Kashmir - A Short Story “Know Wiki...?
By: Aafaq Hameed
Tags: Fiction, Short Story, Kashmir, Music, Rock

Kashmir - A Short Story











“Know Wiki...? Led Zeppelin has a song named Kashmir...”



“Hehe! Come on... I am the guy who introduced you to rock! How dare you ask that?”



“You have?! Aha! So what basically is Kashmir? Why the name Kashmir, haan?”



Wubba lubba dub dub..., Waqas’s phone rings.



“Netflix password, dumbass! Netflix password!” He hangs the call. “Okay Aafaq, I have read this somewhere, probably on the internet... Kashmir is a place where the band imagines to be talking to prophets about revelations and waits for a Messiah to come. I guess the name is taken by our place.”



“Huhah! If it were today’s band, they would never have named anything Kashmir. You see, their Kashmir is full of hopes, and ours is definitely not!”



We amble, almost unwillingly, on the stream-side to Geadiseer’s famous pump shed. Famous when I was a kid and would go there to swim with my gang. I can imagine my tiny brown body fidgeting around the well, squabbling with boys over something, perhaps trying to push each other into the water. But there are no kids swimming in it at the time, no vrooming motors, no quakes or just ripples in the water — the place doesn’t look famous anymore. We walk away from the place.



The sun is above the head, shining callously like it darts glass shards all over the body. I may look like an Afro-Caribbean in a day or two. Well, I am not sure about Waqas. His face is somehow oval like a peanut, and coincidentally of the same colour. A peeled one. Well, if the sun keeps burning like this, there’s no wonder that he would look like a roasted peanut by tomorrow. Nevertheless, he is my only friend. We always talk about girls, music, movies and philosophy. Basically everything, yet music mostly. You know, we groove to music all day; riffs connect us, they really do.



We keep walking with our drained out legs, while there plays Seger’s famous Old Time Rock and Roll on my phone. The heat is hampering our steps, our stomachs growl and skin burns. God knows how many miles we stroll in a day!



“There used to be a mosque here. Where did it go?”



“Do you pray, dear Nietzsche of poor people?! Why do you care then?”



“Huh, as if you lead prayers in your home, Netflix-and-chill-pizza-fed-xippie! I pray Eid prayers at least!”



“Okay. Haha!”



We break into a loud laugh, so loud that a bunch of aunties on the street come out from an ajar gate to give us looks. Dreadful, bizarre looks. Surely, we had interrupted their gossip, but we laugh anyway.



“Ruined children!” they whisper.



Soon after we reach a deserted road, we also see some roadside shops at a fair distance from us. And seldom a car passes by the road. A few pedestrians only. The place is perhaps a Red-Zone. We arrive at the two shops; one is kiryana and another one sells samosas and other junk foods. While Waqas buys some cold-drink from the kiryana, the samosa-seller, sitting on the doorsteps of his shop, meets my eyes. He brings a chair from inside of his not-so-occupied shop. Putting his butt on the chair’s edge, he looks very anxious about something. He is looking at me now and I feel it in my gut that I have seen him somewhere. His face is saggy with a not-so-patchy beard, and on top of that, he has a Hollywood-like hairline which really makes him handsome. Artlessly handsome. Oh yes, I remember! Back in 19’, I have had his tea once, when he used to sit on a tea-stall in the taxi-stand on way to my home. It was during winter, or maybe autumn, I don’t know. There were russet chinar leaves scattered all over the snow, and it was sunny but cold. I had two samosas with tea that day, and got nausea by the evening. It must have been due to cold. It is no wonder that Waqas knows the guy as well and perhaps more than I do.



“Wanna have samosas?”



“What? Yuck, no!”



“F**k off! I am going to eat!”



Waqas greets the seemingly anxious man.



“Hey man, how are you?



He talks with great energy as if he waited for someone to talk to him. And it seems that the kiryana-guy, who is old and has donned white salwar-kameez and skull-cap, doesn’t go very well with the samosa-seller. I don’t think they even talk to each other. Could be a war of past, or rather they enjoyed the company of silence and solitude.



After a minute or two, I too make myself comfortable on the doorsteps that face wide-spread paddy fields and a huge mountain after that. Picturesque scenery, I must say. Do the shopkeepers talk to these mountains? Do they listen to the songs of crickets? Don’t they have things to talk? I wonder while drinking my bottle of lemon-flavoured cold-drink.



“It must be very boring to sit all day and do nothing. But it’s very beautiful here.” Waqas bathes his samosa in the chutney. “Why did you not go home by the way?”



“Eh? Paddies and mountains? I could see decorated shikaras float from morning till evening in the glossy waters of Dal. Evening till morning. But you know, the situation is disastrous there. Every day, you see half a thousand cases or even more. Twenty deaths. Thirty deaths How would a man like me stand that?”



His soiled, white shirt cannot escape my eyes. He is an impoverished, Ladakhi man. What makes him smile then? How is he so happy? I don’t dare ask him. But Waqas can.



“But you aren’t alone, right? You have a family, where are they?” He pays him with a ten-rupee note. “Hmmm, and how is the sale? Do people come here?”



“No father. No mother. No brother or sister. I am the only guy left of my breed. I have a wife and daughter who studies at Kashmir University. It is a big one.” The samosa-seller plays with the note between his skinny fingers. “Do you see anyone right now? I only have customers at evening, who come to buy tilleh-kaddeh. Unlike other halwaais, I make them using a variety of chickpea. It’s becoming famous.”



Waqas lights up a cigarette and takes a long, slow drag. He must be enjoying it. The samosa-seller’s face is lost in a plume of smoke. All of a sudden, three little girls come walking on a dirt road, linked to the concrete one. They all have sported new clothes because of Eid.



“Hey, come here! Make a guess what could be in my hand, and if you are right, I will give it to you.”



“Bullet? Coin? Zebra? There’s nothing inside, you are making a fool of us, uncle!” They laugh and walk away.



“Look here!” He takes out something. Something he had made out of the ten-rupee note. You see, it was like a paper coin with a design. What do I call it? Ladakhi origami? “You brought Maggie, little girl? I will make it for you.” He smiles and laughs.



I am bored, and I feel like going home but the sun, the stubborn fire-ball hanging in the sky makes me hang on there. Also, home is almost two kilometres far.



A chain of army jeeps and trucks pass by the road. Fast, and honking unceasingly. We fall silent for a couple of minutes. Later, the samosa-seller again turns to me.



“Life was very simple at first. People were simple and just simple things satiated them. I remember, my parents, my brother’s family and I would sleep in a single room. I was friends with my cousin sisters and played with them. You know... there used more innocence than lust.” He coughs. Coughs his lungs out. His face crimsons. “You may have seen how boys on roads, prowling for girls like hungry jackals. Let aside the army men, you know their libido. They can even fuck animals. They —”



I am bored to an extremity now, so I interrupt him with something very less relevant to the debate.



“Well, the past was indeed very simple. I remember, my grandpa would bid me adieu for school after getting me on a tanga. I was tiny at the time and liked the tangas. Some of them had robust white horses, the cart would be adorned with chimes and mirrors and bells. And ah, the anklets of those horses still toll in my dreams, announcing tanga-rides!”



“Yes, my son. People were happy. A kilo of meat costed sixty-rupees and lasted for many days. Do three kilos of meat last for three days in our homes now? No. Money has become the second father of man. You are worms if you are poor. The riches will kill with impunity if you are poor.” He takes a long sigh, out of anxiety perhaps, and puts on a smile again. “My brother died of brain haemorrhage. In the beginning, all my kith and kin would comfort me with their lies... the bastards are nowhere now. I married my brother’s sister then. She must be waiting for me.”



Once again, the long chain of army vehicles appears to our eyes. Faster this time. We overlook them until, in no time, they stop at our feet. They remain calm for a while. Nobody comes out, nobody goes in. The kiryana-guy runs away. And soon as the Ladakhi man stands up to pull the shutter of his shop, a bullet hits him in his left eye. Another one on his chest. And one more in his mouth. His blood paints the rust-bitten shutter of his shop, and he falls with a thud on the ground. I bite back a scream. Waqas blacks out. Whistles blow, and the army-convoy leaves, after killing a man. A fucking man. They may have been checking their new highly-advanced American weapons, or perhaps just letting the virgin fingers of a new recruit learn the job. It can also be that the last remaining three bullets in some soldier’s magazine may have bothered him. Nobody knows except them. Nobody wants to know.



Zeppelin on Waqas’s phone still plays, and the blood-spattered lips of the samosa-seller whisper along:







Oh, pilot of the storm who leaves no trace



Like thoughts inside a dream



Heed the path that led me to that place,



yellow desert stream



My Shangri-La beneath the summer moon,



I will return again



Sure as the dust that floats high in June,



when movin' through Kashmir