After twenty-five days the sky stopped shrieking overhead. “Peace,” said Bombur Yambarzal to Hasina Karim, and a bloodstained peace it was; the silent sky over Shirmal felt like death. “Are they still alive? What do you think?” Bombur asked Big Man Misri, and the carpenter came slowly to his feet, swaying with exhaustion, like a soldier coming home from a war. “They always were gutless cutlets,” he said, knowing he was speaking the Gegroos’ epitaph. “They died like rats in a trap.”
Big Man made sure that all exits from the windowless structure were securely padlocked before he gave up his vigil, and he took away the keys. The military police-that is, the weary duty officer in his dusty Jeep-protested without much enthusiasm. “Go home now,” Big Man told him. “No crime has been committed by any living person.” “And if they are alive?” the officer asked. “Then,” answered Big Man, “all they need to do is knock.” But no such knock was ever heard. The little mosque at the end of the village remained padlocked and unused. The great events of a single powerful day, the defeat of Bulbul Fakh by Bombur Yambarzal and his saucepans, and the crime of the Gegroo brothers and their decision to immure themselves in this building until they died, had somehow pushed the mosque out of the villagers’ consciousness, as if it had literally moved farther away from their homes. Wilderness reclaimed it. Trees marched out of the wood and captured it; creepers and thornbushes bound and guarded it. Like a castle under a fairy-tale curse it vanished from sight and eventually the wooden roof rotted and caved in, and the bolts on the doors rusted, the cheap padlocks fell away, and the memory of the Gegroo brothers was also eaten up, leaving behind a village superstition so powerful that nobody ever set foot in the place of their death by cowardice and starvation; and that was how things remained until the day of the dead brothers’ return. That day, however, would not come for more than twenty years, and in the meanwhile Zoon Misri lived quietly on, and was slowly nursed back to something like her former self, though a certain lightness of spirit had been lost forever. No man ever came to ask for her hand in marriage. That was how things were. Nobody could defend it but nobody could change it either. And nobody understood that the only thing keeping Zoon alive was the disappearance of the Gegroo brothers into their vanished tomb, which permitted her to agree with herself that they had never existed and the thing that they had done had never been done. The day of their return from the dead would be the last of her life.
When he returned to Elasticnagar from the war of 1965, Colonel Hammirdev Kachhwaha was once more a changed man. His father’s death had briefly liberated him from the jail of unfulfilled expectations, but the experience of war had imprisoned him again, and this was a dungeon from which he would never escape. Military action had been a disappointment to Tortoise Colonel. War, whose highest purpose was the creation of clarity where none existed, the noble clarity of victory and defeat, had solved nothing. There had been little glory and much wasteful dying. Neither side had made good its claim to this land, or gained more than the tiniest patches of territory. The coming of peace left things in worse shape than they had been before the twenty-five days of battle. This was peace with more hatred, peace with greater embitterment, peace with deeper mutual contempt. For Colonel Kachhwaha, however, there was no peace, because the war raged on interminably in his memory, every moment of it replaying itself at every moment of every day, the livid green dampness of the trenches, the choking golf ball of fear in the throat, the shell bursts like lethal palm fronds in the sky, the sour grimaces of passing bullets, the iridescence of wounds and mutilations, the incandescence of death. Back in Elasticnagar, he immured himself in his quarters and pulled down the blinds and still the war would not cease, the intense slow motion of hand-to-hand combat in which the glassy fragility of his own pathetic, odorous life might be shattered at any moment by this bayonet that knife this grenade that screaming black-greased face, where this twist of the ankle that swivel of the hip this duck of the head that jab of the arm could summon up the darkness welling out of the cracks in the jagged earth, the darkness licking at the bodies of the soldiers, licking away their strength their legs their hope their legs their dissolving colorless legs. He had to sit in this darkness, his own soft darkness, so that other darkness, the hard darkness, would not come. To sit in soft darkness and forever be at war.
His soldiers were on edge. They were counting their dead and nursing their wounded and the high voltage of war continued to flow in their veins. They had fought a war for people who were ungrateful, who didn’t deserve to be fought for. A fantasy of the enemy was spreading through the majority community in the valley, a dream of an idyllic life on the other side, in the religious state. You could not explain things to these people. You could not explain the measures taken for their protection in peace as well as war. For example it was not permitted for non-Kashmiris to own land here. This enlightened law did not exist on the other side where many people were settling whose culture was not Kashmiri culture. Wild mountain men, fanatics, aliens were coming in there. The laws here protected the citizenry against such elements but the citizenry remained ungrateful, continued to call for self-determination. Sheikh Abdullah was saying it again. Kashmir for the Kashmiris. The idiotic slogan was repeated everywhere, painted on walls, pasted on telegraph poles, hanging in the air like smoke. Maybe the enemy had the right idea. The population was unsuitable. A new population should be found. The valley should be emptied of all these people and refilled with others, who would be grateful to be here, grateful to be defended. Colonel Kachhwaha closed his eyes. The war exploded on the screen of his eyelids, its shapes coalescing and blurring, its colors darkening, until the world was black on black.
Acting on his instructions the army began to make routine sweeps through the villages. Even in routine sweeps, it had to be emphasized, accidents could happen. And, in fact, the level of violence accidentally rose. There was talk of accidental shootings, accidental beatings, the accidental use of cattle prods, one or two accidental deaths. In Shirmal where Bulbul Fakh had been based everyone was suspect. There were long interrogations and these sessions were not marked by the gentleness of the questioners. There were problems in Pachigam as well, even though the presence of three pandits in the panchayat counted for something. Abdullah Noman, who for years had held the village in the palm of his hand, found himself in the unfamiliar position of having to depend on Pyarelal Kaul, Big Man Misri and Shivshankar Sharga to put in a good word for his family and himself. The Nomans were on a list. The shameless intermarriage of Abdullah’s youngest son and Boonyi Kaul was frowned on in the highest circles. Moreover, Anees Noman had disappeared. Firdaus told the soldiers he was visiting relatives in the north but this explanation was not believed. Anees Noman’s name was on another list.
Boonyi Kaul Noman and Shalimar the clown were living with Abdullah and Firdaus. On the night that Anees left home the brothers quarreled badly. At the end of the argument Anees said, “The trouble with you is this marriage of yours that stops you from seeing straight.” Boonyi and Shalimar the clown had no children because Boonyi claimed to be too young to start a family. Anees in a parting shot did not fail to point out that this was suspicious behavior on her part. Then, knowing he had said too much, he opened the back door and disappeared into the darkness. “He should stay out there,” said Shalimar the clown to nobody in particular. “It isn’t safe for him in here anymore.” Later that night when everyone was in bed Abdullah and Firdaus Noman spoke to each other of disillusion. Up to now they had tried to believe that their beloved Kashmiriness was best served by some kind of association with India, because India was where the churning happened, the commingling of this and that, Hindu and Muslim, many gods and one. But now the mood had changed. The union of Boonyi their friend’s daughter and Shalimar the clown their own sweet boy, which they had held up to the world as a sign, felt like a falsely optimistic symbol, and their fierce defense of that union was beginning to look like some kind of futile last stand. “Things are growing apart,” Firdaus said. “Now I know why Nazarébaddoor feared the future and didn’t want to live to see it come.” Unsleeping, they stared at the ceiling and feared for their sons.