He was a soldier and so he tried to compartmentalize, to put his disorders in a box in the corner of the room and to go on functioning normally. When they spilled out it was regrettable but his troops had grown accustomed to the jumbling of his senses, the strangeness of his descriptions. Nowadays his fellow officers reacted normally when told that they had rigid vermilion voices and the soldiers on parade kept silent when he congratulated them on smelling like jasmine blossoms and the cooks at Elasticnagar knew just to nod wisely when he told them that the lamb korma wasn’t pointy enough. The condition could be said to be under control. The problem of memory, of excessive remembering, was not. The accumulation grew every day more oppressive and it became harder and harder to sleep. It was impossible to forget the cockroach that had crawled out of the shower drain six months earlier, or a bad dream, or any one of the thousands of hands of cards he had played in his military life. The weather of the past piled up in him, names and faces jostled for space, and the overload of unforgotten words and deeds left him wide-eyed with horror. Time was supposed to soothe all pain wasn’t it but the knife of his late father’s disapproval refused to grow dull with the passing months. He now believed that the two problems, the two bugs in the system, were somehow connected. He did not seek medical help for his troubles because any diagnosis of mental problems, however slight, would certainly be a reason for removing him from his command. He could not return home as a head case. There would be no dream girls then. And memory was not madness was it, not even when the remembered past piled up so high inside you that you feared the files of your yesterdays would become visible in the whites of your eyes. Memory was a gift. It was a positive. It was a professional resource.
And so, to return to the matter at hand, this mullah, this Bulbul Fakh, was quite unacceptably denouncing a neighboring village for its tolerance, was stirring things up, inciting violence and advocating a firebrand Islam that was positively un-Kashmiri and un-Indian as well. However, he made a good point when he condemned the hussy and her fancy boy, that couple who had chosen to fly in the face of every decent social and religious convention and who had been defended for it by people who should have known better, people among whom a number of suspected subversives probably lurked. These liberation-front-wallahs were nationalist subversives rather than religious fanatics and between them and the iron mullahs there was little love lost. So why not just stand back, eh? Resources were not infinite and time was pressing and one could not be everywhere and there was a war to fight. It was not so much a matter of turning a blind eye as of the proper prioritizing of goals. Why not let two kinds of subversive wipe each other out, and allow the young whore to reap the whirlwind for her misdeeds? If some sort of cleanup operation was required later, the forces left behind to police the district would be fully capable of handling that situation. Maulana Bulbul Fakh’s turn would come. Yes, yes. The thing to do was to do nothing. That was the statesmanlike choice.
Colonel Hammirdev Kachhwaha in his office put his legs up on his desk, closed his eyes and surrendered for a time to the internal whirl of the system, submerging his consciousness in the ocean of the senses, listening like a boy with a shell at his ear to the unceasing babble of the past.
It was almost eighteen years since the death of the Gujar prophetess Nazarébaddoor, but that didn’t stop her from intervening in local affairs when the need arose. Numerous residents of the region reported her visits, which usually took place in dreams, and whose purpose was usually to warn (“Don’t marry your daughter to that boy-his cousins in the north are dwarfs,” she advised a drowsy goat farmer on a hillside near Anantnag) or to commend (“Snap up that girl for your boy before someone else does, because her firstborn is destined to be a great saint,” she commanded a boatman sleeping in his shikara on Lake Gandarbal, causing him to jerk awake and fall out of the boat). In death Nazarébaddoor appeared more cheerful than she had been in the last days of her life, and she admitted to several of those who had seen her in visions that death suited her.
“The hours are better,” she said, “and you don’t have to worry about the animals.” When she appeared to Bombur Yambarzal, however, all her old gloominess was back. The bulbous waza awoke in the dark to see her one-toothed face leaning down close to his, and he felt the cold breath of the dead upon his cheek. “If you don’t do something double-quick,” she said, “Bulbul Fakh’s civil war will burn both your villages down.” Then she drew back and became one with the darkness and he awoke all over again, alone in his bed and sweating. A few seconds later he heard the Maulana’s voice raised in the azaan. The dawn call to prayer was also, on this occasion, a call to arms.
Wherever information is tightly controlled, rumor becomes a valued alternative source of news, and according to rumor the whole tribe of iron mullahs was summoning Kashmiris to arms that day, calling upon them to arise and rid the land of the alien Indian troops and of the pandits too. But Bombur Yambarzal had not heard any such rumor. For him this was not a national but a personal matter. He rolled out of bed and ran, wobbling, heaving, panting and sweating, all the way to the main village kitchens where the wazwaan was prepared. There he girded himself for battle. Once he was ready, and had caught his breath, he walked much more deliberately down the main street of Shirmal toward the mosque at the far end of the village, in a manner that might almost have been called kingly except that this was a king with kitchen knives and cleavers stuck in his belt, with kitchen kettles and cookpots strung around his body in place of armor, and with a big kitchen saucepan on his head. The fresh blood of slaughtered chickens dripped from him, he had smeared it over his hands and face and over all the kitchen equipment too, and had brought along a small leather wineskin full of even more blood, to make sure the effect wasn’t lost ahead of time. He looked simultaneously horrifying and ridiculous, and the village’s women and children, who had been waiting anxiously for the men to emerge from the mosque and announce their decision regarding the attack on Pachigam, began to laugh and cry at the same time, not knowing which was the more appropriate response. Bombur Yambarzal stiffened his back and raised his head up proudly and led a parade of astonished women and children to the door of the mosque.
When he reached it he drew from his belt, as if they were swords, a pair of great metal spoons, and began to bang on his armor, making a noise that would have raised the dead had the dead not preferred to remain peacefully underground and ignore the appalling racket. The men of Shirmal poured out of the mosque with zealotry in their eyes, and behind them came a considerably irritated Maulana Bulbul Fakh. “Look at me,” shouted the waza Bombur Yambarzal. “This thickheaded, comical, bloodthirsty moron is what you have all decided to become.”