arrived in Delhi one nippy morning in October 1996 with a rucksack in which I had put two sets of clothes and several books including a well-thumbed copy of Irving Stone’s Lust for Life that I very nearly knew by heart. The bus that had brought me from Jammu stopped at the Red Fort and suddenly, I felt very vulnerable. I thought this city would suck me into its dark underbelly; it would swallow me whole.
I was one of the thousands of migrants who landed each day at the doorstep of India’s capital from every crevice and corner of the country. Like most migrants, I had also come to Delhi in search of a better life, to regain some of what my family had lost during the exodus from the Kashmir Valley. But there was a difference between the other migrants and me. On festivals, and on family functions, or when they were dying, they knew they could go back to where they had come from. I couldn’t do that. I knew I was in permanent exile. I could own a house in this city, or any other part of the world, but not in the Kashmir Valley where my family came from.
The sense of vulnerability soon left me as I made friends, and fell in love, and wrote forty-page letters to beloveds until the early hours of the morning, when electric-motor pumps would be switched on in the water-deprived Punjabi colonies inhabited by those who had fled Pakistan after Partition. I ate my first pizza, drank my first whisky. A few years later when my parents joined me after leaving Jammu, I would come home drunk, sometimes way past midnight, and speak in English to my father who would open the door for me. He never spoke to me about it, but when he felt my accent was getting stranger, he would ask my mother to tell me to go easy on the ‘Coca-Cola’. That phase is over. I now insist on carrying my own key. But even now, when I come home, my father coughs from inside his room. He won’t sleep until I return, whatever the time.
There are no more forty-page letters. All that remains of those days is a plastic bag containing bracelets, photographs with lipstick marks on their backs, and my old copy of Lust for Life. There is also an old issue of the Daily Excelsior newspaper that every Kashmiri Pandit subscribed to in Jammu because it informed them of who of the community had died in exile. I hardly ever open it. But, sometimes, when I’m angry at the TV shows where our murderers speak about our return, I do. On its front page is a picture of Ravi’s mutilated face. The blood from his nose—the result of a blow from the butt of a Kalashnikov—has dried up. His forehead still looks beautiful and clear, and so does his moustache that I had wanted to imitate when I was young.
It is then that the voices come back to me. The loud clapping. The jeering. The chants reaching a crescendo. The hiss of the loudspeaker. The noise beats hard on my chest, like a drumbeat gone berserk. My head feels like an inferno, and a cold sweat traverses down my back.
Hum kya chaaaahte—Azadiiiii!
What do we want—Freeeedom!
Once I was with a few non-Kashmiri friends, and one of them was enacting a scene he had witnessed in video footage shot early in 1990 in Kashmir: a mammoth crowd in Lal Chowk, shouting, ‘Indian dogs go back!’ and ‘Hum kya chahte—Azadi!’. It made all of them laugh. To me, it brought back memories of the kicks I had braved in school while I sang the National Anthem. But in gatherings like these, my friends shouted for Azadi just for fun. For them it was just a joke—the sight of a crowd clenching fists, demanding freedom in a funny accent. Before I had improved mine, my friends would make fun of me as well.
‘Look at our friend here, he doesn’t live in Bharat, he lives in Barat.’
‘Tonight, he will go to his gar, not ghar.’
I would laugh with them, making fun, in turn, of some of them for their inability to use the nukta, the small dot that makes jahaaj what it is: jahaaz.
But this word, Azadi, it frightens me. Images of those days return to haunt me. People out on the roads. People peering out of their windows. People on the rooftops of buses. In shikaras. And in mosques.
‘Hum kya chaaaahte—Azadiiiii!’
I no longer sing the National Anthem. A few years ago, a child beggar at a traffic signal pinned the national flag onto my shirt. I threw it away in the waste bin of a café near my house.
It was the day I realized I could no longer remember my mother’s voice.
~~Our Moon Has Blood Clots -by- Rahul Pandita
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