killed by the land mine. The road is open now, but they have begun a crackdown in the surrounding villages.” Fifteen minutes later, we passed the spot where the mine had gone off. I saw no soldiers, no military trucks. There were only the willow trees lining the road, the paddy fields, the tin roofs of a village beyond the fields, and a large crater on the right corner of the road, carved out by the explosion. We drove past a few villages where the shops had been closed and the streets were empty except for patrolling paramilitary soldiers. Fortunately, they let our bus pass.

A few weeks later, I was home again. That weekend we expected Father to visit from his office in Srinagar, which was wracked with violence. Each day on BBC World Service, we heard reports of scores of deaths there. The solemn voice of Yusuf Jameel, the BBC’s Srinagar correspondent, rang through our radios each evening: “I am hearing the sound of gunfire.” The fatal sound of bullets would play on the radio for a few seconds, and Jameel’s stoic voice would follow: “Yet another unidentified body has been found in the river Jhelum in Srinagar.”

Late in the afternoon Mother sent me to buy lamb chops for the dinner she was making for Father. I stepped out of the house and saw Mother’s grand-uncle, the white-haired Saifuddin, sitting by his grocery counter and scanning the market. He didn’t do much business but knew everything that happened in the neighborhood, as he spent most of his time watching who went where, and asking relentless questions. He waved at me and asked, “Today is a Saturday! Is Peer Sahib coming home?”

“Yes, he should be here soon,” I replied.

“I only asked because I haven’t seen Masterji [my grandfather] at the butcher’s shop yet. He usually buys meat by this time on a Saturday. I was wondering if everything is fine. God knows this is a dangerous time.”

I assured him that Grandfather was busy with some chore, and I was buying the meat. I walked toward the butcher, and the few neighborhood men hanging about the pharmacy and the tailor’s shop called out, “How was the interview?”

“Oh! The usual. He hadn’t seen Grandfather buying meat yet,” I said.

Everybody laughed. Abu, the butcher, was looking our way, smiling. “This neighborhood won’t be the same without Saifuddin. At least he asks about everyone.” He began cutting lamb chops for me, instructing me along the way about the parts Grandfather would ask for. And then: “Masterji must have gone to check the apple orchard. Or the fields.”

“No, he is home, fixing some electrical stuff.”

Then I noticed a group of young men with guns standing near the bus stop. Tonga, the tall JKLF man from our village, was with them. Some village boys had begun calling him Rambo, but the elders still called him Tonga. A small crowd of villagers had gathered around Tonga and were arguing about something. Abu and I looked at each other. “God knows what Tonga is up to,” he said, sighing. I rushed to find out. Tonga and his cohorts were planning to attack a convoy of Indian troops supposed to pass by our village. The villagers were trying to persuade them against it. They were addressing Tonga by his real name. “Mohiuddin Sahib, you are our son, you are from our own village. You have to stop this attack.” “Mohiuddin Sahib, you know what the soldiers do after an attack. Do you want your own village burned?” “Have you forgotten we have young daughters? Do you want soldiers to barge into our homes? Have the fear of God, this is your own village!”

Tonga moved away from his sullen comrades to explain himself to the villagers. “I know! I know! I swear by my mother, I can’t do anything. Every time my commanders plan an action here, I fight with them. Don’t I know? My old mother lives here; my three daughters live here.”

Hasan the baker held Tonga’s hands. “Please! Do something.”

Abu joined in. “Mohiuddin dear, please. You can save the village. Please.”

Even the old Saifuddin left his perch and came up to him. “Mohiuddin Sahib, you are my son. Rahet, your mother, is like my sister. Remember that! And look at my white hair and white beard! Where will I run?”

Tonga held his hands. “You are like my father, and I am like your son. But I can’t stop it today. Please, close the shops and leave! Please, we don’t have much time.”

The villagers gave up. The shopkeepers pulled their shutters. I ran home. “Mummy, KLF people are outside. They are going to attack a convoy,” I shouted. “Tonga is there, too, but he can’t stop his commander. We have to run.” Everybody panicked. Mother folded the sleeves of her pheran and asked everyone to shut up. She was in schoolteacher mode, and everyone listened to her. She hid the jewelry of her sisters that was kept in our house. Grandfather got a bag of the family’s academic degrees, professional documents, cash, and passbooks. We were ready to leave through the door opening onto the vegetable garden behind the house. Then Mother said, “What about the books?” We looked at one another.

Father had built his library over the years. Each book had his name and a book number on the first page in either his scrawly handwriting or in Mother’s neater letters. I had spent long hours in his library. There were the great Russian writers in thick People’s Publishing House hardbacks that were sold in the mobile bookshops run by the Communist Party of India; there were the American and European novelists in slim paperbacks; there were the great Urdu writers Premchand, Manto, Ghalib, Iqbal, and Faiz. And there were histories, law books, commentaries on religion and politics in South Asia. The most beautiful of my father’s books was The Complete Works of William Shakespeare—a thick edition, leather-bound, with gold-tinted pages. His books were those of a self-taught man, books that had shaped him, helped him build his life; they made him stand out when he talked about worlds and ideas that few men in our world could talk about. Touching their spines, running my fingers along their fonts, feeling the smoothness of their paper, and being mesmerized by their stories made me feel closer to Father and that I shared his connection to a magical world.

But there was nothing to be done; we had to leave the books in the house. We stepped into the backyard. Grandmother kept looking toward the house. “Sahib must be here anytime,” she repeated. The sun was sinking in the sky, and we expected Father to arrive at any moment. “God will keep him safe. There is nothing you can do by staring,” Mother shouted at her, and bolted the locks.

Our neighbors were standing on their lawns with a few bags. Yusuf and his sons, Manzoor, Khalid, and Asif, were there. “Now what are we staring at!” Grandfather roared, and we began walking away. Amin, the chemist, was walking with his family; Abu, the butcher, was there with his wife and sons. A little ahead, I saw Kaisar, the ribald tailor, helping his father to safety. And Gul Khan, the old farmer who gave the call for prayers, was carrying his tiny granddaughter on his shoulders. Soon our walk turned into a run. I hoped that Father would hear about the attack and stay away; I hoped that nobody would be killed in the attack and the soldiers would not set our house on fire. I thought of some of my most beloved things: books, the black-and-white television, the Sony radio, the Polaroid camera.

Our village was emptying fast, almost everyone running toward Numbul, the adjacent village. It lay across some paddy fields and the Lidder, our local stream. The blue-green waters of the Lidder rushing through the fields bubbled over the stones. The wild grass grew by the stream, the willows swayed, and the paddies were ripening. The mountains stood witness. In the open sky, crows and eagles wandered and whirled. Indifferent. They continue with their own seasons.

We were half a kilometer from the Lidder when the first bullet was fired. Yusuf tried running faster, Grandfather stopped, and Gul Khan lay on his stomach in the fields, holding his granddaughter. I had an urge to laugh when I saw that Yusuf was running with his left hand covering his left cheek as if it could stop a bullet. Every few seconds, we heard the crackle of bullets. Kalashnikovs used by the militants sounded different from the machine guns and other rifles used by the soldiers. Yusuf’s son Manzoor tried to tell from the sounds who was shooting. “Now the military is firing back. The militants seem to have stopped firing.” His normally calm father slapped him.

The guns were still booming when we reached Numbul. Every door there was open to us. I do not know whose house we rushed into. We were ushered into a room. People from our village were already there, sitting silently along the wall, with half-empty cups of tea. As my family followed Grandfather into the room, two young men stood up and offered him and Grandmother their places; another took the cushion he was leaning against and placed it against the wall for Grandfather. “This is not a time for formality,” Grandfather protested. Tea followed. Nobody said much. We listened to the faint sound of gunfire.

After a while, Grandfather and a few other men stepped outside. I followed. We stood looking toward our village; all I could see were distant treetops, a few minarets, and the village mountain. Nobody said it, but each of us was searching the horizon for flames and smoke. Gunpowder doesn’t take long to burn a village. But I saw no smoke, only a slowly darkening sky.

I imagined people stopping a local bus in a neighboring village, telling the driver about the attack and turning it back. I imagined Father holding his newspapers and office files, getting off the bus, and staying with an acquaintance. But I could not ignore thoughts of the bus driving toward our village or getting caught in cross fire. I fully understood for the first time that he was making dangerous journeys week after week to see us.

The guns fell silent some time later. We stayed in Numbul that night. The next morning we headed back, anxious and edgy. Our walk home was brisk, punctuated only by short greetings to acquaintances and curious looks at village houses, searching for signs of the last evening’s battle. We came to a sudden stop when we reached our backyard. My grandparents, Mother, my brother, my aunts, and I were transfixed for a moment, staring at our untouched home, as if we had sighted a new moon. I rushed into our courtyard. Father was standing on the veranda. “I heard about it on the way and stayed in Islamabad at Mohammad Amin’s.” He spoke casually.

I shook his hand. “Were you all right?”

Father smiled. “Yes! We were fine.”

Grandfather repeated the details of our flight and our stay at Numbul. I joined in and gave the account of seeing the militants on the road and the conversations villagers had with Tonga. My younger brother couldn’t be silent either. “Daddy, Basharat was crying when we were in Numbul.” Father looked away, pretending not to hear him. “Let’s go inside!” he said.

We went around checking each room facing the road for signs of damage. A few bullets were stuck in the ceiling in Father’s room, and a few more had pierced the walls in the drawing room and the guest room facing the road. Grandfather pulled out the cartridges with pliers. We looked at them for a few moments and then threw them away.

By late afternoon, Father was sitting in his usual corner in our drawing room, a few books and a boiling samovar of tea by his side. My brother and I sat facing him. Every now and then, a friend or a relative would drop by, and tales of the previous night were recounted. In between these tellings, Father would recite a verse or two of Urdu poetry or a passage from Shakespeare and then turn to my brother and me: “Whoever explains this verse will get five rupees.”