Kashmir Blues travels through the streets of Bombay and Delhi and soaks in the beauty of that place called Kashmir along with its carpets, flowers, love and death. This is Urmilla Deshpande’s second work of fiction. Some excerpts from the book.
Samaad got off his metal cot and folded up his bedding. He filled his old paint can with water and went out into the field behind his house to relieve himself before Fajr, the first namaaz of the day. He watched the sun rise. He got no pleasure from it, he only watched it because he was awake when it rose outside his kitchen window as he made his tea.
He was done with his morning prayers, and with the ritual of rolling up his precious old rug and putting it away. That rug was part of him, it went everywhere he went. The profound red in it came from madder root. The plant had to be at least a decade old, mixed with milk and fermented exactly thirty days. He sometimes wondered if it was the feel of that rug rather than any true religious feeling that brought on the reverence he felt while performing his ritual. He had used it most of his thirty-six years, or at least since he was old enough to pray. His father got it from his grandfather, they had all used that rug for a long time. Someone far back in the family had made it when they were still nomads, wandering the North-West Frontier of India with their goats.
As the water began to steam, he saw the dust boiling upon the path to his house, backlit by the early morning light that came in through his window and dappled his mud floor. He added two cups of water for the tea and went out to greet the two men as they stepped out of the battered and dusty Jonga. They were both dressed in the knee-length shirts and loose pants worn by the men of the North-West all the way from central India into Afghanistan.
Samaad hugged the older man, leaning into him side to side in the traditional way. The younger man he just nodded at. They walked over to the Jonga and began to unload it. They talked as they worked, about how old the vehicle was, how neither the Japanese nor anyone else made things the way they used to, this one had a hundred thousand kilometres on it, each one hard-earned on those unforgiving Himalayan gravel roads. They talked of the death of old Abbas bhai in the village. He had been shot in the thigh as he walked home after locking up his chai-beedi shop, as he had done through those same fields for most of his life. He had lain there, not fatally wounded, but in shock, had gone to sleep in the cold dark. He had been found frozen the next morning, not twenty steps from help.
Then, of course, talk turned to the state of their beloved home, the slow death of the local businesses, how there were no European or American tourists. No one came anymore to honeymoon in the old houseboats, once splendid old ladies decked in silk curtains and carved walnut screens, now rotting or rotted, abandoned on the great Dal lake and the banks of the Jhelum, their owners and all the artisans gone south to make their homes and setup shop among the Tibetan diaspora, new refugees among those old ones.
Not even Indian tourists came to see the heartbreaking colours of the flowers in the Kashmir valley. They said after soldiers and freedom fighters had died there, the flowers bloomed with colours like never before, stained vivid by their blood. ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses row on row’, Samaad thought, the Great War. Those battlefields, having hosted murder and death, lay asleep all winter under the cold quilt of snow, and then, come springtime, poppies bloomed like great drops of blood, the earth ridding itself of the life-blood of young soldiers that had soaked into the ground as they lay dying. They talked of this and that, more matter-of-fact than sad, the older men ignoring the occasional outburst from the younger one. He was very young, after all, no more than seventeen. They both remembered being that way at his age.
Sometimes Samaad wondered about his own lack of outrage. He sometimes wondered if he had lost it along the way, in England, where his father had sent him to school and college. He had wanted his son to be indistinguishable from the people who came to buy their carpets, or to vacation in their houseboats. But Samaad knew it was there, lying dormant, feeding his life, feeding everything he did. It was better this way, pent up, a trickle of the fury, that would last him his whole life, rather than a gush that would send him into open conflict and take that life away in a single moment of violence. That young man would be recruited soon enough, for some quick and dirty operation that would likely end his life. Then his blood, too, would feed the earth. When they were done unloading, they went into the house, got their tea, and then sat on their haunches and sipped it while they smoked their beedis. They talked some more. Then the older man said goodbye and drove away, leaving the boy to help Samaad.
Samaad got to work then, opening each bag one by one, with care, taking out each carpet, unrolling it onto one of his own that he had laid out on the floor. He went over each one, turning it this way and that, looking at it from each side of the little room, measuring, counting knots, making notes, making more notes, and finally writing a number beside each column, a code for the price that only he knew. There was nothing special, no spectacular carpet in the lot. None that he could take to those special buyers in Bombay and New Delhi who would pay whatever price he asked for.
But there were some good ones, some old ones in very good condition. He would make what they needed that quarter. He would pay the men who would visit him four months hence, in the earliest time of day, when it was all night and fog, when no one would see them. When they had come and gone, then even he could not say for sure in the bright light of morning that they had been there at all. Businesses willingly and sometimes, as in Samaad’s case, unwillingly, funded the insurgency in their area. They really had no choice but to pay for ‘protection’.
Samaad tried not to dwell on the fact that radical fanatics from the north were taking over not just the land, but the businesses, and everything that was once his father’s, his brother’s, his. He tried not to dwell on the erosion of his religion—tolerant, mystical, spiritual, and therefore easy to push aside: to ridicule. His way was hated by these radicals who came quietly like snakes and rats through the passes. They said his beliefs were so distorted from the real Islam that they did not consider it Islam any longer. It had been tainted and mixed with Hinduism and Buddhism over the centuries, the radicals said, and this was true.
But Samaad knew that his beliefs were what had kept their land, their people together. Not harmoniously and happily at all times, rubbing along with some friction, but at least together. Now, the warp and the weft were being pulled out of that great carpet of diversity that was Kashmir. The Pundits had been driven out, the Sufis were being killed, the Buddhists had retreated to their corner, it would soon all fall apart. He tried not to, but did dwell on it more and more.
A thought was growing within him, a glowing cold blue ember. He knew something was calling him. He had heard it that day on the mountainside. He had heard the great conch of Shiva, his footsteps sounding in the hills. He had heard the songs of the qualandars, those old men who followed the truth of Allah above everything else, whirling in the eddies flowing out of Shiva’s dreadlocks, calling to him to protect this land, to keep it pure and safe. At noon they ate the food the boy had cooked, huge coarse rotis and lentils and fried green chillies.
Samaad went back to work, keeping at it all that day and most of the next, with only a few hours of sleep. Then the older man came back in the Jonga, collected his boy and a list from Samaad. ‘Salaam ale kum, Hamid bhai,’ Samaad said to him. ‘Wale kum salaam,’ the old man replied, ‘be safe, Allah is always with you, my boy.’ They embraced, and then he and the boy drove away.
Kashmir Blues, by Urmilla Deshpande . Published by Westland Limited, pages 362, Rs 325.
(For updates you can share with your friends, follow IBNLive on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest)
More on IBNLive Right Now
MOST SHARED
PHOTOGALLERY
