Another summer the brothers stayed among kindly people, the Hanji and Manji tribal boatmen who rowed and punted their craft down the myriad waterways of the valley, gathering singhare, water chestnuts, on the Wular Lake, or working market gardens on Lake Dal, or fishing, or dredging for driftwood in the rivers. When a boatman ferried passengers on his craft the brothers Noman sat huddled up at the back of the vessel with their faces wrapped up in shawls. At other times, on the big boats, they pitched in and worked as hard as their hosts. Poling a boat carrying seven thousand pounds of grain from lake to lake was a hard day’s work. By night, after so effortful a day, the brothers gathered with the boating families at the kitchen end of one of the giant covered boats with its barrel-thatched roof and ate meals of highly spiced fish and lotus root. The boatman with whom they stayed longest was the unofficial patriarch of the Hanji tribe, Ahmed Hanji, who not only resembled an Old Testament prophet but believed that his people were the descendants of Noah, and that their boats were the pygmy children of the ark. “Boat’s the best place to be right now,” he philosophized. “Another flood’s coming, and God knows how many of us will be drowned this time.” “That’s the trouble with this damn country of ours,” Anees Noman muttered to his brother when they lay down to sleep that night. “Everyone’s a prophet.”
All the men in the liberation front were afraid almost all the time. There were not enough of them, the security forces were hunting them down, and in every village there were stories of families shot to death on suspicion of having harbored insurrectionists, stories that made it harder to recruit new members or to gain the support and assistance of the frightened and downtrodden population. Azadi! The word sounded like a fantasy, a children’s fable. Even the freedom fighters sometimes failed to believe in the future. How could the future begin when the present had such a stranglehold on everyone and everything? They feared betrayal, capture, torture, their own cowardice, the fabled insanity of the new officer in charge of all internal security in the Kashmir sector, General Hammirdev Kachhwaha, failure and death. They feared the killing of their loved ones in reprisal for their few successes, a bridge bombed, an army convoy hit, a notorious security officer laid low. They feared, almost above all things, the winter, when their high-ground encampments became unusable, when the Aru route over the mountains became impassable, when their access to arms and combat supplies dwindled, when there was nothing to do but wait to be arrested, to sit shivering in loveless garrets and dream of the unattainable: women, power and wealth. When Maqbool Butt himself was arrested and jailed, morale hit an all-time low. Butt’s old associate Amanullah Khan ended up in exile in England.
The resistance changed its name and became the JKLF, four initials instead of five, “Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front” without the “National,” but it made no difference. The Kashmiris of England, in Birmingham and Manchester and London, could dream on about freedom. The Kashmiris of Kashmir were shivering, leaderless and very close to defeat.
In the old stories, love made possible a kind of spiritual contact between lovers long separated by necessity or chance. In the days before telecommunications, true love itself was enough. A woman left at home would close her eyes and the power of her need would enable her to see her man on his ocean ship battling pirates with cutlass and pistol, her man in the battle’s fray with his sword and shield, standing victorious among the corpses on some foreign field, her man crossing a distant desert whose sands were on fire, her man amid mountain peaks, drinking the driven snow. So long as he lived she would follow his journey, she would know the day-by-day of it, the hour-by-hour, would feel his elation and his grief, would fight temptation with him and with him rejoice in the beauty of the world; and if he died a spear of love would fly back across the world to pierce her waiting, omniscient heart. It would be the same for him. In the midst of the desert’s fire he would feel her cool hand on his cheek and in the heat of battle she would murmur words of love into his ear: live, live. And more: he would know her dailiness too, her moods, her illnesses, her labors, her loneliness, her thoughts. The bond of their communion would never break. That was what the stories said about love. That was what human beings knew love to be.
When Boonyi Kaul and Shalimar the clown first fell in love they didn’t need to read books to find out what it was. They could see each other with their eyes closed, touch each other without making physical contact, hear each other’s endearments even when no word was spoken aloud, and each would always know what the other was doing and feeling, even when they were at opposite ends of Pachigam, or dancing or cooking or acting away from each other in distant no-account towns. A channel of communication had been opened then, and though their love had died the channel was still functioning, held open now by a kind of anti-love, a force fueled by strong emotions that were love’s dark opposites: her fear, his wrath, their belief that their story was not over, that they were each other’s destiny, and that they both knew how it would end. At night in his appointed city garret, or on a straw bed in a stinking country barn, or aboard a lurching boat wedged in between sacks of grain, Shalimar the clown went looking for Boonyi in his mind, he prowled through the night and found her, and at once the fires of his rage flared up and kept him warm. He nursed this heat, the hot coals of his fury, as if in a kangri next to his skin, and even when the fight for freedom was at its lowest ebb this dark flame kept his will strong, because his own goals were personal as well as national, and would not be denied. Sooner or later two deaths would release him from his vow and make possible a third. Sooner or later he would find his way to the American ambassador as well and his honor would be avenged. What happened after that was unimportant. Honor ranked above everything else, above the sacred vows of matrimony, above the divine injunction against cold-blooded murder, above decency, above culture, above life itself.
There you are, he greeted her every night. You can’t get away from me.
But he couldn’t get away from her either. He spoke to her silently as if she were lying by his side, as if his knife were at her throat and he were confessing his secrets to her before she took them to her grave, he told her everything, about the finance committee, the billeting, the impotence, the fear. It turned out that hatred and love were not so very far apart. The levels of intimacy were the same. People heard him murmuring in the dark, his fellow fighters heard him and so did his hosts, but the words couldn’t be made out, and nobody cared anyway, because all the other fighters were murmuring too, talking to their mothers or daughters or wives and listening to their replies. The murderous rage of Shalimar the clown, his possession by the devil, burned fiercely in him and carried him forward, but in the murmurous night it was just one of many stories, one small particular untold tale in a crowd of such tales, one minuscule portion of the unwritten history of Kashmir.