He said: Don’t leave that hut, the place of your exile, or you will release me from my oath and I will return, I will certainly know and I will certainly return.
She said: I’ll stay here and wait and I know you will return.
He said: This terrible time, this in-between time in which we have all been dying of doing nothing, is coming to an end. I am going over the mountains. Here I am, in the mountains. I am taking the Tragbal Pass. Above me stands Nanga Parbat the mighty peak that veils its face in storm clouds and spits lightning at all who dare to pass it by. On the far side of the mountains is freedom, the part of Kashmir that is free. Gilgit, Hunza, Baltistan. Our lost places. I am going to see what Kashmir looks like when it’s free, when its face is not veiled in tears.
He said: I quarreled with Anees again. I spoke of our Pak allies and told him I would put my trust in them and in our common God and he called me a liar and a whore who wants to be fucked from both ends, from behind and in front at the same time. He has a filthy mouth these days. He is against Pakistan and doesn’t want to talk about religion. He laughed in my face when I spoke of my faith and told me I didn’t know what faith was if I could be faithless to my own brother. I said there was a higher allegiance and he laughed in my face again and said maybe I could fool everyone else but I couldn’t fool him that all of a sudden I had turned into some kind of fire-eater for God. He speaks like an old man. I don’t care about the old ways anymore. I want to drive the army bastards out and our enemy’s enemy is our friend. He said no, our enemy’s enemy is our enemy too. But he knows as well as I do that many of our comrades are going over the mountains. His own boss is leaving him and coming with me. He is with me now. I am in the mountains now. I left my brother behind but I am with my brothers. Anees and I parted on bad terms which I regret. He says he knows he will not live to be an old man but who wants to be old in hell. I am wearing dark green gumboots and inside them I have wrapped my legs in a woollen blanket torn in half. I am wearing everything warm I could find but there is no hot coal for my kangri. They gave me a polythene coat and pants to put over it all. Over the mountain there are training camps. Over the mountain there are comrades and weapons and money and political backing. Over the mountain I will find the rainbow’s end.
He said: There are six of us climbing the paths. The invisible commander, Anees’s boss, says he has no regrets. We have left Anees behind, left him to his outmoded ways, and are heading toward the future. The insurgency is divided; very well then, it is divided. We are throwing in our lot with the radicals over the mountains. The name of the invisible commander is Dar, but there are ten thousand Dars in Kashmir. He says his people were from Shirmal originally. I don’t know any Dars in Shirmal. We all make ourselves up now, we don’t have to be ourselves anymore. He trained as a junior cook, he says, but he has been with the resistance almost from the beginning, almost from childhood. He learned invisibility early and now nobody sees him unless he chooses to let himself be seen. I see his bundled clothes pulled tightly around him, his goggles, the ice crusting his beard. His face is a mystery. He is younger than I am, he says. In the mountains people confide in one another. We whisper our secret lies. We may die at any minute, from the cold, from a bullet. From a frozen bullet. I call him Doorway, Dar-waza, put his name and his old job side by side and that’s what they mean. I call him Naked Mountain because like Nanga Parbat he never shows his face. They say that on those rare days when the mountain unveils herself she is so beautiful that she blinds all who see her. Perhaps my Doorway-Darwaza, my Naked Mountain of a leader, is also an exceptionally handsome man, whose beauty blinds. At any rate he will be my door into the next place. Over the mountains I will be trained and my power will increase. I will meet men of power and draw power from them. I will learn the subtle arts of deception and deceit of which you are already a mistress and I will perfect the art of death. The time for love is past. We may die at any minute. The Indian troops know the routes we use and maybe they are lying in wait. We are going in dead of winter when only crazy people would go because maybe they will not be watching. It is too cold. It is impossible to cross the mountains. We are crossing the mountains. We are impossible. We are invisible and impossible and we are going over the mountains to be free.
Boonyi talked to herself too, about mountain passes and danger and despair. Zoon Misri came up to visit her and heard her friend muttering about the return of the iron mullah and the survival of the rapist brothers, and began to tremble. The basket she had brought Boonyi as a gift, with home-baked breads and kababs wrapped in a cloth, fell from her hand. She ran all the way down the hill to Pyarelal’s house by the stream. “The longer she stays up there in Nazarébaddoor’s hut, the more she begins to sound like some kind of crazy Gujar prophetess herself,” she wept. “Only she’s turning into some sort of curse-giving Nazarébad, just the evil eye without the begone.”
Pyarelal tried to console her. “People who spend a lot of time alone do begin to talk to themselves,” he said. “It means nothing. She probably doesn’t know she’s doing it.” Zoon went on sobbing. “No, she is crazy, she really is,” she insisted, her tongue loosened by emotion. “She talks to Shalimar the clown as if he was sitting right beside her, talks to him about how he’s going to kill her-as if it was some small unimportant thing, you know?-as if it was lovers’ talk, can you imagine?-sweet nothings about death. Hai-hai! She asks where he’s going to stab her first and how many times and what-all-how can a person ask such questions and react as if the answers excited her, as if excuse me ji they aroused her?-and now she’s started saying worse things, things that will be the death not only of her but of me as well.” What things are those, Pyarelal tried to ascertain, but Zoon just shook her head and wept. There were words she could not say, names she could not bring herself to speak. The Gegroo brothers are alive and so is Bulbul Fakh. That was the sentence which would end her life if spoken in Pachigam. As long as it only hung in the air in a madwoman’s hillside hut it might be possible for Zoon Misri to survive. “I can’t visit her anymore,” she told Pyarelal. “Don’t ask me to say why. It’s too dangerous for me up there, that’s all.”
Boonyi said: “They have crossed the Tragbal Pass. No Indian soldiers were lying in wait for them and they have safely crossed. Men have come to meet them and one of these men is Maulana Bulbul Fakh. The iron mullah has placed them under his protection. He lives in Gilgit and plots his triumphant return. The three Gegroos are with him. They were sealed up in the Shirmal mosque like Anarkali but there was a secret passage just like in Mughal-e-Azam. They escaped into the woods and went over the mountains and waited for their time.”
Pyarelal asked her: “How do you know these things?” It was winter, so they were huddled round the fire in her hut. The goats were in the barn he had helped her build. He heard the clanking of the small brass bells around their necks. His daughter was in a condition not unlike a trance. She was at once there in the hut and somewhere else as well. She could hear what he was saying but she was also listening elsewhere. She said: “My husband tells me. He has crossed the mountains to meet the iron mullah. The iron mullah says that the question of religion can only be answered by looking at the condition of the world. When the world is in disarray then God does not send a religion of love. At such times he sends a martial religion, he asks that we sing battle hymns and crush the infidel. The iron mullah says that at the root of religion is this desire, the desire to crush the infidel. This is the fundamental urge. When the infidel has been crushed there may be time for love, although in the iron mullah’s opinion this is of secondary importance. Religion demands austerity and self-denial, says Bulbul Fakh. It has little time for the softnesses of pleasure or the weaknesses of love. God should be loved but that is a manly love, a love of action, not a girlish affliction of the heart. The iron mullah preaches to many hundreds of men from many parts of the world. They are preparing for war.”