That dark summer after the Misris perished the fruit in Pandit Pyarelal Kaul’s apple orchards was bitter and inedible, but the peaches of Firdaus Noman were as succulent as usual. The saffron in Pyarelal’s saffron field was paler and less potent, but the honey in Abdullah’s beehives was sweeter than ever before. These matters were difficult to understand; but when Pyarelal heard on the radio that the well-known pandit leader Tika Lal Taploo had been gunned down the nature of the portents became plain. “In the time of Sikandar But-Shikan, Sikander the Iconoclast,” he told his daughter at her Gujar hut in the woods, “Muslim attacks on Kashmiri Hindus were described as the falling of locust swarms upon the helpless paddy crops. I am afraid that what is beginning now will make Sikandar’s time look peaceful by comparison.” In the weeks that followed his prophecy came true and he told Boonyi, “Now that everything I have stood for is in ruins I am ready to die, but I will live on to protect your life from the insanity of your husband, even though neither one of us has anything left to live for.” The radical cadres of the Jamaat-i-Islami party had new words for “pandit”: mukhbir, kafir. Meaning spy, infidel. “So we are slandered as fifth-columnists now,” Pyarelal mourned. “That means the assault cannot be far away.”
In the aftermath of the Muslim insurgency against Indian rule another pandit was murdered in Tangmarg. Posters appeared on the road leading from Srinagar to Pachigam demanding that all pandits vacate their property and leave Kashmir. The first Hindus to respond to the poster campaign were the gods, who began to disappear. The famous black stone statue of Maha-Kali was one of twenty deities who vacated their home in Hari Parbat Fort and vanished forever. A priceless deity from the ninth century fled the Lok Bhavan in Anantnag and was never seen again. The Shiva-lingam of the Dewan temple also mysteriously departed. These exits were timely, because soon after they occurred the fire-bombings began. The Shaivite temple complex at Handwara, near the famous shrine of Kheer Bhawani, was gutted by a blaze. Pyarelal sat beside Boonyi and buried his face in his hands. “Our story is finished,” he told her. “It is no longer the story of our lives, but the story of a plague year during which we have the misfortune to be around to grow buboes in our armpits and die unclean and stenchy deaths. We are no longer protagonists, only agonists.” A few days later in Anantnag district there began a week-long orgy of unprovoked violence against pandit residential and commercial property, temples, and the physical persons of pandit families. Many of them fled. The exodus of the pandits of Kashmir had begun.
Firdaus Noman came to see Pyarelal at his house to assure him that Pachigam’s Muslims would protect their Hindu brethren. “My wise and gentle friend,” she said, “never fear; we will take care of our own. The killing of Big Man Misri and Zoon’s suicide was bad enough, and we won’t let it happen again. You are too precious to lose.” Pyarelal shook his head. “It is out of our hands,” he said. “Our natures are no longer the critical factors in our fates. When the killers come, will it matter if we lived well or badly? Will the choices we made affect our destiny? Will they spare the kind and gentle among us and take only the selfish and dishonest? It would be absurd to think so. Massacres aren’t finicky. I may be precious or I may be valueless, but it doesn’t signify either way.” He kept the radio close to his ear at all times. As the bitter apples fell from their trees and rotted on the ground Pyarelal remained indoors, cross-legged, with the transistor held up against his head, listening to the BBC. Loot, plunder, arson, mayhem, murder, exodus: these words recurred, day after day, and a phrase from another part of the world that had flown many thousands of miles to find a new home in Kashmir.
“Ethnic cleansing.”
“Kill one, scare ten. Kill one, scare ten.” Hindu community houses, temples, private homes and whole neighborhoods were being destroyed. Pyarelal repeated, like a prayer, the names of the places struck by calamity. “Trakroo, Uma Nagri, Kupwara. Sangrampora, Wandhama, Nadimarg. Trakroo, Uma Nagri, Kupwara. Sangrampora, Wandhama, Nadimarg. Trakroo, Uma Nagri, Kupwara. Sangrampora, Wandhama, Nadimarg.” These names had to be remembered. Forgetting would be a crime against those who suffered “whole-hog” burning of their neighborhoods, or seizure of their property, or death, preceded by such violences as could not be imagined or described. Kill one, scare ten, the Muslim mobs chanted, and ten were, indeed, scared. More than ten. Three hundred and fifty thousand pandits, almost the entire pandit population of Kashmir, fled from their homes and headed south to the refugee camps where they would rot, like bitter fallen apples, like the unloved, undead dead they had become. In the so-called Bangladeshi Markets in the Iqbal Park-Hazuri Bagh area of Srinagar the things looted from temples and homes were being openly bought and sold. The shoppers hummed the most popular song of the times as they bought their pretty pieces of Hindu Kashmir, a song by the well-beloved Mehjoor: “I will give my life and soul for India, but my heart is with Pakistan.”
There were six hundred thousand Indian troops in Kashmir but the pogrom of the pandits was not prevented, why was that. Three and a half lakhs of human beings arrived in Jammu as displaced persons and for many months the government did not provide shelters or relief or even register their names, why was that. When the government finally built camps it only allowed for six thousand families to remain in the state, dispersing the others around the country where they would be invisible and impotent, why was that. The camps at Purkhoo, Muthi, Mishriwallah, Nagrota were built on the banks and beds of nullahas, dry seasonal waterways, and when the water came the camps were flooded, why was that. The ministers of the government made speeches about ethnic cleansing but the civil servants wrote one another memos saying that the pandits were simply internal migrants whose displacement had been self-imposed, why was that. The tents provided for the refugees to live in were often uninspected and leaking and the monsoon rains came through, why was that. When the one-room tenements called ORTs were built to replace the tents they too leaked profusely, why was that. There was one bathroom per three hundred persons in many camps why was that and the medical dispensaries lacked basic first-aid materials why was that and thousands of the displaced died because of inadequate food and shelter why was that maybe five thousand deaths because of intense heat and humidity because of snake bites and gastroenteritis and dengue fever and stress diabetes and kidney ailments and tuberculosis and psychoneurosis and there was not a single health survey conducted by the government why was that and the pandits of Kashmir were left to rot in their slum camps, to rot while the army and the insurgency fought over the bloodied and broken valley, to dream of return, to die while dreaming of return, to die after the dream of return died so that they could not even die dreaming of it, why was that why was that why was that why was that why was that.
She knew where he was. He was in the north with the iron mullah at the Line of Control. He was part of the elite “iron commando.” She knew what he was doing. He was killing people. He was killing time. He was killing everyone he could find to kill so that he could tolerate the time that had to pass until he could kill her. She blamed herself for their deaths. Come and get it over with, she told him. Come: I release you from your restraints. Never mind what you promised my father and the sarpanch. My father is right, there is no longer any reason for any of us to live. Come and do what you have to do, what you need to do in a place so deep it causes you pain. I have nothing but you and my father, his love and your hatred, and his love is ruined now, his capacity for it is damaged, his picture of the world has been broken and when a man does not have a picture of the world he goes a little mad, which is how my father is. He says the end of the world is coming because his apples are too bitter to eat. He says there is an earthquake trembling in the earth and he has started believing in the snake stories of the sarpanch’s wife, he has started believing the snakes will awake, out of their disgust for humankind they will come forth and kill us all and the valley will have peace, snake peace, the peace it is beyond human beings to make. He says the earth is sodden with blood and will give way and no house can stand upon it. He says the mountains will thrust up all around us, they will push higher into the sky and the valley will be gone and that is what should happen to it, we don’t deserve such beauty, we were the guardians of beauty and we could not do our work. I say we are what we are and we do what we do and I am beyond pride in myself I am just a thing that lives and breathes and if I stopped breathing or living it would make no difference except to him, except, in spite of everything, and for a few more moments, to him. Come if you want. I’m waiting. I no longer care.