
WINNER: Paradise Lost
“Playful, often bizarre, and lively. "Paradise Lost" revisits the classic with blazing wit and spins a unique short story with novelistic pleasures.”
—Canisia Lubrin
E
ven Yama, the God of death, is running late in that hopelessly Indian way.
And while that gives me time to reflect on my bumpy life thus far, it is the irony of my impending departure that seizes me. I will soon be gone with no choice in the matter. I will be dead, deceased, departed in the prime of youth despite no symptom of any terminal illness, any foreseen or unseen enemies, and without fighting any war for any reason—if being trigger happy or territorial or the sheer force of the invasive habit of imbecilic hegemony can be called ‘reasons,’ that is—and without being caught in apocalyptic weather, and without mixing snake poison in cow’s milk on the advice of a Godman to treat insomnia caused by lactose intolerance, and without having gone sightseeing to Vietnam protected by American soldiers, and without being a dowry victim of a North Indian mother-in-law or a murder target of a man, Home Minister, animal, or virus.
Yet, I will be dead, deceased, departed in the prime of youth.
Without even the suicidal ambition of Rasputin, and without overeating myself to death like the French physician and philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie, and without shoving a whalebone into my own urinary tract to clear a blockage like the great American statesmen Gouverneur Morris, and without being bitten to death by a monkey like Alexander of Greece, and without falling down a chimney after mistaking it for a balcony like Finnish actress Sirkka Sari, and without suffering a fatal stroke after reading one’s own premature obituaries like the great Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey, and without laughing myself to death after watching The Goodies comedy show like Alex Mitchell, a poor bricklayer from Norfolk.
Though there is much to laugh about in my case, too.
Yet I will be gone.
At the age of 25.
Unless Yama, the Hindu God of Death screws up like the India of today, the India of the unlit '90s, by either reaching a few years after my allotted time, or by not showing up at all. Yama. Late as always. Benignly allowing me time to revisit my life story right from the beginning, even at the end. But to blame it all on Yama is to pardon Hindu India for her over-dependence on just a single God for managing the vital matter of Population Control, despite having at its disposal a total of 330 million gods with unemployment issues quite like their worshippers. Yet India’s overpopulation is as much about the frenetic fertility of an idle subcontinent as it is about Yama taking too bloody long to get out of his pajamas and into work attire every morning and clearing the inventory of people living beyond their time. Though of course, for me, his inefficiency is a selfish stroke of luck.
I hope the fellow just doesn’t show up at all.
That at least one of the two bullocks pulling his bullock cart simply refuses to budge and settles down like a holy cow in the middle of the road, causing an uproarious Indian traffic jam. But who knows. What if hoping that Yama doesn’t show up to take me away from life is as futile as hoping that the lousiest head of state in a nation’s history will work the least and therefore inflict the least damage?
Ha!
Oh, to laugh at such a time, when my life is about to end! This life, which began one deceptively beautiful and delusively surreal Himalayan dawn.
In the autumn of ‘65.
When the world seemed to have missed the warning issued by the clock on the Clock Tower at Lal Chowk, our revolutionary Red Square in downtown Srinagar, the jaan of our Sufi political heart. We missed, or rather we took too lightly, the flags that people hoisted under its watch, under the watch of Time. Flags that struck a discordant note in my Sufi Kashmir. The brazenly green and utterly Islamic Pakistani flag, the Indian tricolour with the saffron band on top and the laughable tokenism of the green band at the bottom. Flags that turned the red heart of our capital into white lies, and the square itself into lasting evidence of the unkept promise of referendum. By both: our Sheikh who tried and died, and their Nehru, who promised and forgot.
It escaped our notice till at least 1965 when I was born, and when the world was more or less still lucky to be uneventful, moderate, and trusting.
In America, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson had launched a ‘War on Poverty’.
In England, the leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson, was Prime Minister.
In India, Lal Bahadur Shastri, an unassuming Gandhian and Nehruvian, was Prime Minister.
And the Indo–Pak War of 1965 had just ended.
And so the Dal Lake in Kashmir was a tableau of peace.
The timing was perfect.
It’s all about timing.
As time would tell.
But now in 1990, I hide in my locked house in downtown Srinagar, but still do not blame it on the noisy commotion on the street outside, which I am made to believe is baying for my blood. I have been told by some that the mob outside will not care a dime if I am atheist or Sufi. They will simply draw my blood for the colour they think my religion has cast on it. Yet, although I have locked myself in fear, I don’t blame them. Because when I look back at what happened, I blame it on this hellhound called Time. The sunny Kashmir of then to which promises were made. The glowering Kashmir of now that has vowed to avenge.
It’s not as much about Kashmir and India as it is about the Kashmir and India of then and the Kashmir and India of now.
It’s all about Then and Now.
And so 25 years later, I shake my head.
Too late, I fathom the foreboding hidden in the sheer silence of that halted clock on the Clock Tower at Lal Chowk, its cadence missing, numbed behind the deceptive beauty of paradisiacal Kashmir. Like a lull before the tumultuous, riotous dawn of Kali Yug.
But here at home in my more or less Kashmiri pandit locality of intractable wood and recalcitrant stone by the old bridge over the timeless Jhelum, the ticking of my faddish wall clock is deafening. Although what should have been deafening instead, is the sloganeering mob outside on the street, their lungs screaming Azadi, and blood polarized by political volition. They all scream for freedom, but very few for the minor pandit hurdle that comes in its way. Yet, for the pandit in me, it is the latter that makes this wall clock tick louder. I shut my eyes to concentrate on the Tick-Tock inside: a warning note of history, the sound of manacles strapping an epoch tight in a vice-like grip. Here it comes: four times for certainty, the extra blip like an exclamation mark! To expunge the Sufi age and Kashmiriat.
I shut my eyes to concentrate on the Tick-Tock inside: a warning note of history, the sound of manacles strapping an epoch tight in a vice-like grip.
Conclusively.
One. Two. Three. Four ...!
... And on this striking note of reflection, here it comes.
The awaited, feared knock on my door. Four times, too.
Yama, I guess ... Finally.
The slogans outside rise to a fever pitch. All set to depart, I drag myself to the door.
Khuda Hafiz.
Goodbye.
I open the door and find a constable of the Jammu & Kashmir police.
Has Yama changed his attire? How many avatars does Yama have? Sometimes he comes in Army uniform, sometimes in hand-woven khadi and Gandhi topis, sometimes in pious saffron, or holy green. But in a J&K police uniform? That is rare! Unless you are a mujahid.
Deceptive fucker, this constable.
But I have a choice, and the choice is easy. I have no way of verifying if the Yama there on the street—the mob screaming for Azadi—will promote me and send me to heaven from this Jannat called Kashmir. Or if this sarkari sonofabitch, right here at my door, has come to demote me and send me to a burning, saffronized hell. Yet, the democratic Kashmiri that I am, I’d rather respond to a fake political promise than to the hard truth. So when the fucker says they, the saffron clods from Hindustan, have a bus ready for waiting victims like me, I rush out behind him, leaving my things behind at home because I know I will return soon after the weather changes, and when the Indian army saunters in with all its might, trampling our tormentors, in the manner my commune describes so glowingly whenever we gather in pious solidarity in the Rup Bhawani temple.
Where they mock Muhammad.
And pray to Ram.
In a rusty old state transport bus, mysteriously in the middle of a curfew and in the middle of the night, when my Kashmiri Muslim brethren are battling oppression in downtown Srinagar, I join my gaggle of fleeing fellow pandits. They chatter loudly and begin the joyous task of thanking the 330 million gods of our ample pantheon for the new lease of life. They take welcome breaks in between to bless the holy land of India for saving them from murderous Islam. And keeping the best for the last, they thank the newly appointed Hindu Governor, first for making good their escape on this bus, and second for teaching the Islamists (my brethren) a bloody good lesson. Confident of returning soon, they break into bhajans and sangeet and I, a Kashmiri atheist, shut my eyes to the tuneless jamboree.
Sleep deprived for days on stretch, I hug some precious, indelible images of Kashmir and fold my legs up on the bus seat in the fetal position.
My motherland takes me in her dreamy arms.
I am in a foggy mountain land. How can I ever live in the plains?
But no, this isn’t exactly me, it’s my soul. Or maybe, my alter ego. I feel vaporous like a cloud. And I am flying over the looming mountains of Jammu and Kashmir.
First, I am a trembling rag of pallid, heavy-headed fluff hovering over the desolate cold washy spread of the Parkachik glacier at over 15,000 feet in the Suru Valley in Ladakh. Then, in a shout, I rise over the deathly spires of the tundra, and open my arms wide to the beckoning valley and descend into the ambrosial pines of the Jannat.
Jannat. Paradise. The spontaneous feelings for this ungraspable land tell me that beneath my present state of vaporosity of a cloud or an alter ego, I am indeed a human in a fleeing bus. For I possess all three: heart, blood and soul.
Kashmir.
At the word ‘Kashmir’, the glacier below spangles. As though ready on prompt. It stretches languorously. Clouds dance. Skies deepen. And crevasses on the Kun peak open. Strangely, like the accommodating hollows of my mother’s body. Sentimentality fills my eyes and slips as consoling moon-drops on my cheeks. And as the melancholic word ‘Kashmir’ echoes in the phantasmagoria of the Suru, a hundred cottony clouds hug fraternally in the bewildered cobalt sky. The Suru river slows. It pauses. And then foams for effect. Dancing and squirming over rocks shimmering in verglas, it scoots away, prattling merrily to itself in the overflowing ebullience of a grandmother’s soliloquy when affectionately filled with remembrances of infants and toddlers.
And as the melancholic word ‘Kashmir’ echoes in the phantasmagoria of the Suru, a hundred cottony clouds hug fraternally in the bewildered cobalt sky.
Two images swim in my drenched eyes: my dead father’s, my missing mother’s.
But they disappear under the tutelage of the Himalayas below.
A yak stands grazing on a meadow in the distance without a care in the world. I swear I see it winking, but do not hear the wink.
Trust people to exaggerate about the silence of the Suru.
Three men—'Dards,’ I believe—sit by the river, their noses like perfect summit ridges, their eyes the colour of a Kashmiri sky, skin like fresh snow. To possess these mountains must be an indenture for a past life of devout altruism. Which is why their cheeks wear a perky blush and their mood coasts on wings. They now hum a tune. It sweeps the wide verdant valley. It rises mistily to caress the rising slopes of hanging glaciers. It tries and tries to climb higher, but strains and struggles in the thin air. So, resigning itself to mellow notes of meadowed heights below the snow line, it settles in the valley. It sounds faraway and lonesome, like it hails from some remote land of bitterly beautiful mountains, somewhat like these, maybe somewhere in Persia.
Oh, but now I am leaving Kashmir for the land of a billion doomed destinies.
A thick, wavy tuft on my head leads the way. And my gaze is fixated now.
Ensnared actually.
Because slanting below is the Jannat. My beat quickens. So many lives have been lost in trying to possess it! But it’s mine. Ours. Humara Kashmir. Now I am pulled forward on my own accord. And the Suru rushes back and with it, its shrill loneliness. I speed into the succour of lush conviviality and shift gears to its urgent melody. I descend fast, my tufts blown back like mini jet streams. 12,000 feet ... 11,000 ... 10,000 ... I allow myself a free fall along snow-caked rock tresses watching over the vast valley of Kashmir, shielding it from the rapacious lows below and beyond. The river becomes preponderant. Soon I am tousling a brio of dewed boughs that rush at me.
9,000 feet. The sweet spot between habitable heaven and heavenly earth.
The Kashmir valley.
Jannat.
Paradise
Firdaus.
In person.
No oil, no gold, no material wealth, but content with Sufi penury, is what I think, as I consider the naïve chirrup and coltish splash of its rivers. It is simply a subject of neurotic obsession, I surmise, while savoring dawn-break on these meadows and inhaling with the aromatic breath of dark forests on their edges. The Parkachik glacier with its ice futilely playing prism, is no match for exuberant Kashmir, its bustle of birdsong and the traffic of its indigenous breeze, all so culpable for this arrant craving for good things—a colossal spread of hot food, the wazwan served on rococo walnut carving, a chilled drink, a mellow dessert, the fewer than forty winks of nap from time to time, and a crazy copulation, restful, not steamy, not hot, not sweaty, but the long and lagging endlessness of compatible sex.
Is this felonious breeze liable for dallying idealism, I wonder.
No wonder revolution is spasmodic here.
My homeland is fraught with meaning.
Now I am flying lower, over a lush squiggle, skittering over, feeling it in my pores, for I know the farewell comes lickety-split. And to escape the amorous clutches of Kashmir, I start bounding fast. I zip over the sodden valley, past juicy vegetable beds, cutting through full fields of wheat and barley, slicing the orange hue of autumn, of ripening apricots and mulberries. And in the distance, Srinagar’s Jhelum is wrapped in pining mist. With rows of perfect poplars and showy willows swinging in the winking breeze, a sinful Jannat conspires to slow me down.
My homeland is fraught with meaning.
It forces me to twist amid its warren of peaks. It feeds and fortifies my indwelling bias, with its gurgling brooks pretending to play guide. Oh, stop it! I know how transient all this is. But, no. Now the Sindh valley seductively decks my path with a profusion of wild flowers. And the tree line hospitably unfolds its version of the wazwan: first the birch, then Kashmiri rowans, poplars, willows, blue pine, horse chestnut, pome and elm, fir, spruce and berries. And finally, the great Kashmiri confection, the temptress—the oriental Plane of Greece, the local Booune, the striking Chinar, a large-hearted tree, a full shelter for the roofless, the Kashmiri tree, the woolsack of the valley, a tragic allegory of abundance granted upon envisaging human pillage. It chaperones a carpet of purple saffron blooms that tilt in the breeze, and the sight, no not sight, but smell – the fragrance of Kalhana’s plentiful Kashmir finds flagrant expression in foliaged clumps of walnuts, almonds, apples, apricots, plums, peaches and cherry.
Indescribable.
Yet, to not describe Kashmir, is to write context-less history. For there may be no other land whose recurrently defiled necrosis stems mainly from its obsessive looks. This is a beautiful maiden who is being stalked, and for spurning their overtures, she is subjected to acid attacks. Consent and self-determination are not very different, my dear.
Or, shall we say, Kashmir is heaven with a difference.
Where peasants pray unheeded. And sinners prey undeterred.
So.
I have to tear myself away, but this irresistible urge to look back ...
... to the wistfully ringed meadows of Gulmarg. And behind, the jagged snows of Nanga Parbat in Pakistan appear chafed, perhaps on account of my partisan direction. They frame the Wular Lake. I wave and the lake responds with a sunlit twinkle. But as I continue toward the Indian peninsula, its countenance turns grisly.
In valediction, I reflect on the passing fragrance.
Kashmir, with its incense of floriculture, horticulture, even agriculture, but never industry, is a world of moving ancient art paintings, a land of lost people in ready retrogress, dressed for the part, living the past in the present, and fighting to retain their most misunderstood Kashmiriat; an old Sufi play for the world to squint at and opine, something that’s done for old buildings, old books and old thoughts. They’re supported passively. They are kept unresolved as touchy tragedies so that the plate of steaming current fare has that old preserve on the side for exoticism. But this is where I hail from wherever I may hail to. I know it will be long before I sober somewhat from its intoxication. Only then will the blurred label on its bottle be legible.
Kashmir. 500 years.
But I am out of home now, I know from my rending tears. Moony and overcast, I drain them over Jammu town in the foothills, dousing the chicken’s neck of India, welling the Tawi till its debris nudges its banks. In parting, I wave at blithe children splattering in puddles of rainwater.
And the filial rubber band snaps.
Kashmir is gone.
And I am awake. The dream is over.
It is one of those days in a crowded January 1990, when the Hindu Governor planted by India ensured that we Kashmiri Pandits left, but blamed it on our Muslim neighbours who actually pleaded for us to stay. And now I am inside a perforated tent in a refugee camp.
And now it is the year 2000 and I am inside that perforated tent in the refugee camp.
And now it is 2010 and I am inside that perforated tent in the refugee camp.
And now it is 2023 and I am inside that perforated tent in the refugee camp.
It has been three decades since I left the Jannat.
More Pandits arrived and told me stories. I believe the four sides of the Clock Tower at Lal Chowk now show four different times, and each is wrong. I hear, the hundred-year-old Chinar tree in Srinagar, around which we played catch-me-if-you-can, got felled. And the red flag of Kashmir, with the white plough that stood for us peasants, and which was inspired from the bloody shirt of a martyr who fought the oppression of the Hindu king, and which flew alongside the Indian tricolor, has lost its ‘legitimate status’.
Legitimate status? Whose legitimacy does a flag of the people need?
Meanwhile, I hear that the Indian army in Kashmir, which was supposed to make short work of the Azadi fighters in one-hundredth of the time they took to spank Pakistan’s shameless thrice-whipped bottom in 1971, is taking ‘refuge’ like me, but in luxurious fortified camps and with strict instructions to not step out in perilous Srinagar after 7pm.
Arghhh.
So that khaki lummox at my door in 1990 had actually offered me a shelter-exchange program with the army under the aegis of which I would get screwed in their communal hell while they get screwed too, but in my Sufi heaven?
What the fuck.
And it turns out that the Kashmiri Pandits who never left Kashmir are more hale and hearty than the Pandits native to the Indian states of Delhi or Uttar Pradesh or Bihar!
Fuck you.
I glance absently at my cheap digital watch, though it is inherently mute. But now I stare at it. The date and time it shows is exactly what it was over thirty years ago when I decamped on that clamorous bus.
I shut my eyes to arrest the inevitable flow. I count till ten and then look up and shake my head. Am I going kooky again? Because through this large perforation in the tent canopy, in a crack of lightning in the dark sky, I see a ray of hope.
A raindrop falls inside the tent.
And then another.
And another.
And another.
Finally, this last drop hangs for long on the canopy like an exclamation mark before falling!
One. Two. Three Four ... ! Four times for certainty.
The Lal Chowk Clock tower flashes in my batty mind. A hundred Azadi slogans slam my head in a fever pitch. But that miscreant slogan is missing.
The Kashmiri in me sheds the Pandit suffix and rises.
I swing my shabby duffle bag over my shoulder and thank 330 million gods, excluding Yama, for the belated wake-up call. Praying for the safety of the Indian army and the soul of dead governor-cum-travel agent, I board the bus to the Jannat.
Three decades too late, but then it is never too late to go to heaven.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: In Milton’s Paradise Lost, God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden for eating the forbidden fruit. In much the same way, kismet banished many Kashmiri Pandits—sadly, some innocent ones—from the Elysium of Kashmir because a few of them ate the forbidden fruit of communalism. Willful religious polarization by both Pakistan and India has worked hard to blunt the syncretic, inclusive culture of Kashmiriat. While suffocating Kashmir, this has been the political ventilator of floundering, unstable and insecure regimes of Pakistan and India. Kashmir is a standard staple on their electoral menu. A few hundred Kashmiri Pandits never left Kashmir. How interesting is that? But their stories have no political currency and that explains their absence.