When Conches Fell Silent

The ideological founder of Pakistan, Allama Iqbal, traced his ancestry to the Brahmins of Kashmir. As he envisaged only North-western India as part of Pakistan, another Kashmiri Pandit delivered it exact same by sundering the eastern half into Bangladesh in 1971. That was P N Haksar, Indira Gandhi’s backroom boy. Of course, goes without saying Gandhi too had Kashmiri Pandit lineage, as does the present Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir Omar Abdullah. Just shows how intensely intertwined the Kashmiri Pandits and Kashmiri, indeed South Asian politics are, or have been.

Yet, Our Moon Has Blood Clots by Rahul Pandita remains intensely personal. Though the lightness with which Pandita wears his emotions in no measure lightens the travails of a community reduced to being refugees in their own land.

To a generation fed on the association of Srinagar with Hazratbal and Charar-e-Sharif, Rubia and Mirwaiz, the author introduces the Srinagar of Kshir Bhawani and Shankaracharya, Durgashaptapati and Rishis, Shaivism and the week long Shivratri festival. The Brahmin lineage of Kashmir, only a figment now – a brutalized one at that – is established by the author without a trace of malice or revivalism.

The author shows subtlety and fortitude in bringing out the tormenting internal conflict. From the difficulties of first day under Jammu heat barely 300 kms from the valley, to the charade of refugee rations, to the darkness of tracking obituaries daily, Pandita manages to bring out the Pandit’s struggle to keep body and soul together, without schmaltz.

The exodus of Kashmiri Pandits might have happened in 1990, but the build up had begun much earlier. It is this story of Kashmir that Pandita focuses on. Of how while growing up, his cricket team was called India and that of his friend Tariq, Pakistan. Of how as early as 1983, shouts of Pakistan Zindabad rented the stands during an India-West Indies match in Srinagar. Of how, for a Yasin Malik slapped by a Hindu teacher for writing Azadi on the classroom wall, there was a Rehman defiling the image of Saraswati. Of how, much before the Army rapes began, the Pandit was being lampooned – see a pandit, ride a pandit – and shot. Of how, much before grievances over encounters, not a single person got convicted in the hundreds of cases of Pandit killings. Of how, the whole brutalization process has only been matched by bureaucratic ingenuity of governments that have done everything to add to the woes, short of disowning the community.

It is remarkable how the author has compartmentalized the personal. While on a professional assignment, Pandita visits the Kshir Bhawani temple but calls the pilgrimage Mecca. It must take courage to see the present day Kashmir through the eyes of a Muslim cab driver after having suffered what the author did. Just once Pandita’s emotions betray him – when he visits his home, and finds onions on the shelf where once stood his books. He seethes, he fumes, and the diligently worn mask of detachment unravels a little. That’s when the idea that the exile could be permanent hits home. That’s when Wandhama, Sangrampora, and Nandimarg start to get loaded with meaning that is political.

Yet the composure returns as swiftly. The author brings in the fact of a Namazi doctor once saving his mother, or friend-turned-militant Latif Lone doing it earlier. Strangely, Pandita even slips in a paragraph on Gujarat’s Gulberga society and Ehsan Jafri. What is the connection of Gujarat with Kashmir? One is left wondering whether even the memoir is written under some kind of editorial compulsion.

What happened in Kashmir was a meticulously planned ethnic cleansing. Our Moon Has Blood Clots cuts through the secular myth that commoners had no role in the act. But in his fortitude, Pandita does not use the word even once. He uses the word ghetto for the first and last time on the second last page only. He ends the narrative with a letter to his brother Ravi’s friend Irshad who is now a college teacher in Srinagar. Telling him he shall return permanently sometime, and asks him to call if in receipt of the letter. Did Irshad call back? I would wager he did not. Which means Pandita’s – and the Pandit’s – wish to return might remain just a wish. Forever perhaps. For, that’s where the politics begins.