Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits

  Wrapped in a polythene, tucked away safe in my mind
a little goodbye, maybe, or just a passing smile...

  ...The birds fly away to the southern sky searching a home
a bunch o' paper flowers, or a little boy left all alone
Can somebody hear me, I'm screamin' from so far away
morning who'll calm you,now the evening's eclipsed again...

  ...Well does life get any better
More yesterday than today
How I thought the sun would shine tomorrow
But it rained...

… and an earlier time when the flowers were not stained with blood, the moon with blood clots!
—Pablo Neruda, ‘Oh, My Lost City’

In Shahar though, by the age children learned the alphabet, they realized that there was an irreversible bitterness between Kashmir and India, and that the minority Pandits were often at the receiving end of the wrath this bitterness evoked. We were the punching bags. But we assimilated noiselessly, and whenever one of us became a victim of selective targetting, the rest of us would lie low, hoping for things to normalize.

Suddenly, we hear laughter outside. Then someone passes a remark and there is the sound of laughter again. Father goes to the window and after taking a deep breath lifts the corner of the curtain to look outside. I kneel on the ground near him and peep outside as well. Near the main gate below, there is a gang of boys. Some of them are smoking. I know most of them. They are boys from our neighbourhood—near and far—and I have played cricket with some of them. Their ringleader is a boy who lives nearby. ‘He is even trained in rocket launchers,’ one of them says loudly, boasting about his cousin who is with a militant group now.

‘Let’s distribute these houses,’ one of them shouts. ‘Akram, which one do you want?’ he asks.

‘I would settle for this house any day,’ he points to a house.

‘Bastard,’ shoots back another, ‘how you wish you could occupy this house with their daughter!’

There is a peal of laughter. They make obscene gestures with their fists and Akram pretends as if he is raping the girl and is now close to an orgasm. Since I am kneeling next to Father, from the corner of my left eye, I can see that his legs have begun to shake.

In the next few minutes, all of them have one house each. In between they discuss other girls. And then Akram asks the ringleader, ‘Hey Khoja, you haven’t specified your choice!’

The ringleader is wearing a pheran and there is a cricket bat in his hands. He is smoking. He savours the question for a moment. Everybody is looking at him now. The ringleader then turns and now he is facing our gate. He lifts his arm, and points his finger towards it. He lets it stay afloat in the air for a moment and then he says it.

‘I will take this!’

The corner of the curtain drops from Father’s grip. He crumbles to the floor right there. He closes his eyes and is shaking. I think I hear someone from the gang shouting: ‘Good choice, baaya, good choice.’

Then it all blanks out. I can hear nothing more. There is a buzzing sound in my ear, as if my cochlea has burst. One of them must have then picked up a stone and thrown it at Razdan’s house. The sound of glass breaking tears through the freezing air. Pigeons take flight. A pack of dogs begins to bark.

‘Haya kyoho goy,’ says one of them, ‘you have incurred losses upon Akram. Now he will have to replace this windowpane.’

‘At least go inside and piss; like a dog you need to mark your territory.’

And then they leave. Their voices grow distant till they completely fade away. Silence prevails again except for the staccato barking of mongrels and the cooing of pigeons that are returning to the attic.

From March 1990 onwards, the killings of Pandits in the Valley increased manifold. The news reports coming in from Kashmir were tragic. In the name of Azadi, the Pandits were hounded on the streets and killed brutally. Killings of the Hindu minority had turned into an orgy; a kind of bloodlust. By April, 1990, the mask was completely off. It was not only the armed terrorist who took pride in such killings—the common man on the streets participated in some of these heinous murders as well.

Over the years, the narrative of what led to the exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley has been changed. A series of untruths have been spoken so many times that they have almost become the truth. One major untruth is that the Pandits were made to leave Kashmir under a government design to discredit the Kashmiri secessionist movement. One of the scapegoats chosen for this untruth was the former governor of the state, Jagmohan.

‘The Pandits were encouraged by Jagmohan to leave so that he could deal with us firmly.’ One kept hearing this. Initially, I didn’t care. But now I seethe with anger whenever I come across this propaganda. I have become determined—to paraphrase Agha Shahid Ali—that my memory must come in the way of this untrue history. Another problem is the apathy of the media and a majority of India’s intellectual class who refuse to even acknowledge the suffering of the Pandits. No campaigns were ever run for us; no fellowships or grants given for research on our exodus. For the media, the Kashmir issue has remained largely black and white—here are a people who were victims of brutalization at the hands of the Indian state. But the media has failed to see, and has largely ignored the fact that the same people also victimized another people.