Pyarelal asked: “How does your husband tell you this?”
She answered: “He speaks to me as you speak. He is full of fire and death. When you and the sarpanch are no more he will come here for his honor.”
“This then is a part of what he says,” her father needed to know.
“This is the reason we are able to speak,” she replied. “This is our bond that cannot be broken.” She fell sideways and was unconscious. Pyarelal caught her and laid her gently down to sleep. “Then I will never die,” he whispered to her sleeping body. “I will live forever and he will never be released from his oath.”
This was not how things were supposed to go, according to the old story. In the old story Sita the pure was kidnapped and Ram fought a war to win her back. In the modern world everything had been turned upside down and inside out. Sita, or rather Boonyi in the Sita role, had freely chosen to run off with her American Ravan and willingly became his mistress and bore him a child; and Ram-the Muslim clown, Shalimar, misplaying the part of Ram-fought no war to rescue her. In the old story, Ravan had died rather than surrender Sita. In the contemporary bowdlerization of the tale, the American had turned away from Sita and allowed his queen to steal her daughter and send her home in shame. In the ancient tale, when Sita returned to Ayodhya after defending her chastity throughout her captive years, Ram had sent her back into forest exile because her long residence under Ravan’s roof made that chastity suspect in the eyes of the common people. In Boonyi’s story, she too had been exiled to the forest, but it was the people-her friend Zoon, her father, even her father-in-law-who had helped her and saved her life, deflecting her husband’s vengeful knife, making him swear an oath; after which, and at the wrong time, her husband went off to war, and she knew that for him the battle was a form of waiting, that he would fight other enemies, slay other foes, until he was free to return and take her unfaithful life.
But it was something more than that. It was also a way of being with her. While he was away his thoughts returned to her and they could commune as they once had. And even if his thoughts were murderous this prolonged communion often felt, strongly felt to her, like love. All that remained between them was death, but the deferment of death was life. All that remained between them, perhaps, was hatred, but this yearning hatred-at-a-distance was surely also one of love’s many faces, yes, its ugliest face. She began to entertain fantasies of earning his forgiveness and winning back his heart. In the great old book Sita had called upon the gods to defend her virtue, stepping into a fire and emerging from it unscathed; and she had asked the underworld to open so that she could depart from this world in which her innocence was not enough, and the gates of the underworld did open, and she went down into darkness. If she, Boonyi, set fire to herself no god would protect her. She would burn and the forest would burn with her. Accordingly, she lit no fire. Once in despair she did ask the gates of hell to open in the earth below her feet, but no cavity yawned. She was already in hell.
The iron mullah Maulana Bulbul Fakh was their appointed superior. His breath was still the sulfurous dragon-breath that had earned him his stinky name, fakh, and he still spoke in the old harsh way, as if human speech were painful to him, but he was taller than Shalimar the clown remembered, a giant over six feet tall, and also leaner and much more beautiful than in the old days in Shirmal. Was it possible that he had grown bigger and more attractive with the passing years? As for his being made of iron, there could no longer be any argument about that. There were places on his shins and shoulders where the knocks of a hard life had rubbed away the covering of skin and the dull metal beneath had become visible, battle hardened, indestructible. These proofs of his miraculous nature gave Bulbul Fakh great authority in the camps over the mountains. He carried a lump of rock salt at all times. “This is Pakistani salt,” he told the liberation front commander and his men. “This we will bring to Kashmir when we set it free.” He wrapped the salt in a green handkerchief and put it away in a bag. “The green is for our religion which makes all things possible. God willing,” he said. “With the blessing of God,” they replied.
The iron mullah led them to a “forward camp,” known as FC-22, a front-line facility of the Markaz Dawar center for worldwide Islamist-jihadist activities set up by Pak Inter-Services Intelligence. FC-22 in those early days was a shithole. There were few pukka buildings-the only sleeping accommodation was in filthy, patched-up tents-and not enough food or warmth. However, there were staggering quantities of weapons available, and there were ISI personnel on hand to offer training in the use of these weapons, including high-precision sniper-killer training. There were firing ranges with moving targets and instructors who would push the new recruits in the back or jog their elbows at the same time as ordering them to fire, and they had to learn not to miss, because hitting a moving target when they were off balance was what they were being taught. There were weekly seminars about, and real-time training exercises in, high-speed, guerrilla-style strike-and-withdraw operations across the Line of Control. There was a bomb factory and a course in fifth-column infiltration technique, and above all there was prayer.
The five daily prayers at the camp maidan were compulsory for all the fighters and the only book permitted at the site-training manuals excepted-was the Holy Qur’an. In between formal prayers there was much discussion of God by foreigners speaking in languages which Shalimar the clown did not understand, in which only the word for God stood out. Maulana Bulbul Fakh was his guide to weaponry and foreigners alike. But before he was ready to embark on the great work at hand his consciousness had to be altered. Shalimar the clown was asked to make certain revisions in his worldview. “It is not possible to shoot straight,” Bulbul Fakh said bluntly, “if the way you see things is all screwed up.”
Ideology was primary. The infidel, obsessed with possessions and wealth, did not grasp this, and believed that men were primarily motivated by social and material self-interest. This was the mistake of all infidels, and also their weakness, which made it possible for them to be defeated. The true warrior was not primarily motivated by worldly desires, but by what he believed to be true. Economics was not primary. Ideology was primary.
The iron mullah took upon himself the task of reeducating all newcomers. It was a part of his gift to the revolution, a part of God’s work. Shalimar the clown sat on a boulder by a frozen mountain stream and listened to the iron mullah as once he had listened to Pandit Pyarelal Kaul while longing for the simple happiness of Boonyi’s touch. But that happiness had proved to be an illusion, a deception, and Shalimar the clown’s memory of being deceived made the iron mullah’s lessons easier for him to accept.