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Crimsonkashmir > Chapter 1 |
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| Grandpa Stories |
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“In the weave of past, we live our present.
The present weave is a peep into past.”
— Jesse |
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| Bangladesh/Pakistan |
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The Indians wanted him to play the role of a quintessential ape-man.
He had been tied to a termite-infested pole for the last seventy-two hours.
Tied to that yellow teak stake, totally nude, for the last three days, he
felt like a quintessential ape-man.
The captors had removed everything. He adorned nothing. Only his hobnailed
army leather boots provided some succour to his stark naked body. Around
him were his half-naked men, the men he had commanded. All were looking
down in shame.
His remaining forty-six odd men surrounded twenty-two Bangladeshi females.
Aping him in ape-like faith they also were without a stitch, totally nude,
their lush ripe bodies shimmering in the fierce sun. More importantly, they
were dead and he alive, tied to a teak stake amidst them.
These lovely creatures had been dead for over three days, sadly including
his favourite 18-year-old Amina Haq, hacked to pieces.
It was a gory sight and his nostrils quantified the degree of stench. It
was awesome, ten at scale of ten.
Their rotting bloated bodies gushed out stinking gases, which hung in the
still air around them. Humid conditions, despite the winter-cold had advanced
the decomposition. Their pyrolytic putrid flesh was melting out of their
bodies. White shining maggots, big, medium and small, all were having a
field day, oozing out of their noses, mouths and their vaginas, enlarged
by his troops repeated use. Those now dead but once such handpicked handsome
living ladies had been their most effective shields against Mukti Bahini
attacks and they had slowly become a gateway to vent their frustrations
with fiery semen and other warlike juices.
In the earlier surprise attack, Indians had killed 82 of his men. Twenty-two
of these women had also died.
God only knew by whose fire!
He had not chopped his Amina. But who had perpetuated this dastardly act?
His English college educated Amina, haute girl of Dacca, cute, demure Amina,
the eldest daughter of the richest traitorous local landlord. She was a
girl of big O’s, O smile, O buttocks and O bust and only if her father
had not been a traitor, a Mukti Bahini cockroach, he would have sanctified
that big beautiful O to his life. He had loved the big ‘O’ of
her cute round face when he had punctured her the first time. The same ‘O’
now mocked him, fixed, immobile, resting on a small rock, just below his
earlier instrument of terror, less her luscious body, God knows dumped where.
The previous shameless stomach crawling Bengali ants wanted them dead.
Local villagers had surrounded the tiny hillock in millions. Brothers and
sisters of ants and larvae in sheer numbers. They had come like swarm of
flies, immediately after the last shot had been fired and he had surrendered.
What the hell could he do without any orders to the contrary?
The relief forces had run into a sickening Mukti Bahini ambush about five
kilometres to his rear. The event had quickened his resolve to lay down
arms. A few men had run out in sheer panic, only to be chopped into pieces
by endless civilians. His rifle company had watched helplessly as the deserters
screamed for mercy and his intervention. However, he was helpless. He had
only adequate ammunition for self-defence, approximately hundred rounds
per man. Not adequate for a rescue foray but enough to save his precious
body being shamelessly dismembered and displayed as a shopping mall carcass.
Therefore, they had stuck to their defenses to be rescued.
The Scheduled Caste regiment of the Indians had saved them from certain
butchery by frenzied locals but those sly Indians had also ensured his constant
humiliation.
For three days, he had cried, naked, tied to the pole. His tears fell on
his Captain’s epaulettes lying on his feet. His sacred epaulettes
lay soiled on his feet, in puddle of his urine and excreta; just ahead the
open grinning fixated mouth of his once lovely Amina. Till, all his men
had fainted due to hunger, thirst, putrid smell of nausea and death, and
then only did the chamar Indians remove them from the scene.
This was no way to treat soldiers.
So what if his troops had indulged in some pillage.
All was fair in war.
Only few Bengali women of traitorous locals had been interned. What was
a big deal if few had been raped. In any case most had willingly compromised.
They had fattened on their company’s lavish food where none existed
in the countryside. Why the hell that black skinny Indian Hindu Major had
made such a hue and cry over it? He knew why. Only to humiliate the glorious
Pakistan Army and belittle the Muslim warriors. Fuckers will pay. He had
studied law and knew the rights of soldiers and citizens in full measure.
He will raise it as violation of Geneva Conventions.
The Indians will be made to pay.
Despite his rising newfound blind hatred for his captors, that ever-invasive
offensive smell of his earlier dead captives never left him. It became the
lavender of the balance of his miserable life.
The rotting odour of human flesh clung to him in his depressed awakening,
sleep and dreams in equal proportion. He even embraced pure vegetarianism,
much against the tenets of his family ethos but that smell of rotting human
flesh never left him. One day after an agonizing sleepless night, at a family
reunion, someone accidentally served him muttonchops. He screamed at the
sight of perceived human parts. He screamed at fleshy lumps of Amina. He
screamed and screamed till his throat bled.
He screamed everyday, till he died five years later.
His wife could never console her teenaged son after that. She watched in
alarm her once bubbly Punjabi male family mascot; withdraw inwards, gulping
his shame and anger. How it happened, why it happened, was not acceptable
to the young man who had lived each day just to catch a fleeting glimpse
of his father. He lost hope in any miraculous positive intervention by his
Gods as his countless daily prayers were left unattended. He was shattered
in faith. He reduced his tortured fatherly pangs, by clutching and staring
endlessly at the photo frame of his once handsome father, in full Army uniform,
whenever he could.
He would never forgive those who had reduced his father into that pathetic
state.
He dreamt and sought revenge, hour by hour, twenty-four times a day.
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| Kashmir, India |
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At that precise instant she learnt that she was unkempt, dirty and ugly.
One of the most beautiful girls she had ever espied upon of her own age was playing along the bed of a small freshwater stream. She had adorned a pink lace frock and held an even cuter doll in her hands.
That fairy’s parents were lounging on chairs a little distance away and her abbu was serving them sumptuous meat. She had never smelled the likes of them before and a small morsel she had slyly tasted when no one was looking by dipping her dirty fingers was out of heaven. Her father had angrily shooed her off.
But beyond all that, what she wanted the most was that gudiya in that girl’s hand.
Bravely she went up to her. Conscious of her tattered clothes, she pointed towards the doll and said, “Give me that.” She stared at that godly girl, to will her into submission.
The girl in the pink frock glanced at her and struck her tongue out, “Go away, you beggar. You have to study to get a doll. Papa presented it to me when I came first in my class.”
Disappointed, but not in the least shedding her resolve to possess the captivating doll, the little beggar girl lunged and a howling fight started. A stunning slap resounded on her soft cheeks, as her abbu pulled her off the lovely girl, who was desperately clinging to her favourite doll.
She howled and cried, “I want that gudiya.”
Her father cringed, apologized and lay on the feet of the master when he came running to investigate. The master on hearing the story, supported a curious smile on his face and entreated, “Baby, give her the doll, I will get you a bigger and a better one.”
“No,” she screamed in protest. “I got it because I came first in my class.” She was vehement in her reaction.
“No baby, no,” cooed her father. He whispered something into her cute little lobes. She was nodding silently to the tune of each soothing word being fed to her unsoothing ears. She loved her papa too much to refuse him, despite desperate yearning for the doll clutched tightly in her hands. She looked back towards the defiant beggar girl, tried to smile but failed miserably. Then she did what a child of her age could do best without a parental prompt. With a look of disgust and pure hatred, she threw her doll at the beggar girl.
The astounded beggar girl whooped in surprised joy and picked the deserted doll up in one swoop and before her abbu could react, she was running up the slopes, with her prize. At each step, she resolved, “I will study, I will study so I will get more such dolls”.
Later, in her mud thatched house she told her abbu of her dreams. The illiterate old man broke down and cried. |
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| Uttaranchal, India |
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Atop the world, atop the mystic and sacred mountains.
They were nestled in the Himalayas.
His father dressed in his scarlet white dhoti with his big hairy naked chest
bounded by the sacred black thread, sat cross-legged on a big black stone.
He sat similarly attired, minus the sacred thread and the hairy chest. The
holy yagna was in its last gasps of formal completion and with each Sanskrit
incantation, both threw mixtures of aphrodite-blessed foods in the holy
fire to appease the plethora of unrelenting Indic Gods.
Through the haze and blur of leaping crimson flames, he could see from top
of their hillock the plains of mother Ganges. The vast vestige of an ancient
civilization, the focal point of his motherland, lay before him. This was
his mother’s womb, the womb that had nurtured and bred millions like
him before. He was very proud of his culture, his religion and the land,
which had fed likes of his generation for five thousand years before him.
To have similar beliefs for five millennia, good or bad, withstand the fissures
and pressures of gentle Buddha or even gentler Mahavira or survive the cruel
sword of Islam and the monetary subversion of the suave and smooth talking
children of Christ, calm the influences of ten gurus, something fundamentally
had to be good in his religion. He was sure that it was not based on collective
fear, paranoid hysteria for kafirs or heathens or divine salvation or retribution
from an unknown evil.
Who could question a way of life?
It was the way of nature.
It was the way of their beliefs.
When his religious contemporaries were eating uncooked savage foods, wrapped
in animal skins indicative of their level of development, his patron saints
were churning scientific treatises, one a day, still stumping now these
advanced societies.
How come they had stolen a march over them? To survive them was still very
remarkable.
He belonged to the original religion if not the race, of the only earliest
recorded religion in the world, the oldest surviving one. This was his land,
the mother of existence. He was a proud, staunch, Sanatan Dharmi.
His father turned to him and with trembling fingers put the sacred thread
around his shoulders, across his back. From the middle of it hung a small
flat silver amulet with three golden lines running across its horizontal
plane. He kissed it and bowed his forehead to embrace its holiness.
His little empty head nodded vigorously as if he understood all the actions
of his ancient father. “This is your first step into manhood. This
is the first step to your religion. Do no evil. Do good to others. Do good
to the Mother Nature, which feeds you. Guard your dharma. To guard your
dharma you have to guard your beliefs, for what you live for, for what you
desire for, for what you love for,” stated his father in a gentle
tone that his father wanted him to understand.
In fact, at that point, he understood almost nothing.
When they came down from the mountaintop after four days of holy hibernation,
their world was devastated.
The village had been razed to the ground. His family temple dedicated to
Lord Shiva, their six hundred-year-old sanctum of prayers lay desecrated
and destroyed. His mother and his elder sister were missing. Grim faces
of state armed police personnel could never tell him actually of what had
happened to his dear ones. Those were very sad days of religious riots.
His smiling, vibrant, happy father aged overnight and a few days later died
of shock. The proud village Brahmin had died a pitiable old broken man.
He then painfully understood the meaning of each word his father had wanted
him to understand.
He only remembered that before leaving for hills to north, a mullah had
visited the village from Pakistan.
Kashmir, India
“Coward, coward,” chanted the children, as he could not muster
enough courage to jump across a three-feet-wide water channel.
“Coward, coward,” chanted the girls, as he shrieked while running
away, escaping the dread of a caterpillar thrown at him by his classmates.
“Coward, coward,” chanted Sikander, as he fainted dissecting
a frog in his High School biology class.
Yes, he was a shameless coward and the truth was not painful.
He was afraid of all evil, all pain, all misgivings and all ridicules.
He was a confirmed coward.
He loved being a coward.
It was safe being a coward.
Why should anyone take a decision that could bring about a torment in otherwise
peaceful life? Who had told his crazy father to just get up and charge across
the expanse of the battlefield and land up dead? Why take such stupid decisions?
Let others do that dreadful work for you. It was nice to be a coward. Cowards
don’t have to decide. They live.
Crying unashamedly, he had told the sum of his agonies to his loving ammi.
But his ammi, lovely soft, crooning beautiful ammi told him to ignore all
those fools and only concentrate on his studies. She had promises to fulfill
to her dead husband.
Ignore the fools, his intelligent brain had reasoned.
But his heart reasoned otherwise. It pumped up an alien desire. He wanted
to emulate Sikander, the brave Sikander, and the heart-throb of all known
Muslim girls in school.
Sikander the brave had thrown stones at Indian patrols, ever since he was
13. He was expelled from school when he slipped his hand up the skirt of
a Hindu girl who had defied the Islamic dress code. Though out of school,
he was his hero, his idol.
Chants of azadi had shaken his beliefs. Muslim brotherhood from Turkey to
Kashmir was his vision. The government repression, when it came, created
many incidents, which made him spit at anything Indian.
At the Srinagar Medical College, he became a slave of his High School fail
zealot, Sikander. Mother constantly scolded him and pleaded with him to
avoid jihadis. “This bloody bread you eat comes from India. The money,
which I get, is Indian. Your brave father had died fighting Pakistanis in
the 1971 war in this valley. He was honoured,” she had screamed, raved
and shouted.
He remained deaf. Deaf as a dead dodo, he chose to remain emotionally mute
to his mother’s pleadings. She was too much an Indian lover for his
liking. But because of her immense love and sacrifices, which he saw and
appreciated, he did not brand her a traitor outright.
They had burnt the Indian flag at the stadium during an Indo-Pak cricket
match. What a glorious day it had been. He felt like a conquering emperor,
just the way Babur must have felt on snatching the throne of Delhi. Even
Aisha, the neighbour’s sickly daughter, had smiled at him for the
first time. His chest had bloated in macho pride.
They came like swarms of bees. They stung worse than a swarm of bees.
When the Indian troops were dragging Sikander out of his house, he as a
bystander eyewitness suddenly felt scared, so scared that the earlier gratifying
sensation was reduced to scrotum pulverizing pain. Pomp and splendour of
earlier elation vanished in thin air.
Their eyes met. Sikander’s legs up in the air, head dangling down.
Their eyes met. He was begging for help. But what could he do? Fear had
locked his feet, totally immobile.
“Coward, you meek coward,” shouted the eyes of Sikander. He
looked down avoiding the accusing gaze of his best friend.
He had not dared to look up for the next four years, till Allah had given
him deliverance from his sin, by treating an injured mujahidin, accidentally.
Despite all his underground help, that fixed accusing gaze of Sikander,
never wavered off him. He did not have the courage to attend the funeral
of his revered idol, Sikander, who died after four days of constant torture.
Code-named “angel” because of his deeds to the injured, he had
been an evil source of death for his friend. They had homed on to them courtesy
the video footage of that wretched cricket match. That awful black ugly
man, sniggering interrogator, his muscular pain giving goons, his beseeching,
pleading mother, all played on his fragile nerves to accept his guilt without
any protest. It was he who had broken down in the first basic questioning,
blurting out Sikander’s name.
His willing cooperation had saved his body but not that of his friend.
There was a shuffling of feet across the screen. He looked up. A big man
in a loose brown salwar kameez looked at him. He shivered involuntarily.
“I need you angel,” the man said. |
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| Kabul |
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They were the bravest band of five brothers. He, the youngest, felt as such.
The little boy tottered behind his elder brothers. He worshipped the soil
they ran on. Oodles of courage fell from each step they took. Splendent
images of that courage were etched deeply in his nascent mind.
They were simply fantastic, God like and God gifted.
Alone they could climb trees, milch cows and pluck apples. They could trek
alone, raiding and stealing others’ fruits, vegetables and occasionally
a few chickens. They always were laughing, content and happy. They all clamoured
for his mother’s attention. That was the time when he felt a little
annoyed. All would fight to be fed their favourite mutton biryani. All would
not eat by themselves, for all would fight for morsels fed into their mouths
by their loving mother.
But somehow before he could comprehend factually anything more pleasurable,
the good life changed dramatically.
Strange-looking alien men changed their lives. The white men came. They
looked pale and sick. The white pale looking sick men came with their even
stranger looking machines. Those monstrous machines looked satanically evil.
Alarmed at the sight of witnessing the evil, he rushed to his mother, bravely
covering himself under the safety of her dupatta.
He was petrified of those thundering steel boxes that moved and spat vicious
fire. But his brave brothers as usual set the matters right for him in a
jiffy. They were the bravest of the brave, weren’t they? They ran
up from the rear or the sides and mocked the iron monsters by pelting them
with stones.
They laughed, threw stones and laughed again.
Apprehensive at first, but seeing his brave brothers in action, he left
his mother’s side and laughed. Clapping with his frail hands, throwing
stones, he laughed. His brothers were really too brave. It made him proud,
even fearless, to the extent of allowing his tiny self to pick up fights
with his bigger friends.
“Bloody white shit-head Ruskie”, shouted his brothers. “Bloody
white shit-head Ruskie”, he shouted, aping his brothers. “Pig-eating
cunts”, shouted his brave elder brothers. “Pig-eating cunts”,
he shouted mimicking his brave elder brothers. He fought with his big brothers
when they refused to tell him what was a cunt. Less that cunt-spoiling instance,
he loved his brothers.
His abbu always looked the other way when those pale sickly men passed on
in their big machines. He had that strange animated look which had hallmark
of pure unadulterated hatred.
“Fucking traitors, bloody communists”, his father would retort
at a few like him of his own clan, riding those big monstrous machines.
“Fucking traitors, bloody communists”, he would shout animatedly
shaking his fists at them. “Fucking traitors, bloody communists”,
his elder brothers would shout shaking their plucky genitals animatedly
after them. “Fucking traitors, bloody communists, ”, they all
would gleefully shout aping the bravest of the brave, their father, the
only person his brave brothers feared.
Late in the morning one day, one big machine blew in front of his house.
All his brave brothers cheered at the sight of an overturned dead iron monster.
By late afternoon, bullets started screaming and dancing around their house.
The iron monsters made a frightening entry. They came back spitting fire.
By late evening, three of his brothers lay dead amongst piercing wails of
his mother. He learnt a very important lesson that day that bravery doesn’t
stop bullets nor his father was the bravest of the brave.
By night, his father bundled up all they possessed and started walking in
the darkness of night.
Four days later, tired and hungry, they were in Peshawar, Pakistan. His
father knelt down and kissed the holy earth. Allah the merciful had saved
their family from further decimation.
A week later, the little boy clutching his abbu’s hand, walked past
a big granite building. Entering by the main gate, he saw hundreds of his
age sitting in neat rows, chanting strange verses. He looked up questioningly
at his father. The old man had tears in his eyes. He wailed and thrashed
on his father’s chest, as he was bodily lifted into the arms of a
strange man with a long white beard.
“He is your father, mother and home from now. Take care of yourself,
my son. Oh Allah, please forgive me,” he cried and ran away.
That was the last he saw of his not-so-brave father for the next three years.
Not that it mattered after a week of separation. He found unbridled love,
peace, stomach-filling sumptuous meals and, more importantly, a strange
old man who loved him more than his biological father.
He rarely missed home in his new home. |
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| Punjab, India |
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He was born under the wrong phase of the moon.
The astronomical angels drawn by plethora of heavenly stars were also ominously
awry. Even the Purohit did not make the Janam Kundli for the first two weeks.
However, this did not deter his anxious father from bulldozing his way into
the domain of protesting nurses in the labour room and assure himself with
authenticity of his own eyes that the child in question supported the important
thing between his wobbly legs.
He liked what he saw.
The overjoyed father then ran around distributing sweets.
In a bout of raving generosity, he also presented pure silk saris to all
bais’ who had brought about this happy event. He gave his grateful
wife a diamond solitaire and his sulking widowed childless half sisters
gold marriage sets while the real surviving one got something undisclosed.
After only four months, he packed his heart-throb daughter away to an obscure
village life as she displayed life-threatening sibling rivalry.
But as a son, the son didn’t for a long time give his thankful father
an opportunity to elate.
His son battled against four hernia operations, a rarest of full-moon bronchitis
asthma, two shoulder dislocations, twice cracking his right hand from the
wrist and the elbow, tear his knee ligaments, have one of those twisted
and a chipped lumbar spine digits and burdened with lesser issues of countless
broken finger bones or sewed skin patches, presenting a perfect cocktail
of living life on an edge.
It didn’t at all please his alarmed father who ran from one soothsayer
to another to kill the evil spell of the murderous moon. If the physical
pain was an acceptable justifiable norm in dealing with his son’s
existence, the dusts of Venus added another dimension to his son’s
woes–women. Four/five girls down including his basic language teacher
and a school housemistress and such simple philanderings enabled an easy
rustication from his prestigious private boarding school. The dramatic rustication
drama repeated in college only six months later, thankfully not women related,
but for giving seventeen stitches to his classmate, was not fun to his self-made,
self-educated engineer father.
And all this misery he bestowed on his family before he crossed his teens.
He was eleven years old in 1971 and proceeding on a holiday trip on the
Pathankot-Jammu road when enemy planes straffed hapless military and civilian
vehicles.
It was war; the first impressions of which he captured peering out of the
big windows of their old trusted Ambassador car of 1958 model. He witnessed
a soldier firing a long gun at the fearsome, crisscrossing and shrieking
enemy aircraft and then jump up in joy, as the plane above him caught fire.
He witnessed the war in a ride of his life, through the window of their
rusty car. His otherwise calm father was driving in a rare fury to perhaps
overtake the events being perpetuated around him from evil Gods above.
At that moment, he knew what he wanted to be.
Latter’s disillusionment was complete when he, obese and pampered,
surprised everyone by joining the military academy at Kadakwasla, Pune.
All this, well before his innocent teens. |
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