by Feroz Rather
THE NIGHT OF
BROKEN GLASS
FEROZ RATHER
To my father, Ismaiel
History didn’t greet us with triumphal fanfares:
– It flung dirty sand into our eyes.
Ahead of us lay long roads leading nowhere,
poisoned wells and bitter bread.
Our wartime loot is knowledge of the world.
– Wislawa Szymborska
Contents
1. The Old Man in the Cottage
2. The Pheran
3. A Rebel’s Return
4. The Souvenir
5. Rosy
6. Summer of 2010
7. The Miscreant
8. The Stone Thrower
9. The Cowherd
10. The Nightmares of Major S
11. Robin Polish
12. The Boss’s Account
13. The Night of Broken Glass
Acknowledgments
About the Book
About the Author
Copyright
1
The Old Man in the Cottage
I
gazed westward from the top of the hill. The cottage where Inspector Masoodi’s son had recently moved his father stood in the thin clearing by the lake. Its old wooden walls painted over in a dark shade of green, the cottage had two narrow slits for the windows in the front. Between them, a door clung to a feeble frame on rusting metal hinges – a door that I could break with a single blow of my axe.
I had come to see the cowherd, Gulzar, who reared my master’s cows along with the rest of his herd. He was a thin boy of sixteen with a soft face bursting with a new beard and pimples. Whatever the season, he never took off his long woollen pheran. Although he always carried a stout staff, I had rarely seen him hit a cow, and that only when it tore away from the herd to enter someone’s kitchen or front garden. He hit his cows below the shoulder – never on the haunches – gently guiding them back. Like me, he was not much of a talker. But while I had lost my loquacity during my time inside the prison, Gulzar was quiet by disposition. As soon as he had his herd settled on the slope, between the foot of the hill – where I had walked down to and was standing now – and the courtyard of the cottage thick with willows – which I kept an eye on – he reclined on the grass. Then, from the deep side-pocket of his pheran, he produced his flute of rosewood.
‘This makes me and the cows happy,’ he said before he began to play.
In summer, when the air became hot and full of mosquitoes and other blood-sucking insects, Gulzar sweated profusely, giving off an odour. However, I never told him to remove his pheran or ever complained about his lack of hygiene. I could not imagine him as someone capable of beating me and I liked him. His reticence, his raggedness, his sour smell and his unshaven pimply face infused a sense of security and self-worth in me.
I saw Inspector Masoodi’s son standing by the wire zareba that fenced the courtyard in. He had his father’s cold, expressionless face. His eyes were deep and bloodshot, and filled with contempt as he stared at me rudely. I understood his unspoken command beckoning me to go to him so he could charge me with an errand. He came close to the fence.
‘I want you to clear the lawn,’ he said peremptorily. He sounded haughty but in need of me.
I looked him straight in the eye, confronting his arrogance for a moment. Then I smiled quickly and said, ‘I can bring you an axe from my master’s house.’ Although his eyes softened a bit, his face remained the same – frigid.
‘Where is your master’s house?’ he asked. I turned around and pointed to the top of the hill. ‘I will pay you well if you help me cut the willows,’ he said.
‘Do not worry about the money,’ I replied.
I walked up the hill to my master’s house. Everything in the house belonged to him. And, because I had told him that I had no one in the world, he felt that I belonged to him as well. In any case, I was ready to risk his wrath for Masoodi’s son. I looked for the axe that I had hidden under the staircase in the corridor a while ago. I found it securely wrapped inside a bundle of dusty gunny bags, just where I had left it. I weighed it in my hands as I picked it up. It was a light axe with a heavy head, perfect for chopping. I touched the metal with my hand and then furtively looked around. When I was completely assured of my master’s absence, I licked the edge clean with my tongue. I liked the taste of cold metal on my tongue. I went down the hill and offered Masoodi’s son the axe.
Over the sound of his blows on the willow trunks and branches, I heard his father cough. The trunks and branches were gnarly and he was soon exhausted. He panted outside while his father coughed inside. All this panting and coughing seemed strangely ludicrous, both father and son in a state of utter helplessness, and for a moment there, I nearly burst out laughing.
‘Can you give him some water?’ Masoodi’s son asked abruptly. I rose from the ground and obliged mutely. However, as soon as I was inside the dark cottage, my mirth could no longer be held in check and I laughed out loud in reckless jubilation that he had finally asked for my help. For years I had dreamt of this very moment.
I stood in the kitchen, groping in the sudden darkness after the glare of the sunlight outside. As soon as my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I dipped a tumbler into the copper pitcher on the sink. I noticed a knife gleaming on the shelf above. I did not touch the knife, but the sight of its shiny metal thrilled me. The water was cold and I wondered whether it would have a debilitating effect on Inspector Masoodi’s already weakened lungs. They sounded rotten and depleted every time he coughed. Would the cold water trigger a fresh bout of hacking?
When I entered Inspector Masoodi’s room, I could not believe the sight that met my eyes. His body had shrunk to less than half its size. He lay on the bed, facing the ceiling, his arms crossed over his chest. His long, oval face was furrowed with wrinkles. His eyes were closed. His mouth was slightly open, and his lips were colourless as though contoured with dry chalk. He moaned like a patient in need of an injection of morphine. When he opened his eyes, he did not look at me. He stretched out his hand, probably thinking that his son had entered the room.
‘Water,’ he croaked, ‘water …’
For a moment, I felt I should retreat. The change in him was so drastic that I wondered how much I may have changed as well. I felt terrible thinking about the past. I was not sure of playing the final part of the game that I had imagined playing when I had seen him last, twenty-five years ago. During every moment of this time, I had rebelled against the idea that he was alive in the very same world in which I also lived. Thinking of what he had done to me and how he had damaged me, my heartbeats sounded like the rattle of gunfire. I looked at him again, incredulous. This was the same man. I wanted to end it all then and there, in a flash. But something held me back. I don’t completely understand it. I was not afraid of his son. Perhaps I wanted to see Inspector Masoodi die a slow and painful death.
The tumbler shook as I handed it to him and the water spilled on to his clothes. I gently raised his head. He had lost most of his luxuriant dark hair. The few straggly strands he still retained at the sides and back of his head were grey and unwashed. I took the tumbler from his hand and raised it to his lips. I could hear his son chopping at the willows furiously; the blows of the metal against the flesh of the wood. I did not look into the old man’s eyes. He breathed stertorously; each breath was an ascending wave of pain. At the top, as it faltered, I slipped a few droplets of water into his mouth. Inspector Masoodi made a wheezing sound and his shrunken belly billowed. As the water went down, his breath descended sharply, ending like a sad sigh. It was hard to believe that this was the same man I had known so closely at the beginning of the war; this pathetic cr
eature who was nothing but a few ounces of flabby flesh clinging to a brittle bone-cage. I looked at him, at his broken skin and the weak hands that had once struck me with fury and violence.
How close to death you are, Inspector Masoodi, I thought. I gnashed my teeth and outside his son continued to wield the axe on the hapless willows.
When I emerged from the cottage, I saw Masoodi’s son almost hidden in the tall grass as he lay beside a tall pile of chopped willow branches. He had the same lean body and broad shoulders that his father once had. But, looking at him lying in the grass, I wondered what kind of shroud the grass would make if it were used to cover his corpse. I was not convinced that the thought was worth the consideration. Inspector Masoodi’s pallor was in my eyes. I sensed the slow arrival of his death that would gradually eat away what was left of his flesh and bones. When his son rose, I jerked my head towards the house and asked him what the problem was.
‘Lung cancer,’ he replied. ‘Terminal stage.’ The sweat was dripping off his brow and he had a small wound on his left forearm that had bled for a while. He had wiped the blood with his right hand which was still stained red. I decided that the expressionlessness of his face came from his father and I hated it. However, what I did like was that he was unsentimental about his father’s condition. Some time ago, I had met Gulzar as he was making his way down the hill. We stopped to chat and he told me that this man was a police officer as well. I reckoned that because his father fell ill long before he was sixty, the retirement age in the police force, the son had the opportunity and compulsion to step into his father’s shoes. The young man had been none too pleased about it because he had wanted to become a civil officer, a bureaucrat. In a place like ours, where the war was slow, subtle and camouflaged, becoming a civil officer gave one immense power, although most of these officers came across as benign and harmless. Gulzar also told me that the son lived with his wife and her parents in the city. He did not like living with Inspector Masoodi. The sight of the dying old man distressed his wife and his in-laws, so the son had shifted the father to the cottage for his final days.
‘Will you look after the old man while I am away?’ he asked now.
‘When will you come back?’
‘After two days, on Sunday.’
The only way that he could have had any inkling about my true identity would have been by interrogating Gulzar who delivered a bottle of fresh milk at the cottage every evening. Twenty-five years ago, in the dead of night, Inspector Masoodi and his friend, Major S, had tossed my half-dead body, tied to a huge rock, into the lake. My file had been closed by the high command because they assumed I was dead like the innumerable prisoners whom I had met and befriended in the prison and whose bodies, pale in the moonlight, I saw at the bottom of the lake.
I looked into his eyes. Upon seeing no signs of suspicion there, I smiled and said: ‘Yes, sir.’
A thick willow branch, overhanging the roof, threatened to block the doorway. I told him that it was too high for me to chop it down. He rolled his eyes in contempt and strode into the cottage, emerging a few minutes later with an old chair. He placed the chair in front of the door. ‘There,’ he gritted angrily.
I climbed onto the chair, the axe in my right hand and my left hand on his shoulder. I could see that he parted his hair in the centre like his father. I could see his bare scalp at the parting. How would it sound, the axe smashing into his skull? What a delightful cracking sound it would make. I swung at the branch with such force that the axe rebounded from the roof, fell from my hands and landed at the policeman’s feet.
As he knelt to pick it up from the ground, the branch broke and fell, crashing down on the man’s wounded forearm.
I jumped down from the chair as he tamped down on his agony. I moved the branch away and examined his arm. I took the axe back from him and watched a drop of blood welling up as the wound began to bleed afresh. In any case, he was not the kind of man who would know how to use an axe. His casual cotton chinos and linen shirt suggested urbanity and a refinement of style. It unnerved me, however, how coldly unsentimental he was. He did not groan or even wince. Like his father in his youth, he gave an impression of toughness and brutal control. When he spoke, the words fell from his lips like hard slabs of granite.
‘My father has taught me how to use a gun and I can do that well,’ he said. ‘But you need to learn to wield your axe wisely.’
I nodded at him, again looking him in the eye. Inside, Inspector Masoodi coughed and mumbled something that we could not understand. His son did not budge. He continued to pinion me with a piercing stare that would have terrified any other man. However, I had already looked death in the eye, so I stared back unflinchingly. I saw the muscles of his face tauten for an instant before he allowed himself to relax into a cold smile. He needed me. He patted my shoulder and asked me whether I could check on his father. I went inside and gave the old man another glass of water.
When I came out, the son was not to be seen. I quickly made my way to the willow stumps. An axe-toting shadow loomed up from behind me. I whirled around to find him standing close behind me. He handed me the axe.
‘There are packets of soup in the kitchen,’ he said.
‘I do not need them,’ I said.
‘My father will. If there is an emergency, call me. The phone is in the corridor.’ He scribbled a number on a slip of paper and thrust it into my shirt pocket.
The willows had laid a siege to the cottage from all sides. They were of the genus which grew profusely in the higher Himalayas and in the forlorn villages of Ladakh. They proliferated with multitudinous shoots and created thick, impenetrable tangles. Neither the lake nor the city beyond were visible through Inspector Masoodi’s bedroom window. The last rays of the setting sun died in the tumorous growth that blocked my view.
As night fell, beastly noises emanated from the undergrowth almost as if some wild animal had descended from the hill and had entered the coppice with the aim of devouring a moorhen sleeping in its nest. I sat by the bed, close to Inspector Masoodi’s head. His bib had flecks of blood and the thick mucus that he coughed up. When I touched him on the shoulder, he shuddered so violently that I thought he was going to collapse. I poured water into his mouth. As the water went down his gullet, it somehow calmed him. I raised his head and slipped two soft pillows beneath it. I dithered for a while wondering how to pacify him and alleviate the pain. I stirred the contents of the bowl on the bedside table and then raised the spoon to his mouth. His hairy nostrils quivered as he inhaled the hot vapours. His mouth opened like the that of a frog and he stuck his tongue out delicately lapping up the soup with the tip of his tongue. This seemed to warm him up a bit and he rallied a little. My conversation with him was a one-sided monologue because, as his son had mentioned, Inspector Masoodi could barely speak.
When he was done having a spoonful – and that was all he could eat – I went to the other bedroom. The walls were rotting and porous with large cracks in the ceiling beams. Spiders dangled from the cobwebs in the corners. I went outside and returned with the axe. I put it under the bed that I planned to sleep in. Inspector Masoodi had another coughing fit. I could hear the fatal beckoning of the hacking against the deepening sounds of the night insects outside. However, I was exhausted. I sprawled out on the bed, folding my arms under my head. Inspector Masoodi was probably dozing now. It became difficult to sleep. Here he was on the verge of death. The same man who had captured me and handed me to Major S. Would he ever know the pain of being sold by a fellow countryman to an outsider? What kind of shackles were these which withheld me from hacking his body to pieces?
Major S had suspended me by my feet in the prison cell where I had been incarcerated. I was stripped naked and my hands were tied behind my back with coarse rope. Inspector Masoodi was the only person who knew that I had attacked Major S a month ago. In an attempt to prevent the army’s invasion, I had lobbed a grenade at the major’s cavalcade. The grenade had detonated a few metres from th
e bonnet of his jeep, the shrapnel smashing the windshield. Major S had been mildly injured by the shards of flying glass. What had enraged him even more was the realization that to tackle me he was wholly dependent on the goodwill of the local police officer.
In retaliation, Major S whipped me viciously with his belt until my limbs swelled and my skin turned red and blue.
I screamed in agony. Such was the magnitude of my pain that I felt the city was crying with me. The lake swelled, and the hills shattered to mounds of ash. I did not lose consciousness. I felt my pain. I was responsible for what I had done; I was conscious of the cause that drove me to violence and kindled the desire for justice in my heart. My path was a long dark tunnel where the rocks exploded and tore open the walls to splatter blood onto my feet. At the end of the tunnel, as I marched forth, I saw the light of freedom, aazadi.
The iron-cage in which I was manacled rattled. I saw Inspector Masoodi enter. He was in his khakhi police uniform, apparently different from Major S’s dark, olive-green regimentals. He had a baton in his hand with which he proceeded to hit me, making the bruises bleed. I wailed and he hit me harder. Major S stood by spurring him on.
‘Is this what you smoke?’ he asked, extracting the pack of Revolution from my trouser pocket. He took one out and lit it. As he took a drag, he coughed. The peculiar scent of the smoke that was fragrant to me irritated his eyes. He asked Inspector Masoodi to back away. He obligingly moved out of the cage and took a ringside seat on a chair by the door.
‘Masoodi, now enjoy the show,’ Major S said, coughing, his eyes watering.
I knew what he was going to do: burn me with the tip of the Revolution. The part of my body that he chose to torture was my buttock.
As I screamed in humiliation and pain, Major S laughed, searing a circle around my anus.
‘Nasty, nasty, nasty,’ he said, chortling and pointing his stubby finger at my anus. He took a long drag and blew the smoke towards my anus. ‘There goes the smoke of Revolution.’
