Fiction

“The more I run from this place, the more I find myself coming back to it. I still wake up to the nightmares of it. It keeps haunting me,” said Harpal. At 78, he could walk faster than me. His long flowing white beard was in complete contrast with his colourful personality. His right arm had a very distinct and disgusting burn mark which he showed to me with pride. “When they burned my house, I got this burn. When it aches, I can see the day clearly when it all happened.” He was arranged as my contact person by a close friend for this specific tour. I was to travel 70 km towards North Kashmir, into a picturesque village, surrounded by thick conifers on three sides, and in the background, the distant image of the mighty Himalayas added to its beauty. It was the last village on the route, fading into the wilderness that went all the way to Pakistan on the other side—only separated by an imaginary line drawn virtually on a map between the two countries. I had taken a public transport bus while my guide advised against it. It was 8:00 in the morning. The weather was cold. The most common outfit you see on a Kashmiri is a Pheran; a plus-size long-sleeved, full-body woollen outfit resembling a raincoat. Most people had retracted their arms within it to hold the Kangri; a fire-pot filled with burning charcoal to keep them warm while their sleeves hang lifeless. The 52-seater bus had packed over 100 people, dropping and picking several more on the way. The people hanging at the door and on the window-grills cluttered my view of the outside. The scent of tobacco mixed with burning charcoal, along with a hint of bittersweet fragrance of sweat, made me a little uneasy in my seat. In winter, people will take a bath once a week, usually on Sundays, so that they can sit inside their houses in the warmth of Bukharis. The reason for my visit was the annual commemoration festival hosted by the local Sikh community to pay respect to over 6000 Sikhs killed during the Kabali raid in 1947. Harpal was a survivor. “I was 15; I was the only one from my village who got out alive.” He had told me earlier. “You see these forests; if you walk by foot across these, you will reach the next village in around 40 minutes. It’s uphill first, and then down for at least 2 kilometres and then up again to Gohina.” He said, pointing towards the dense jungle. “In winters everywhere here is covered in snow. I’ve seen snow leopards come out to hunt cattle, dogs and sometimes humans. We keep inside post-dark in winters.” I could hear faint sounds of Kirtan, the Sikh prayers using harmonium and tabla. One kilometre down, the cold wind drained me out. Thinning oxygen made me gasp for breath. Harpal, on the other hand, was full of energy. He was born and raised in the mountains. This was easier than his more vigorous morning stroll. The single-storey mud-and-wood houses with sloping tin roofs lined the path to the village centre. We headed towards the village centre, which hosted a large playground and the Gurudwara, the Sikh place of worship and our destination for the day. The village spread out from the centre like the spider web and merged immediately with the jungle on two sides, step-farming land cleared out by cutting trees on the third and the entry from where we were coming. “Our house used to be here,” he pointed to an empty space and stood there contemplating. “After it was burned down, we made the new house near the gurudwara.” Many Sikhs with their colourful turbans—red, blue, violet, black—ornated the pathway while walking to the gurudwara. Harpal was wearing a saffron turban. “I was inside, hiding on the kaini (storage space under the tin roof) when it happened. They had killed every single man and raped any women they could find.” He took a long pause, both in his stride and his speech. “Some women escaped and jumped into the well to protect themselves.” “You know, we heard so much about what Kabalis did to the surviving women, that my uncle beheaded at least five women, including his daughter and wife, to protect them from falling into the hands of those monsters. He beheaded them. With his own hands.” “And when he killed the first one, the other four came forward, presenting their heads to him, asking him to kill them, requesting him to kill them.” An unannounced attack was the modus operandi of Kabalis, who killed around thirty-three thousand Sikhs in 1947 raid to free Kashmir from India and annex it to Pakistan. Village after village fell to their brutalities; men and women jumped into wells, elders beheaded women to protect them, mothers took their children along to jump into the Jhelum. In Harpal’s village, the Kabalis set on fire the houses after killing everyone. In one of those houses, he was hiding on the roof. We reached the gurudwara in 10 minutes. I was exhausted, physically from the journey and the walk, mentally and emotionally from Harpal’s ordeal. The Kirtan soothed my nerves. We sat down, closed our eyes and listened to it for hours.

First Published in Ayaskala, Feb 2022 I first met Walt Whitman in his Leaves of Grass, though I had known him for quite a while. My grandfather quoted him a lot, translating him to our mother tongue, Pahari, a dialect of Punjabi usually spoken by the hill people in Northern India.  ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes’ It was quite funny when he spoke it in Pahari.  He had this tattered 1892 copy of Leaves of Grass, sans cover, yellowed over the time, swollen with moisture, kept on his window pane. He was not a learned man, neither an educated one. He had merely done five classes for the nearest middle school was three hours from his home.  He knew English, for he served food to some of the finest Englishmen in Gulmarg, Kashmir. When the white left, they left Whitman to him; that’s how he came into possession of this book. He picked up his English, his book, and other possessions when in 1947’s gory Partition, the hotel he worked in was razed in arson. He was severely ill before his death, and he was giving away all his belongings to his three sons, the bigger apple orchard to the eldest, two paddy fields and four trees of walnut to the other, and to my father, who was the youngest he left the smaller apple orchard and a cherry garden which had three trees of walnut.   I was fifteen years old when he died. To me, he said, ‘For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you’ and then handed over the Whitman. In two years preceding his death, he was a part delusional part philosopher. When he took to bed due to his illness, I kept him company after school. I moved to his bedroom, for someone needed to keep an eye on him.  I was reading the Indian Partition for my school essay when I asked him about his experience. He was a first-hand source—a survivor.  He would narrate to me stories from his childhood, his struggle to establish himself as a big farmer from a mere waiter at a hotel, his ambitious dream of educating his children, breaking them into a non-linear-timelines and then all of a sudden forgetting what he was telling. His memory had grown weak, his narration pale and his sorrows grey.  He had marked the book at several places; after every story, he would tell me to do something for him in return—read a passage from the book.  When he told me how he came to settle at this place, he told me to read a specific passage that echoed his story. And whence and why come you? We know not whence, (was the answer,) We only know that we drift here with the rest, That we linger’d and lagg’d—but were wafted at last, and now here, To make the passing shower’s concluding drops. At places, the text of the book had faded into oblivion. When I read it and didn’t know what came next, he would recite it from his memory. He who had forgotten the names of relatives, the faces of his cousins, he who was delusional for the world was a philosopher to me. After his death, Whitman became my grandfather. He consoled me. He echoed my sorrows. He told me not to lose myself in grief and gave me hope.  Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost, No birth, identity, form—no object of the world, ……. … … Ample are time and space—ample the fields of nature. To this day, Whitman sits on my windowpane, and I go to him every now and then—sometimes to validate an experience, sometimes to remember my grandfather and sometimes to find hope in the dark times.

First published in the Hooghly Review, Issue 1, April 2023 The first thing John did was call 911 after he regained consciousness. The second was to dress up his naked wife lying in bed, still unconscious but breathing steadily. There was a very thin smoke inside his room, and from the smell of it, it was not from fire. The room was locked from the outside, so he could only wait for the police to arrive.  The only other person in the house was his mother, who had suffered a spinal injury that made her wheelchair-bound and paralyzed waist down. All John wished for was that she would be safe; sleeping in her room.  He tried breaking the door but couldn’t, so he opened the windows to let the fresh air in. The little water in the flower vase her wife kept on the windowpane was smelling stale when he poured it over her face in an attempt to make her conscious, which failed miserably. When the police arrived and opened his door, the paramedics ran in, flashed lights in his eyes, and checked his blood pressure. Another team carried his wife on a stretcher to the ambulance. The living room was a mess. The TV, the central table piece, and all the stupid paintings made by his wife were missing. And everything else was broken. How the hell didn’t I hear a thing. At thirty-six, John was working two shifts, one at a grocery store and another at a filling station. He was still paying the EMI’s for the TV, and now it was gone. With the number of things missing and broken, he was now cursing himself. John’s life was already miserable—his rent was overdue, his savings were gone when his mother got ill and he was accumulating debt for her treatment, his wife constantly fought with him, his only shoe had had a withered sole—and now this.  And then, when he entered the kitchen, his mother’s wheelchair was upside down. And she lay near the open fridge. The medics declared her dead.  John was tormented. He was miserable, out of money, and in debt. He had signed a deal with a doctor he met accidentally at the hospital parking, who claimed an alternate treatment can help with his mother’s illness but now she was dead—now of all times when he thought she would be alright, up and walking within a month. The doctor had visited their house only once, for a primary general check-up and now John had to pay the EMI for the promised treatment for the next three months.  Police declared it robbery and homicide. Thirty-five items were missing, and mother strangulated to death using a shoelace that still hung around her neck. This was the sixth incident in less than a year. Robbery and murder with a shoelace. A serial killer. The Shoelace Killer. — The first time James was breathless was during his birth. He was born on the flight; prematurely and underweight. The emergency medics who were airlifting his mother were not trained to deliver babies. They improvised, and by the time he landed on the roof of the hospital, he was already short on oxygen. His mother died later that day, and he had no recollection of how she looked, for nobody had her picture. They were lost in the building collapse from where the medics picked her up as the only survivor of her family. So, he never got to know his dad either. The second time he got breathless, he was strangulating a thirty-year-old man with shoelaces. It was a hard battle and his first time. He was seventeen. But now, when he looks at it, it was just inexperience that made him breathless. Ten years and twenty-two murders—6 shoelace strangulations, 5 injected poisonings, 8 baseball-head-blows, and 3 pillow strangulations—later, he knows how easy it is. He is a 4-in-1 serial killer. He is a highly-paid and well-respected person in his field of work. The best there is. His work requires him to kill a person and leave evidence of the murder. Escaping is his skill, not a job requirement, and strangulation is his personal choice. More than killing, what pays more is the evidence of the killing. And as honest as he is, he never forges fake evidence or directs the murder at someone else, or frames some innocent person as the killer. He frames himself for the murders. But the murders he does are not for himself. — The first time John met James was at the hospital when he took his mother for a routine check-up. He offered to help him put her in the wheelchair from the taxi. ‘I can help you with her,’ James told him. ‘Thank you so much; I think I can manage now,’ John replied. ‘I mean forever, not just now. Once you are ready, you can call me. There is an alternate treatment for her, I can visit your house coming Tuesday’ He took an envelope from his white apron put it on the lap of his mother, and took the taxi in which John had come. When John opened the envelope, there was a black visiting card with golden letters engraved in it. On one side was written the phone number, and on the other were the words in bold-italics; Dr. James αμαρτοφάγος amartofágos — The next day John bought a new pair of shoes.