He was lonely. In the midst of beauty he was mired in ugliness. If it were not subversive to say that Elasticnagar was a dump then he would have said that it was a dump. But it could not be a dump because it was Elasticnagar and so by definition and by law and so on and so forth. He went into a corner of his mind, a small subversive corner that didn’t exist because it shouldn’t, and he whispered into his cupped hands. Elasticnagar was a dump. It was fences and barbed wire and sandbags and latrines. It was Brasso and spit and canvas and metal and the smell of semen in the bunkhouses. It was a smudge on an illuminated manuscript. It was debris floating on a glassy lake. There were no women. There were no women. The men were going crazy. The men were masturbating like crazy and there were stories of crazy assaults on crazy local girls and when they were able to visit the crazy brothels of Srinagar the crazy wooden houses shook with their crazy exploding lust. There were many Elasticnagars now and they were getting bigger and bigger and some of them were up in the high mountains where there weren’t even goats to fuck so he shouldn’t be complaining, even in the little subversive corner in his head that didn’t exist because by definition and et cetera, he should be proud. He was proud. He was a man of integrity, honor and pride and where were the goddamn girls, why wouldn’t they come near him, he was a single male of wheatish complexion and good family who personally had no communalist-type Hindu-Muslim issues, he was a secularist through and through, and anyway it wasn’t as if he was talking about getting married, the question didn’t arise, but how about a cuddle for your commanding officer, how about a kiss or a goddamn caress?
It was like that bit in The Magnificent Seven where Horst Buchholz discovers that the villagers have been hiding their women from the gunmen they’ve hired to defend them. Except hereabouts the women weren’t hidden away. They just looked through you with their ice-blue eyes their golden eyes their emerald eyes their eyes of creatures from another world. They floated by you on the lakes wearing their scarlet head scarves their burgundy their cobalt head scarves concealing the dark or yellow flame of their hair. They were squatting down on the prows of their little boats like birds of prey and they ignored you as if you were plankton. They didn’t see you. You didn’t exist. How could they even think about kissing you cuddling you kissing you when you didn’t exist? You were living or so it seemed on a shadow planet. You were the creature from another world. You existed without actually existing. Your existence could only be perceived through your effects. The women could see Elasticnagar which was an effect and because they thought it was ugly even though it was illegal to think so they assumed that the invisible men who lived there must be ugly too.
He was not ugly. His voice barked like a British bulldog but his heart was Hindustani. He was unmarried at thirty-one but nothing should be deduced from that. Many men were not prepared to wait but he was resolved to do so. The men under his command cracked and went to brothels. They were of lower caliber than he. He contained his seed, which was sacred. This required self-discipline, this remaining within the bounds of the self and never spilling across one’s frontiers. This building of inner embankments, of dikes, like the Bund in Srinagar. When he walked on the Bund at the edge of the Jhelum he felt he was walking on the defenses of his heart.
He felt full to bursting of his need, of his unholy unfulfilled need, but he did not burst. He held himself in and told nobody his secret. This was his secret, which he attributed to all that was pent up in him, all that was dammed: his senses were changing. There was a bug in the system. His senses were shifting sands. If you devoted too many of your resources to fortifying one front line you left yourself open to an attack on another front. His desires had been reined in and so his senses were playing tricks. He barely had the words to describe these deceptions, these blurrings. He saw sounds nowadays. He heard colors. He tasted feelings. He had to control himself in conversation lest he ask, “What is that red noise?” or criticize the singing of a camouflaged truck. He was in turmoil. Everybody hated him. It was illegal but that didn’t stop them. People said terrible things about what the army did, its violence, its rapaciousness. Nobody remembered the kabailis. They saw what was before their eyes, and what it looked like was an army of occupation, eating their food, seizing their horses, requisitioning their land, beating their children, and there were sometimes deaths. Hatred tasted bitter, like the cyanide in almonds. If you ate eleven bitter almonds you died, that’s what they said. He had to eat hatred every day and yet he was still alive. But his head was whirling. His senses were changing into one another. Their names didn’t make sense anymore. What was hearing? What was taste? He hardly knew. He was in command of twenty thousand men and he thought the color gold sounded like a bass trombone. He needed poetry. A poet could explain him to himself but he was a soldier and had no place to go for ghazals or odes. If he spoke of his need for poetry his men would think him weak. He was not weak. He was contained.
The pressure was building. Where was the enemy? Give him an enemy and let him fight. He needed a war.
Then he saw Boonyi. It felt like the meeting of Radha and Krishna except that he was riding in an army Jeep and he wasn’t blue-skinned and didn’t feel godlike and she barely recognized his existence. Apart from those details it was exactly the same: life-changing, world-altering, mythic, religious. She looked like a poem. His Jeep was enveloped in a cloud of khaki noise. She was with her girlfriends, Himal, Gonwati and Zoon, just like Radha with the milky gopis. Kachhwaha had done his homework. Zoon Misri was the olive-skinned girl who liked to claim descent from the queens of Egypt even though she was only the daughter of the outsized village carpenter Big Man Misri and Himal and Gonwati were the tone-deaf children of Shivshankar Sharga who had the best singing voice in town. The four of them were practicing a dance from one of the bhand plays. Looked like they were playing at being milkmaids, which would be perfect. Kachhwaha didn’t know much about dancing but the dance was all perfume and the look of her was emerald. He was on his way to meet the panchayat of Pachigam to discuss important and difficult issues of resources and subversion but his need spoke to him and he told the driver to stop and got out by himself.
The dancers stopped and faced him. He felt at a loss. He saluted. That was a misstep. That didn’t go down well. He asked to speak to her alone. It came out as a barked command and her girlfriends scattered like breaking glass. She faced him. She was thunder and music. His voice stank of dog turds. He had hardly begun to speak when she guessed his meaning, saw him naked. His hands moved involuntarily to cover his genitals. You are the afsar, she said, Kachhwa Karnail. He flushed. He did not know how to speak his heart. The officer, yes bibi. The officer who-after a lifetime of waiting-of building dams-of saving himself-who profoundly wishes. Who hopes-who most fervently yearns… He said nothing, and she bridled. Have you come to arrest me, she demanded. Am I a subversive, then. Do I need to be beaten on the soles of my feet or electrocuted or raped. Do people need to be protected against me. Is that what you have come to offer. Protection. Her contempt smelled like spring rain. Her voice showered over him like silver. No, bibi, not that way, he said. But she knew the truth already, his burgeoning hangdog desire. Fuck off, she told him, and fled, into the woods, along the stream, anywhere but where he stood on the outskirts of Pachigam with the embankments crumbling around his soul.