The conference was called to order by the Hindu editor of a local political magazine....
COVER STORY
The small hall of the officers’ mess was crowded with journalists and uniformed soldiers. The dining tables had been removed and their chairs now sat facing the dais on the makeshift stage at one end of the room. On it, Major Khatri stood, looking fetching in a crisp uniform that accentuated his swimmer’s built, his handlebar moustache glistening as he talked cheerfully with a junior officer.
The conference was called to order by the Hindu editor of a local political magazine. His presence had annoyed the hardcore journalists in the room. It was common knowledge that this editor’s magazine was still in publication because of his connections with the army high-ups. The Kashmiri media was annoyed because his small-time political magazine was regularly published even when all other daily newspapers had been suspended in the past few years.
Major Khatri walked to the dais after a fitting introduction, and started the press conference. With a smile on his lips and empathy in his eyes, he proceeded to dupe the media.
“Jaleelah Malik’s plight is one the army is deeply sympathetic towards. The very idea that the terrorists could kidnap a young girl from a generally well-protected part of Srinagar would have been considered a security disaster, were it not for the knowledge that the terrorists gained entry into that area, thanks to her father.” The Major cleared his throat. “That said, we assure Miss Malik’s family that we stand by them in this time of hardship in every way.”
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Yusuf sat on the couch, feeling the terrible hope Chacha Jaan had cruelly injected into him flutter inside his chest, wondering what Chacha Jaan would do, whether it would work.
Watching Major Khatri on the screen with an almost blank expression, Yusuf realized that it was all about good and bad PR. This was an attempt to change the entire narrative of Jaleelah’s story. They were turning her into a pariah.
In the hall of the Officers’ Mess, a peon was distributing to the assembled journalists what the Major claimed was the documentary proof of her father’s contacts with the atankwadis, the terrorists.
Beside Yusuf, Chachi Jaan had started weeping again, her hand pressed against her lips.
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The doctor drove through the streets of Srinagar listening to the live coverage of the conference. At his feet lay a canvas bag typically used for golf clubs. For the first time in ten years, the doctor was not sitting hunched and the straight shoulders somehow made him look less old – and he had never really been old.
He’d just been too much of a coward.
As is clear from these papers, the man Jaleelah Malik called her father was never an honest man and did not deserve the army’s mercy. The radio announcer was quoting Major Khatri loudly, excitedly. This man brought about his daughter’s end with his own hands and was now using the army to clean the mess that had ensued because of his own greed.
The doctor’s lips were pursed, his jaw set.
He was not going to be knocking on locked doors this time. He was going to burn them down if he had to, to get to the man standing on the other side; the man whose name would appear just one time if someone wrote a story about Makan Taintees’ residents.
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The corridor was dark; the single bulb hanging on a naked wire from the ceiling somehow making it darker. The eyes of the tall man in the dark uniform moved from one barred door to the next, his face visibly uneasy.
He stopped near the cell at the end of the corridor. The small square cell stank of dry blood. Jaleelah huddled in a corner against the far wall, her hair shorn, her tattered clothes barely covering her body. Her lower lip was swollen and her left cheek had a large scab on it; she had probably tried to scratch it. The skin around the wound was inflamed and the eye above it was watering, the corners of her eyes were covered in a gooey, green liquid.
The man couldn’t look at her for too long. If he hadn’t known she was Jaleelah Malik, he wouldn’t have believed it. She was a shadow of the proud, cold girl who had arrived with a black bag on her head two weeks ago.
When he wrapped a hand around the bars of the door, she stirred, shrinking into the corner, her hands involuntarily wrapping themselves around her chest.
She said something voicelessly. He looked hard at her lips; the words she was mouthing were distorted because of the swollen lower lip.
She mouthed it again, her terrified eyes on his.
Stay away. She was trying to say, he realized. Stay away from me.
He raised his hands defensively, to show her he meant no harm. Then slowly, he slipped it into his pocket, pulled out the small old-fashioned Nokia phone. Opening the call log, he dialed the only number saved in the phone and turned on the speaker after carefully shifting away from the cell beside hers.
“Hello?” the voice on the other end sent a shudder through the girl’s body. Her eyes widened, looking at the army officer, wondering what new kind of torture had been planned for her that had to involve the man on the other end.
“Hello?” the voice said again and her heart wanted to rip itself out of her chest and answer it.
The officer looked once at the girl on the stone floor, licked his lips, smiled unconsciously and when he said the sentence that he had rehearsed a thousand times in his head, it was like leaping down a cliff into the open sea below. “Yusuf Sahib, from the maze of the Disappeared, I send you the Scarlet Salute.”
There was a pregnant pause. She wondered whether his forehead had cleared suddenly, whether he had pushed his dark hair away from his pale face just then. He cleared his throat, then he answered in a voice that was filled with fear and hope and the madness of a man who is ready to take that one last leap the man with the Nokia phone had already taken, “Lal Salam Arz ho.” Yusuf said and he was clinging to Chachi Jaan’s arms, hopeful, fearful tears gathering in his eyes.
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Three things happened before all hell broke loose in the entrance hall (that served as the dining hall) of the Srinagar Officers’ Mess. First, someone discovered the door of Jaleelah Malik’s empty cell hanging open, the key in the lock, and rushed out-of-breath, in panic, to inform Major Khatri. Major Khatri was just then doing a Q&A session with the journalists. He didn’t notice that someone trying to get past the sepoys at the doors of the hall. Second, a military jeep with one tall, broad shouldered officer and one slightly shorter, slower, daintier officer, both with large khaki peak caps shadowing their faces, left the parking. And third, a car that had often been seen in the mess’ parking before arrived with a man, un-huddled and un-hunched, sitting on the driver’s seat, his toes against an oblong canvas bag that was meant for golf clubs, but was not being used for them.
“And that will be the last question,” Major Khatri announced, pointing his long finger with the smooth, filed fingernail at a rotund man in spectacles.
The door of the hall flew open. A soldier appeared in the doorway, the camouflage helmet on his head looking very stupid indoors.
The Major waited for him to say something but he just stood there, Major Khatri cleared his throat, made a mental note to give his juniors a refresher course on basic etiquette, and returned his attention to the journalist.
“Ji, last question.” And the report of an Ak-47 drowned the voice of the rotund journalist.
The soldier made a strangled noise, jabbing a finger at the empty air in front of him before a shower of blood spurted out of his mouth as he fell face-first on the floor.
Everybody was very, very quiet for exactly ten seconds, during which Major Amit Khatri stood behind the dais and counting from one to five like he did every day flutter-kicking during his morning exercise routine.
OneTwo-ThreeFour-Fi-ive
He counted in his head, his eyes on the doorway.
OneTwo-ThreeFour-Fi-ive
There was another loud explosion, this time coupled with the incoherent shouting of an exultant maniac who had saved the finest moments of his life for the last.
At the second explosion, everybody in the room started running for cover. The soldiers on duty tried to push everybody through the backdoor of the entrance hall, creating a bottleneck. On the stage, stood Major Amit Khatri, stock-still, his ears trained onto the voice outside. Whoever it was with the gun wasn’t speaking, just screaming.
A loud, keening noise, filled with the agony of ten years of living like a hunchback shuffling in the Parisian church that Major Khatri had turned Makan Taintees into, hit his ears. He stood behind that dais, waiting to see the mad Doctor walk in with one of the guns the Major himself might have helped him unload at some point.
These bloody Kashmiris. The Major thought to himself as new explosions told him his men were responding to the doctor in kind. These bloody Kashmiris. You just can’t change them, can you? He strode down the stage to the nearest soldier, who was standing in the middle of the hall, looking confused.
“Help them clear the hall.” The major snapped, pulling out a pistol from the holster strapped to the man’s thigh. “Chalo.”
Removing the safety catch, the major checked the chamber before replacing it and cocking the little pistol, walked sideways to the open front door.
He took cover behind the left panel of the door, the pistol in his hand feeling like a toy. He could hear his captain shouting instructions at the sepoys and made another mental note to invite him to tea in his office someday. The young man was going places.
Standing in the shadow, he had to squeeze his eyes to look through the narrow space between the door hinge and the frame to see what was happening outside. The doctor’s car was covered with bullet marks, the windscreen shattered. The sepoys were getting steadily closer, so the major thought it was time for a safe entry. He pocketed the pistol, and strode out purposefully. After the sepoys would drag the beaten doctor out from behind his car, he would press the barrel against the old bastard’s temple, make him beg one last time and then finish him.
Major Khatri opened his mouth to yell an order, but the captain made a frantic shushing gesture. Giving me orders? He’s forgetting his place, fumed Major Khatri. “Out, Doctor Sahib! Let’s go meet your daughter, shall we?” he barked.
The ground shook beneath the feet of the men standing in the parking lot when Doctor Taheer stood up, a rifle in each hand, the muscles in his arm clenched under their weight. His mouth was wide open, but no sound was coming out. He would have made another perfect picture just then, with a fitting caption: Crazed Kashmiri man kills Indian Army Major, then self.
Major Khatri’s tall frame hit the ground, the crisp uniform making a slight crunch before the body stilled. The sepoys backed off, their weapons held at ready.
The doctor gasped, his eyes on the blood bubbling out of the major’s chest, spilling from the wound. He swallowed, then bent down to put his empty rifles on the ground. Slowly, he walked towards the dead Major, stood, towering, over him, his face blank. Slowly, his face showing disgust. He raised a foot.
“How much sugar in your tea, Major Sahib?” he asked and smashed his foot into the slack jaw of Major Khatri. Seconds later, bullets entered his back. Minutes later, his dead body was being laid out next to the major.
Did he get a funeral? Did he get a burial? Did somebody know his story?
He was the pet ghaddar from Makan Taintees, not an epithet that could be inscribed on a tombstone. And so, the hole in which his plump body was tossed, was left unmarked.
To be continued…
