27

The general’s private car has just dropped me at Hotel Liward. My legs are stiff and my whole body is aching. I am thinking about the long bus journey after the long train journey. Every part of the bus rattled for eleven hours on the mountain road. Every window. Now every bone in my body is protesting. The bus to Srinagar took eleven hours, and for eleven hours my body had to suffer. Perhaps I should say my body behaved unusually well on the way. A man, much younger than me, vomited six or seven times, but my body cooperated, and I threw up only two or three times, or perhaps this is just a lie. It is impossible to lie to oneself. Just like it is impossible to tickle oneself. Only mad people tickle themselves. I am not mad. I made a big mistake to set out on this tedious journey.

It is for Rubiya’s sake really I am here. Otherwise I would not have come to the valley. Yet. It is for my own sake really I am here. I know once I do the perfect banquet, General Sahib will refer me to top specialists in the military hospital, and they will start treatment right away.

On the road to Srinagar, a sign said:

This is neither a race, nor a rally.

Drive safely in Kashmir valley.

These people are real jokers. I hear the bleak laughter of Kashmiris everywhere. Even in the hotel room.

My room is big and it has a large hot brazier and a mirror on the wall. The bed is neatly made; there is an extra quilt in the closet. I complained (about the small room ‘S’ they had allotted me earlier) and the manager moved me to this VIP room: ‘N’. (The rooms are not numbered. I wonder why they are lettered?) Climbing up the stairs made me breathless. I unlocked ‘N’ and took off my cap and overcoat. On the wall two hairline cracks and the oval mirror. Looking inside, a sudden memory returned to me of that day when Father had helped me untie my shoes after a long journey. I was four or five years old then. My eyes fluttered, reliving the memory. I felt a lump in my throat as I undressed. Then I stepped into the bathroom and washed my hands and face.

I am unable to sleep. I walk to the window. I open it and shut it properly. Chilly outside. I see a Sufi shrine and a post office. The light is dim. The post office is closed. I want to say something. The word does not come to my mouth. What was it I would like to say? What exactly is wrong with my brain? The b-u-s. I wonder why I spoke to the woman in the bus?

We were sitting next to each other. Me: on the window seat. In the beginning we did not exchange a word, but the driver’s rash turns on the winding road made her say something and I nodded and then we could not stop talking. For five and a half hours, almost half of the way, we were silent to each other, lost in our own worlds, and then suddenly we started talking, and I overexerted myself. There was no need to do it. I even offered her my window seat, but she said the aisle was better.

She was a Kashmiri Hindu woman, returning home after a gap of thirteen years. She said her situation was a bit like the exiles in the epic Mahabharata. I apologized for my limited knowledge of Hindu epics. I grew up in the Sikh tradition, I confessed. She studied my face carefully. So why, sardar-ji, have you cut your hair and removed your turban?

I said nothing.

My husband had a travel agency in Srinagar, she told me, and I used to teach biology in school, classes 6, 7 and 8; but we were forced out of the city by the militants. Deep down all Muslims are pro-Pakistan, she said. Our servant was an exception, she said. He would send us letters about the house, now the house is with the militants, he would write, and now it is with the army or paramilitary, but in the last letter he told us that the house was empty, and the roof of what used to be the kitchen and the bedroom had fallen in.

Listening to her I thought of those moments lost to time, my first arrival in Kashmir when Chef took me on long bike rides, plane leaves rustling under the tires, ruins on left, and ruins on right, and so many empty houses, and once or twice he had said that the city without the Kashmiri Hindus looked incomplete. Why, Chef?

‘Without the Hindus (who have been forced to flee by some Muslim extremists) this valley looks exactly like Swiss cheese,’ he said.

‘Cheeze?’

His comment initially left me confused. Cheeze means a ‘thing’ in my mother tongue. Punjabi, the only language in the world made entirely out of puns…

I am talking about paneer, Kirpal. Swiss cheese is a strange variety of paneer with holes in it. In school they taught us: Kashmir India ka Switzerland hai. Well, this place has certainly become the ‘Swiss cheese of India ’. When I look at the empty Hindu houses in the valley, Kirpal, I realize there is no bigger tragedy for a land that forces its own people out and makes them wander from place to place, and leaves them damaged with an intense longing to return home.

The woman changed her seat. She found one next to a peasant girl just before the bus entered the three-mile-long tunnel. Whenever a woman sitting next to me changes seats I ask myself if I did something wrong. She had a plastic bag full of cherry tomatoes, and she kept eating them one by one. She did not offer me a single tomato. Did I misbehave? Did I offend her with a swear word? Do I have bad breath? Did I utter something very lucid? Islands of lucidity are forming inside my brain. Did I mutter something on love? I have wasted the years of my life being too much in love. Love that was not even returned. Love for the wrong person or a thing. Love is a dish that is either overcooked or undercooked. Love never tastes right. Love smells like the inside of a garbage bag. Love has the odor of decay. Throw it away.

I unpack my suitcase. Breathless again. There is a little package for Rubiya. And a gift for someone else. My clothes have all tangled up in each other. The jacket and pants and the tie I brought along from Delhi need ironing. They will look good on you, Mother had said. They will look good on you, Kip.

I don’t deserve to wear these things. They are too bloody new.

I have the breath of death, I say to myself in the hotel room. Women sense it more than men. And they do not want to get closer. In a way I felt relieved when the woman moved because I was able to stretch, but an old man occupied the empty seat minutes after she vacated it. She never once looked back and kept eating her tomatoes. She did not notice her replacement. He was a Muslim man, conical cap on head. Hooked nose. He was using a toothpick to clean his teeth. As he settled on the seat, the man asked, What time is it, jenab? I noticed he had a watch on his wrist, and I assumed it must have broken and I told him the time, and he thanked me – shoorkriya jenab, he said – but right after the tunnel in bright light I noticed the man’s watch was showing the correct time.

Inside the Jawahar tunnel we had to shut the bus windows. The driver feared a militant grenade or an improvised explosive. Inside the tunnel water kept dripping from rock. The tunnel is three miles long. For three long miles yellow sodium lamps lit the road. Then the light of Kashmir appeared. Blue mountains. Bright numinous light reached out to touch us. The driver, that idiot, put the bus in neutral and coasted all the way downhill. Coasting saves him diesel. Just before hitting the valley he asked us, the passengers, to look towards the right. Verinag, he said. This is where the river begins, he said. As if we did not know.

The bus was coasting down. The tunnel disappeared behind us in the crack of the mountain. A few miles later it reappeared. I looked upwards from the window seat and noticed the arch of the tunnel. The happiness and unhappiness of so many people depends on the tunnel and the road, and the road to Kashmir is not so bad. The buses are, the drivers are, the checkposts are. If there is one thing right about our country it is the road.