The Night of Broken Glass

by Feroz Rather

  Nadim rubbed his crotch against her butt. She spun around and thrust her hand into his chest. But in the great surrounding weight, he did not budge. He stood pressed against her, sinking his chin into her shoulder.

  As they crossed the river Jhelum over Khanbal Bridge, he got stiff. He was about to thrust his cock between her buttocks when the conductor called again. The bus stopped and the other three men around the young girl moved forward in the aisle with great difficulty and disembarked. She got out after them, still two miles away from the college. She was so terrified that she did not dare board another bus.

  I did not mention this to you before but do you know who the girl was? Our own Nuzhat. The day this happened, after finishing her zoology class, when she came out into the corridor, she grabbed me by the edge of my scarf.

  ‘Are you okay, Nuzhat?’ I asked.

  She stood speechless for a long time. And then her words came tumbling out as she told me what had happened, her eyes filling with tears.

  Nadim would not know that; how could he? As he was telling me his version, he omitted many details. I remembered the feeling of betrayal in Nuzhat’s eyes, as though all of Kashmir had failed her. I am a woman and Nuzhat is my dearest friend. I felt her rage, her desperation, her hurt. But here was Nadim, down on his knees, begging for forgiveness. I was not sure of what he was up to and did not know how to feel about him at the moment. He was now fully aware of how much Nuzhat meant to me and probably how close Showkat was to you, Jamshid.

  I told him to go away, but he would not. And when I mentioned your name saying I would talk to you, his face remained sorrowful, but his eyes filled with a subtle light. He was not worried that Nuzhat was Showkat’s sister, even if he was the commander of the JKLF that was dreaded by the entire army stationed in our district. What concerned him, he told me before going away, was losing your trust and friendship.

  ‘I can give my life for Jamshid,’ he told me, ‘in a heartbeat.’

  I was moved by his words. He left me in a moral dilemma. I waited for you, alone, at the spot you mentioned in your note. I stood there in the hot sun, facing the brick wall that separated the lawns from Cheeni Chowk, blocking my view of Western Hosiery where I buy my things and those mist-white bottles of perfume for you.

  To distract Nuzhat, I had proposed a visit to the store that day and she had agreed. As soon as my geography class ended, we walked out of the eastern gate into Cheeni Chowk.

  It was a hot and dusty day in mid-July. We walked on a sidewalk over broken cobblestones, against an unbroken stream of men, pushing us against the military bunker protruding from the street corner. The soldier behind the dark olive mesh of threads stuck his tongue out and, mumbling something lewd, licked his lips.

  Nuzhat grabbed my arm, shouting in his face, ‘When it comes to women, you scumbags are the same everywhere.’

  We walked past a row of carts, loaded with melons – cut open and bleeding profusely – and mounds of cheap socks, until we reached the store. It was in the middle of a long row of shops covered in layers of dust. It was the only shop in Cheeni Chowk with a glass front.

  The owner was a jovial, middle-aged fellow, seemingly untouched by the invisible war-worms that bred grief and distrust in our stomachs and livers. However, as we ascended the three steps into the store, Qadir Suth went pale behind his counter. I wondered what was bothering him until Nuzhat turned and whispered, ‘Look! It’s my brother.’

  I turned too and there I saw the man. He was of your stature. He was standing very close to me with his Kalashnikov slung across his shoulder. He greeted me and his sister, and patting Qadir Suth on the arm, told him not to panic.

  The first impression I had of Showkat, I must say, was one of solemnity. He was wearing a bright, sky-blue shalwar kameez and white sneakers. His eyes were deep-set and defiant. His forehead was ponderous and calm like the river Jhelum the morning after the last spring rains. It did not bother him that there were soldiers walking outside on the street; he acknowledged his nearness to death. And by virtue of that difficult acknowledgment, he seemed to have pushed beyond the bounds of human mortality. If you looked closely, a fierce light gleamed in the depths of his eyes. The light a white-hot rod of iron achieves when it is about to burn itself out and morph into something else altogether. His gestures were grave, and in his words, there was finality – what a terrible finality it was. Later, contemplating the quality of his tone, I would be reminded of your dazzling speech. I wonder now, during all your secret meetings where Showkat chose you as the leader of the Jammu Kashmir Youth Front, whether it was from him that you picked up the art of firing words with velocity.

  ‘Tell Mother that I am fine,’ Showkat said. ‘I will not die before I have taken my revenge and cut Major S’s hand. The same hand with which he seized my hair, while making me lick the graffiti.’

  Showkat probably noticed that Nuzhat was upset and wanted to say something, but he forestalled her words by quickly putting a five-hundred rupee note in her hand before vanishing through the back door.

  Qadir Suth looked like he was about to faint. He gulped down some water from a big bottle, wiped his damp brow and took a deep breath now that Showkat was gone. We bought chemises from him and left.

  Although I did not ask Nuzhat, as soon as we went back to the college she told me that her brother had deep gashes in his tongue. Now that she had brought it up, I asked how that had happened. She then went on to tell me the entire story. Two years ago, Showkat was a grocer. One morning when Nuzhat had left home for college, in the marketplace, Mir Bazar, where she waited for the bus, she suddenly saw Showkat, his face pressed against the cemented wall of his shop, his back to her. Six soldiers encircled him. Showkat was moving his head up and down. What was he doing? Nuzhat wondered. He was licking the wall of his own shop, his tongue following the letters of graffiti: JKLF. The soldiers kicked Showkat as he lapped at the letters. They smashed the shelves of the shop and threw out cabbages and neatly tied bunches of spinach onto the street. They broke the crates of apples and oranges in front of the shop and then moving inside, they shattered the glass jars filled with spices and threw out biscuit packets and gunny bags of beans and rice on the road.

  ‘They made him wipe the letters with his tongue?’ I interjected.

  ‘With his tongue,’ Nuzhat affirmed, ‘until it began to bleed.’

  What a horrible incident, I shuddered. Thinking about Showkat, his stature and his solemnity, I was disappointed with Qadir Suth for behaving like a coward. However, later that evening at home in Bijbyor, as I reclined on my bed while outside it had grown overcast and a dark wind stirred the willow groves outside my window, I imagined him alone inside his shop.

  ‘I should lower the shutter,’ Qadir Suth thought when, with the first flash of lightning and rumble of thunder, the electricity went out. He switched on his electric torch and put it on the counter. All the other shops along that street were shuttered and the carts were abandoned and empty. To fend off the eerie silence that had suddenly descended on the street, he whistled tunelessly and opened the drawer to occupy his mind by totting up his profits for the day. As he built a wad of the notes, a jeep came speeding up and screeched to halt in front of his shop.

  The soldiers jumped out and barged inside.

  ‘Was Showkat here during the day?’ Major S demanded stridently.

  Qadir Suth was mute with fear. His hands trembled and the bills slipped through his fingers and cascaded to the floor.

  Major S grabbed him by the collar and slapped him. ‘Was Showkat here during the day?’ he repeated.

  Qadir Suth nodded timorously.

  ‘Why didn’t you inform me?’

  Qadir Suth mumbled incoherently and Major S slapped him again and inserted the barrel of his pistol into the terrified shopkeeper’s mouth.

  ‘I’ll kill you right now,’ he threatened.

  Qadir Suth’s heart pounded. Major S used the butt of the gun to slap his jaw.

  ‘Atto, Khud
ayo!’ Qadir Suth cried. O God!

  ‘Maderchod,’ Major S shouted. Motherfucker. He pistol-whipped him repeatedly until Qadir Suth’s head thudded on the counter, his cheek torn and bleeding.

  ‘Put him here,’ Major S indicated the floor at the entrance of the shop. The soldiers immediately pounced on the shopkeeper and dragged him to the front.

  ‘Raman, give me your rifle,’ Major S commanded. ‘Showkat must understand the consequences for acquiring weapons from Pakistan to wage a war against me.’

  Major S carried Raman’s steel-barrelled rifle to the sidewalk and stood gazing at the glass, eyeballing its thickness.

  ‘Raman, get the petrol,’ he said. ‘Come on, hurry up!’

  Raman quickly brought a can of petrol from the jeep. As the other soldiers stood around Qadir Suth’s prostate form, their guns pointing to his head, Raman sprinkled petrol on the shelves stacked with clothes and bales of fabric. He even doused the flower-printed, summer frock hanging from the ceiling.

  ‘That’s enough, boys,’ Major S ordered. The soldiers trooped out and Major S shattered the glass front of the shop with a tremendous blow of the gun’s metal barrel. Glass slivers rained down on Qadir Suth’s cringing body on the floor. Although he heard the jeep drive away and saw the flicker of flames around him, he felt paralysed and numb with terror. As the smoke started suffocating him, he spluttered and coughed. He slowly crawled out, stumbling down the steps.

  As soon as we returned to the campus, I asked Nuzhat whether she would tell Showkat about Nadim. Her face flushed. I could tell at a glance that she had second thoughts about confiding in her brother and I did not press her about it.

  Do you think I ought to have, Jamshid? I wonder now how Showkat would have responded. Men conscious of their mortality know the value of time. I have told you every detail and I leave you to be the final judge.

  Nuzhat, who had seen me talking to Nadim, seemed upset by this and left without saying goodbye. I wanted to run after her and tell her that I was on her side, but she was already out through the gate. I felt miserable about this until I looked around at the posters on the walls fencing the lawns. They were all close-ups of your face and they cheered me up. The fire in your eyes was muted but unquenchable. Your nose, an ascending Himalayan ridge. Your smile, captivating and prophetic. Across it, in a splash of red ink, was the widely spaced word extending from one end of your jaw to the other: ‘FREEDOM’. The letter ‘R’ hung from your lower lip in a weird, sensual way. You are the face of our revolution, a face behind which rebels like Showkat unite, assimilate and act.

  The eastern wall on the side of Cheeni Chowk was a fifty-metre-long and three-metre-high brick wall that was webbed with thin gashes. Rumour had it that this damage had been caused by a grenade attack carried out by Showkat himself. Despite its dilapidated condition, the wall continued to create the semblance of a shield saving us, the inhabitants of the campus, from the fulminating outside world.

  I waited for you. I sweated as the sun blazed over my head. I turned in one quick beat of heart, opening my eyes, and there you were. I am having a vision, I thought. The clarity of your eyes, the way you looked at me. I am ever so grateful to Baba for finding you in that village seventeen years ago and bringing you home.

  I apologize for pinching your finger yesterday during lunch while handing you the bowl of water. When I came back up afterwards, I walked inside the bathroom. I thought of you when I undressed and stood in front of the mirror as I was getting ready to take a bath. An erotic warmth spread through me as the hot water coursed down the slope of my shoulders. I fantasized you standing behind me in the shower, your hands cupping my bare breasts.

  At night, I lay on my bed, but I could not sleep. The whole night went by, my eyes wide open, filled with the longing to see you. At dawn, groggy and tired, I took one pill from the new strip of sedatives I had hidden in the drawer. I fell asleep and woke up at noon, but I did not leave my bed. Half-awake, sedated into a state of willed dreaming, I looked at the clean white curtain, stained with the flowers of blood.

  I was on the veranda. The nozzle hung above the geraniums, and common sense told me to look across the long lawn, towards the cow byre. Beneath the raised, rust-brown wings of its roof, set brilliantly on fire by the April sun that noon, my eyes searched the dim interior of the room, and peering within I glimpsed the cave of my childhood whose winding solitary alleys I was tempted to tread again. The water from the numerous pores drizzled over the pink petals. Wispy white roots drank their fill until they were soggy and satiated, the water soundlessly penetrated the hearts of the soil particles, suffusing the empty spaces in between, and pushing up and away over the round rim of the pot, a deluge bubbling and swelling in a dam of dirty, brown water, a multitude of trickles descending to touch my bare, tingling toes. ‘Heeeesh!’ I whispered, glimpsing you in the window across the lawn. I lost my grip of the hose handle. Fresh from my bath, the white crown of the towel around my head came loose and my wet hair tumbled free as the water sprayed out on the hard, white marble floor.

  Baba slammed the kitchen door downstairs and cleared his throat loudly as he stepped into the hall across the corridor packed with murids. I shook my head and realized I was still abed. However, the room over the cow shed, I must proceed to tell you, was once my playground and my sanctuary. Every Friday afternoon, Mama smuggled me there as soon as the men of the house went away to pray. She liked to smoke jajeer and there was none in our house. She would leave me behind, latching the door from the outside, and go to the neighbours’ houses.

  I played for hours with numerous stuffed dolls and drew with crayons. Those dolls and crayons and snow-white stashes of paper were my first gifts from Papa during the early days when he still loved my mother and me.

  It saddened me to see Mama crushed beneath the weight of her sorrow. Papa had fallen in love again with Nadim’s mother, Misreh, after her husband passed away in an accident. He smelled of her shirmals every time he came home. I wouldn’t have known about this had they not had a huge row one night.

  ‘You stink of tobacco,’ Papa accused.

  ‘You won’t like it even if I wash myself over and over again because you are used to the smell of shirmals,’ Mama replied.

  I hated Papa for cheating on my mother until I grew up and understood that the reason he could not even think of asking Baba’s permission to marry Misreh before he had to marry Mama was because she was a baker’s daughter, and a Ganai – a lower caste by the standards of our family. I don’t hate Papa anymore, not with the intensity with which I hated him that night, although I think he could have rebelled like you and I would have in that scenario. In his undying affection for Misreh, in his inability to put an end to that affair, I would later find the root of my complicity. My father had been sleeping with Nadim’s mother and that day when he asked for my clemency on the college lawns I might have harboured the feelings of a sister for him. I felt guilty and more so because Mama was and continued to be sad. She disappeared for hours on end to smoke jajeer in the neighbours’ houses and had started to cough up blood.

  ‘Mama, you must stop this,’ I told her.

  ‘Not until I have destroyed the cold grief sitting in my lungs, my child,’ she retorted.

  Shireen Kochak was Qadir Suth’s only niece. Her stately looking father with the disproportionately large, pockmarked nose brought her along to show her to Baba a few weeks before your arrival at Syed Manzil. Although Ramzan Kochak was one of the richest men in the Anantnag district and owned most of the shops in Cheeni Chowk, Shireen was in rags. He had banned her from meeting with her lover, Farhad Ahangar, who was his driver.

  Shireen had abandoned both Rasool Mir College and food and had become emaciated and epileptic. She had sworn off bathing and make-up until her death or until they returned her lover to her. The stench that rose from her armpits and crotch was rancid. She raved in the dead of the night and at times when she heard her father’s Maruti 800 swishing through Cheeni Chowk, she sa
ng in a sweet albeit desolate voice, frantically running from window to window in the room on the second storey where her father had locked her up. Despite her unkempt hair and fingernails, her eyes remained beautiful and inexpressibly sad.

  I saw her in the corner of the hall, seated in front of Baba, humming the most popular Rasool Mir song:

  I tremble I’ll fall dead

  My hope has fled

  My yar, the one I adore

  I don’t see him anymore

  ‘Stop, you devil,’ Baba scolded her.

  Shireen’s dilated pupils flickered for an instant before she burst into hysterical laughter and tears coursed down her face.

  Baba dropped an isband in the firebowl before him. The dried white mallows burnt and white wisps of bitter smoke rose. Baba whispered to his rosary, holding her gaze.

  ‘Go away,’ he shouted, ‘otherwise, I’ll smoke you out of here.’

  Shireen stopped weeping and her eyes gained focus. Perspiration beaded her brow and she trembled. She fainted into her father’s arms who looked worriedly at Baba.

  ‘The jinn has left the girl,’ Baba said. ‘It wasn’t a stubborn one.’ He scribbled verses of the Qur’an on a small piece of paper with a fountain pen and folded it.

  ‘Put this in a locket and put the locket around the girl’s neck,’ he instructed Ramzan Kochak.

  The grateful father returned to the hall with a bag of figs. ‘The taweez is working and the girl is cured of all her memories,’ he said. ‘She has agreed to marry my nephew. And I want you to perform the nikah next week.’

  Baba smiled and asked Mama to put the bag on the top shelf in the kitchen – the shelf I cannot reach even today. It was from that bag that you stole a fig for me. As it was raw, you cut it open with your teeth, and put the hard rinds of green-and-pink flesh into my hands. When I chewed them, my mouth burnt and blistered and my lips swelled up. I wept and the whole house came to know.