An air of calamity was rapidly enveloping the village. The fruit orchards, saffron fields and rice paddies lay empty and untended as those who habitually labored there put down tools and gathered outside the Noman residence where the panchayat was meeting. No food was cooked in the villagers’ kitchens that afternoon. Children ran barefoot hither and yon, gleefully shouting out ill-founded rumors of banishment and suicide. Boonyi and her three friends huddled together, arms around one another, in an inward-facing circle of misery from which loud wails and sobs of anguish escaped constantly. Even the livestock had divined that something was wrong; goats and cattle, dogs and geese displayed the kind of instinctive or premonitory agitation that is sometimes seen in the hours before an earthquake. Bees stung their keepers with unwonted ferocity. The very air seemed to shimmer with concern and there was a rumble in the empty sky. Firdaus Noman came for Boonyi, running with an ungainly lolloping gait, panting heavily, and screamed abuse at the judas Gopinath sitting calmly by the riverside. “Carbuncle!” she cursed him. “Clovenhoof! Bad-smell buttock! Little penis! Dried-up brinjal!” The object of her wrath, the zaharbad, the pedar, the possessor of the smelly mandal, the wee kuchur, the wangan hachi, neither turned nor flinched. “Wattal-nath Gopinath!” Firdaus screamed-that is to say, mean-spirited, low-life, degraded Gopinath-and Boonyi’s friends broke away from their circle to take up the chant. “Wattal-nath Gopinath! Gopinath Wattal-nath!” Through the village went that cry, taken up by the eager children, until the whole village, almost all of whose residents were by now gathered outside the sarpanch’s home, was shouting. “Wattal-nath Gopinath! Little penis, bad-smell buttock, dried-up brinjal, clovenhoof! Gopinath Wattal-nath, go!”
“Damn you too,” Firdaus said more conversationally to Boonyi. “Come on, you stupid oversexed child. I’m taking you back to your father’s house and there you’ll stay until what’s done is done and your fate is known.” “We’re coming too,” cried Zoon, Himal and Gonwati. Firdaus shrugged. “That’s your concern. But I will be locking you four wretches in.” Boonyi did not argue and made her way home, chaperoned by her beloved’s irate mother. “Where is Noman?” she asked Firdaus in a small voice. “Shut up,” Firdaus answered loudly. “That is nothing to do with you.” Then in a low fast murmur she went on, “His brothers have taken him away, up to Khelmarg, to stop him from cutting off Pandit Gopinath Razdan’s fat head.” Boonyi replied more heatedly, and certainly more lewdly, than her situation warranted. “Anyway, they shouldn’t make me marry that snake. The first time he’s asleep I’ll cut off his kuchur and stuff it into his evil little mouth.” Firdaus slapped her hard across the face. “You’ll do as you are told,” she said. “And that was for the dirty talk, which I will not tolerate.” Faced with the incandescent fury of Firdaus Noman, neither Boonyi nor her friends dared to remind her where that day’s bad language had come from in the first place.
Once they were inside Boonyi’s home, Firdaus stopped pretending to be angry and made the girls a pot of salty pink tea. “The boy loves you,” she said to Boonyi, “and even though you have behaved like a disgusting slut, that love counts with me.” One hour later a boy knocked at the door to tell them that the panchayat had reached its decision and their presence was required. “We’re coming too,” said Himal, Gonwati and Zoon again, and again Firdaus did not demur. They made their way to the steps of the sarpanch’s residence where the panchayat members stood solemn-faced. Shalimar the clown was there with his brothers surrounding him and Boonyi’s heart thumped when she saw his face. There was a murderous darkness on his brow that she had not seen before. It frightened her and, worse than that, it made him look unattractive to her for the first time in her life. All the villagers were gathered around this little tableau and when they saw Firdaus approaching with Boonyi and her girlfriends a silence fell. Pandit Pyarelal Kaul was standing beside Abdullah Noman and the two fathers’ faces were the grimmest on display. “I’m done for,” Boonyi thought. “They’re going to pack me off to that bastard sitting like a cold fish by the river, waiting to have me handed over on a plate-me, Boonyi Kaul, whom he could never otherwise have won.”
She was wrong. Abdullah Noman the sarpanch spoke first, followed by Pyarelal, and the other three members of the panchayat, Big Man Misri the carpenter, Sharga the singer, and the frail old dancing master Habib Joo, also made brief remarks, and their verdict was unanimous. The lovers were their children and must be supported. Their behavior was worthy of the strongest censure-it had been licentious and rash and filled with improprieties that were a disappointment to their parents-but they were good children, as everybody knew. Abdullah then mentioned Kashmiriyat, Kashmiriness, the belief that at the heart of Kashmiri culture there was a common bond that transcended all other differences. Most bhand villages were Muslim but Pachigam was a mixture, with families of pandit background, the Kauls, the Misris, and the baritone singer’s long-nosed kin-sharga being a local nickname for the nasally elongated-and even one family of dancing Jews. “So we have not only Kashmiriness to protect but Pachigaminess as well. We are all brothers and sisters here,” said Abdullah. “There is no Hindu-Muslim issue. Two Kashmiri-two Pachigami-youngsters wish to marry, that’s all. A love match is acceptable to both families and so a marriage there will be; both Hindu and Muslim customs will be observed.” Pyarelal added, when his turn came, “To defend their love is to defend what is finest in ourselves.” The crowd cheered and Shalimar the clown broke out into a broad smile of disbelieving joy. Firdaus went up to Abdullah and whispered, “If you had made any other decision I would have kicked you out of my bed.” (Later that night, when they lay in that bed in the dark, she was in a more reflective mood. “The times are changing,” she said softly. “Our children aren’t like us. In our generation we were straightforward folk, both hands on the table in plain view at all times. But these youngsters are trickier types, there are shadows on the surface and secrets underneath, and they are not always as they seem, maybe not always even what they think they are. I guess that’s how it has to be, because they will live through times more deceptive than any we have known.”)
Two panchayat members, Misri the carpenter and Sharga the baritone, the two largest and, along with the sarpanch, strongest men in Pachigam, were dispatched to the riverside to throw Gopinath Razdan out of town-Abdullah the sarpanch, fearing excessive violence, forbade his enraged sons to have anything to do with the ejection-but by the time the posse of two reached the Muskadoon the spy had already slipped away, and he was never seen in Pachigam again. Six months later, after a period of professional disgrace, he was assigned new duties in the village of Pahalgam, and was found dead one morning in the nearby mountain meadow of Baisaran. His legs had been blown off by some sort of homemade bomb and his head had been severed from his body by a single slash of a blade. The murder was never solved, nor did any clues lead back to anyone in the actors’ village. Eventually the investigation ran out of steam and the official case file was closed. Colonel H. S. Kachhwaha had his strong suspicions, however, and his frustration grew. Not only had he been insulted by Boonyi Kaul, but the failure of his spy’s mission had given him no shred of a pretext for the “descent in force” that he had planned for Pachigam. The colors of his world continued to darken, and he made a note that the village of actors was still earmarked for special attention, a decision whose medium- and long-term consequences would be grave.