Red streaks, white snow

15th December 2004*

Today in the evening, I saw a car go up in flames in front of my home. I asked daddy what happened. He told me it was an accident. I overheard the crowd of people gathered around the burning car saying it was an ULFA attack. A hand grenade had been flung at it by another car that drove past. That burning car belonged to my neighbours. They were driving to a party. They got burnt. I know their little boy. He is eight years old, three years younger than me. He wasn’t in the car. I heard him crying and I remembered a friend.

Around 3 years back in Kashmir, there was a little boy. Aasmaan, a word that in Urdu means heaven, was the name of his hometown. When I met him, he boasted that his dad’s dad and his dad’s dad and his dad’s dad (and so on) had been evangelists. I was a small girl then, so I didn’t know what this big word meant. He swelled up and told me that it meant they were preachers. They were preachers from Iran- Persia, land of gold, palaces, beautiful princesses, sheikhs, dervishes, fakirs… Those great-great-great granddads of his must have had long beards, worn long white robes, traveled for days across hot desert sands. Then they reached Kashmir. They settled down there and went about their business, spreading the word of Allah.

He would never have been born if his ancestors had stopped walking through the desert. He, a seed in some 13^th century Iranian preacher’s blood, had made that long precarious journey. So he loved his little legs. He didn’t have legs like those of a gazelle. He had short stubby legs. But he ran like that maniac runner Forrest Gump. He never missed a chance to show off the cups he had won in races in school. They stood proudly lined up on the shelf above his little blue study table, beside his Winnie the Pooh pen stand, crammed with multi-coloured pens, and a photograph of him with his parents on a trip to Srinagar. Walking back from school with his cousins, he always managed to leave them far behind, never bothering to listen to his Uncle’s admonitions to walk with them like a good elder brother. But he also sometimes patiently sat in a corner, his forehead creased, trying very hard to understand the story his Abbu was teaching the class X students, all the while dangling his legs, which were yet too short to reach the floor.

You might have heard that Kashmir is a very beautiful place, but it also happens to be a dangerous place. Aasmaan wasn’t spared. His mother’s younger brother, his uncle got shot. His mother’s family had come all the way from Afghanistan a long-long time ago. That particular great-great-great grandfather had fought many battles. Finally the King tired of it, made peace, and gave him land to settle down. That was ages ago, but perhaps, some of that hot blood still remained. Now his mama had been shot by militants. He was afraid that his uncle had become like those bullets ridden blood-stained bodies he had seen a year back. They had lain mangled on the snow in front of his colony gate. The white snow was stained- red streaks, red drops. After that, he avoided his favourite white cream pastries that had thin red jam lines running across the top.

He heard later that his uncle wasn’t hurt so badly. But all the same, it’s still very bad, isn’t it, to be shot in the leg? If you don’t have legs, how will you walk? How will you run? How will you stand on your feet? How could his great-great-great-grandfathers have ever reached Kashmir if they couldn’t have walked, if it hadn’t been for their legs? Camels alone would never have been sufficient.

Everyday, he heard his mother and father and close relatives talking in low voices late into the night in the drawing room. One night, he sneaked out of his bed, stood listening at the door, hiding behind the curtain. But his mother spotted him. She got up from her seat and picked him up in her arms.

“Beta, it’s so late. What are you doing hiding behind the curtain? You should have been asleep long time back. Why did you get up from your bed? And where is your sweater? Why aren’t you wearing it? Allah, I don’t want you catching cold in this bitter winter.” She said, stroking and smoothing his untidy mop of hair.

“Ammi how is uncle? When will I see him again? And where has he gone?” he asked

“Your uncle has gone with Shameem aunty and Rizwan uncle to Vellore for treatment,” she replied, carrying him off to his bedroom.

“Vellore? Where is that?” he asked.

“Vellore is at the opposite end of India, exactly opposite to Kashmir. India is a long country, you know. If Kashmir lies at the head, then Vellore would be at the tail”, she replied, putting him down on his bed.

“You mean India is like a lizard? And Vellore is at its tail?” he asked, faintly recalling the India map that hung beside the blackboard in his father’s classroom.

“Yes, it’s exactly like that.” she said.

“But uncle is so sick and it’s so cold. Why did they have to take him so far?” he asked.

“The doctors there are the best, darling. Your uncle’s case is a little serious. We don’t want his legs to be amputated”, she said, tucking the covers of his pastel purple coloured blanket with the Pokemon on it under his chin.

“What is amputated?” he asked.

“When your limbs have been hurt very badly, when it has become incurable and the infection can spread to the rest of the body, then doctors perform an operation to remove that sick limb. That is amputated.”

Amputated, then, became a new word to mean something he already knew about. Amputated meant his neighbour Jaleel auntie’s eldest son who had lost his left hand, his classmates older brother in eighth standard who had lost both legs and needed a wheelchair, the neighbourhood grocery store shopkeeper’s nephew who had only one leg, but still kept store for his uncle. They had lost their limbs in bomb blasts. He didn’t want his uncle to become one of them. He didn’t want his uncle to become an amputated. What would happen to Shaukat and Ali? Who would pick all of them up from school everyday? Who would buy them those chocolate pastries, play cricket with them on Sundays, take them to the only video game parlour in the main town market? His own father never indulged him.

People without limbs are sometimes called crippled. Would his uncle become one? Like that beggar in the market near his school, who was called a cripple by everyone; even children. It was great fun to shout “Cripple!” at him and then shriek and run away when he started cursing. It had seemed a funny name. Now he was frightened to discover that cripple is an ugly word.

Saying his prayers before bed had seemed such a hateful chore. He said them only because he was afraid of his father’s strict eye. But now, his prayers lingered on over the minutes. He had dreams where he saw his uncle on a wheelchair trying to climb a mountain, failing and rolling down each time. Then he saw his house turning into a video game and men in fatigues with big guns chasing him, cornering him in his room. He would always wake up at this point. Those dreams got frequent and he had to sleep with the window open, so that he would remember in the dream to escape through the window. It was the coldest month of January. It was snowing. The trees in the park were bald, black. It wasn’t very sunny, just cold, wet.

February dawned. The skies cleared. The snow melted, revealing brown earth, green grass. News arrived that his uncle’s legs had been saved. The doctor was very competent. Everybody couldn’t thank her enough. Everybody was relieved. Everybody was grateful.

His uncle wouldn’t become an amputated. His uncle wouldn’t become a cripple. His uncle had been saved. He had to do something for the person who had caused this miracle. So he sat down on his table and wrote a letter to her. It was a simple letter. It didn’t say much. He wrote, in a careful big fat cursive- Thank you Dear Dr. Anita Valmiki for saving my uncle’s legs. He signed his name at the bottom. Then he carefully folded the letter and put it in a white envelope that he found lying on his father’s desk and asked his mother to post it. That was his first letter. Not really,

his first letter had been to the pretty girl in school who was a year older. At recess, he had sneaked it into her schoolbag left unattended. He was so scared, he forgot to write his name. But, that didn’t matter.

Assam, where I stay, is a far country from Aasmaan, but violence, like a serpentine river, runs through both places, through both of us. Its waters seep beneath our clothes, into our skins, underneath. Here where I live, there are bandhs, curfews. Sometimes there are police checks when we are driving. Dad keeps his documents in order. When we are driving in the countryside, we are driving behind Army trucks. Everyday in the newspaper there is something or the other. This is what all my elders talk about - ULFA, government, AASU, other groups, other names. It’s like the damp of the monsoons that soaks through my school shirt on a five minute wait for the bus.

Two months back, it was my best friend Barnali’s birthday. She lives in Machkhowa. There was a blast there, the day before her birthday. So her birthday party was postponed. We restricted our movements for the next few days. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere, just school, and back.

The fire brigade has arrived. The flames, doused. The black smoke billows towards the sky, heaven, aasmaan.

* The ULFA claimed responsibility for the bombing in Guwahati, stating that it was in protest against the flushing out of their camps in Bhutan that had happened exactly a year back on December 15^th, 2003. It was the one year anniversary of a highly successful Operation ALL CLEAR carried out by the Bhutan government with the support of the Indian Army, where in total 13 ULFA camps, 12 NDFB, and 5 KLO camps were uprooted.