Sarmad’s insubordinate spirit, intense, palpable and truer than any accumulation of historical facts could be, appeared to those who sought his blessings. It celebrated (but never preached) the value of spirituality over sacrament, simplicity over opulence and stubborn, ecstatic love even when faced with the prospect of annihilation.
“But for us the price-rise and school-admissions and beating-husbands and cheating-wives are all inside us. The riot is inside us. The war is inside us. Indo-Pak is inside us. It will never settle down. It can’t.”
“ Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have […] you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better. This place where we live, where we have made our home, is the place of falling people […] We aren’t even real. We don’t really exist.”
[Delhi’s] new masters wanted to hide her knobby, varicose veins under imported fishnet stockings, cram her withered tits into saucy padded bras and jam her aching feet into pointed high-heeled shoes. They wanted her to swing her stiff old hips and re-route the edges of her grimace upwards into a frozen, empty smile. It was the summer Grandma became a whore.
“But even if I was President of America, that world class Brahmin, still I would be here on hunger strike for the poor. I don’t want dollars. Capitalism is liked poisoned honey. People swarm to it like bees. I don’t go to it.”
“The city is still stunned by the simultaneous explosions that tore through a bus stop, a café and the basement parking lot of a small shopping plaza two days ago, leaving five dead and very many more severely injured. It will take our television news anchors a little longer than ordinary folks to recover from the shock. As for myself, blasts evoke a range of emotions in me, but sadly, shock is no longer one of them.”
“I feel a rush of anger at those grumbling intellectuals and professional dissenters who constantly carp about this great country. Frankly, they can only do it because they are allowed to. And they are allowed to because, for all our imperfections, we are a genuine democracy. I would not be crass enough to say this too often in public, but the truth is that it gives me great pride to be a servant of the Government of India.”
“Like many noisy extremists, [Naga] has moved through a whole spectrum of extreme political opinion. What has remained consistent is only the decibel level. Now Naga has a handler—though he many not see it quite that way—in the Intelligence Bureau. With a senior position at his paper, he is a valuable asset to us.”
“The inbuilt idiocy, this idea of jihad, has seeped into Kashmir from Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now, twenty-five years down the line, I think, to our advantage, we have eight or nine versions of the ‘True’ Islam battling it out in Kashmir […] Some of the most radical among them […] are actually on our payroll. One of them was recently blown up outside his mosque by a bicycle bomb. He won’t be hard to replace. The only thing that keeps Kashmir from self-destructing like Pakistan and Afghanistan is good old petit bourgeois capitalism. For all their religiosity, Kashmiris are great businessmen. And all businessmen eventually, one way or another, have a stake in the status quo—or what we call the ‘Peace Process,’ which, by the way, is an entirely different kind of business opportunity from peace itself.”
“This was Kashmir; the Separatists spoke in slogans and our men spoke in press releases; their cordon-and-search operations were always ‘massive,’ everybody they picked up was always ‘dreaded,’ seldom less than ‘A-category,’ and the recoveries they made from those they captured were always ‘war-like.’ It wasn’t surprising, because each of those adjectives had a corresponding incentive—a cash reward, an honorable mention in their service dossier, a medal for bravery or a promotion.”
They would swarm out of their homes in their hundreds of thousands and march to the graveyard, unaware that even the outpouring of their grief and fury had become part of a strategic, military, management plan.
“I would like to write one of those sophisticated stories in which even though nothing much happens there’s lots to write about. That can’t be done in Kashmir. It’s not sophisticated, what happens here. There’s too much blood for good literature.”
Rumor had it that the unidentified martyr who was buried that night—the founder-corpse—was not a corpse at all, but an empty duffel bag. Years later, the (alleged) mastermind of this (alleged) plan was questioned by […] a member of the new generation of freedom fighters, who had heard this story and was troubled by it: “But […] does this not mean that our Movement […] is based on a lie?” The grizzled mastermind’s (alleged) reply was, “This is the trouble with you youngsters, you have absolutely no idea how wars are fought.”
On this occasion Miss Jebeen was by far the biggest draw. The cameras closed in on her, whirring and clicking like a worried bear. From that harvest of photographs, one emerged a local classic. For years it was reproduced in papers and magazines and on the covers of human rights reports that no one ever read.
The corrosion in Kashmir ran so deep that Amrik Singh was genuinely unaware of the irony of picking up a man whose wife and child had just been shot and bringing him forcibly, under armed guard, to an interrogation center at four in the morning, only in order to offer his commiseration.”
“If that fool didn’t know how to live here with the military, why did he have to come into this world in the first place?”
She described how, when her brother’s body was found in a field and brought home, his fists, clenched in rigor mortis, were full of earth and yellow mustard flowers grew from between his fingers.
So all in all, with a People’s Pool, a People’s Zoo and a People’s School, things were going well in the old graveyard. The same, however, could not be said of the Duniya.
How
to
tell
a
shattered
story?
By
slowly
becoming
everybody.
No.
By slowly becoming everything.
By the time they got back, the lights were all out and everybody was asleep. Everybody, that is, except Guih Kyom the dung beetle. He was wide awake and on duty, lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens fell. But even he knew that things would turn out all right in the end. They would, because they had to. Because Miss Udaya Jebeen was come.
