“It is not about a writer’s cramp this time”, Salik, visibly frustrated slaps himself, cranes his neck and shrieks aloud in a piercing self- lacerating tone, his jaws forcefully gnashed together, forehead profusely sweating and a frown angled up in helplessness. His eyes are intensely misted; and a jet of condensing rising vapors spurts like wildfire through the ugly cavity between his sharp incisors; dead stubborn that he would definitely avenge this mass massacre tonight. He wipes the sticky drool off his cracked lips with his tattered sleeve, disgust at the morose sky writ large on his face. It is smelling blood. The entire night, he is a stubbly frail figure in the open that shivers in dilemma on the frozen threshold of his half-broken window, battling his whims to stab the main accused. The icy winds have blown in enough homogenous wafts of the remote burning coal-tar mixed, yes, with the fresh blood of an entire village through his inflating annoyed nostrils and he has already started catching a severe fever after throwing up thrice; but he is still determined not to budge an inch until he gears himself fit to fulfill his pledge. He must hunt for him, before he gets caught. Mustering together miraculously the courage of an entire lifetime, he shakes himself and rises valiantly to personally set out in the search come what may, but is immediately struck by a sight of a glowing signboard that warningly reads on the opposite end, “DEAD SLOW. ARMY CAMP AHEAD.”
He looks defeated and incompetent to find out the prime convict. The forces outside still see him as their target alike many of those who were around and yet alive. If he dares march out, he might be the stupidest person to get shot at, no matter how resolute he is to help them in their search. He is scared and now a little morally conscious too, for some old reason. “Is this it, then?” he interviews himself. Either ways, he was to die that night. “Yes. Certainly it is easier” he confides to himself his alternate better choice. Darting a meaningful glance at the broken mirror beside, he again finds himself an easy target to shoot at and be killed than the commander, whose life was the only threat to all those still alive. Fidgeting with the metal rotating cylinder, he now cocks the hammer and aims to fire the gun with a single pull on the trigger. In no time, he would blow out his own brains that would settle down like sand in the late winter snow. Firmly pressing the barrel harder against his temple, he assumes charge and takes in a deep long breathe. “So, this is finally it.”, saying so, he pushes the pen off the table by his foot and begins trembling at the thought, as he waits to command his finger to press and shoot. He feels his soul fleeing rapidly and lightly through the bones of his legs. Reflexively gulping down his secretions to moisten his throat, he grunts frightfully and finally… drops back again defeated in his arm-chair, limping. He is weak, no, extremely weak and a coward. He puts back the revolver on the wooden table, highly regretful in a room where he was stranded with the dead bodies of three gunmen. A black drop of sweat soon dribbles down along the curve of his long bleeding nose, trails along his chiseled cheekbone and hangs restively from his flaccid plump jowl; and within a minute drops away.
There is an inclined burning table lying lopsided against a blood sprinkled wall; an underlying dead cat, ruptured abdomen with bullet holes, some scattered mortar shells and a recently punctured rucksack of fresh gunpowder behind him. He is still confused and petrified, gazing at the light snow falling outside, still trembling in his creaking arm-chair by the open frosted window. He has failed both ways. He has neither been able to be the army collaborator nor has he succeeded to end his own story right here. Cowered beneath the partially collapsed slab of the grim room, he gets up cringing back cautiously to avoid any unnecessary detection and get shot at mistakenly. It’s not silent anymore. High beam rays from dazzling searchlights now project high crisscrossing each other in the smoggy wintry night-sky outside. Loud shrill sirens soon viciously defeat the smothery silence of this remote unarmed village in Shopian. High military boots are heard assuming hasty positions in resonance. Bloodcurdling deafening screams are heard arising in the distance. Doors breaking open with gun butts. Men running helter-skelter in the open fields for their lives. And children crying bitterly for their separated mothers; a commotional din stirs the atmosphere, smog descends and bloodstains on his unwritten poem remain unnoticed. He writes motioning his finger like a musician in thick air:
Jashn- e- marg hai is shab, lo thodi see aur pee lo:
Mey pee loun zindagi ki ab, ki bas issi shab azaad hai’n hum:
(Drink some more in the celebration of death tonight:
Drink this wine of life, for it’s the only night of our freedom)
‘Death’. An occasional gun-shot every now and then drags him out of his poetic capabilities to the ‘…Mission’. Loudspeakers fiercely announce from the local mosques that there have been some surreptitious infiltrations across the border the early night; and the Maa*****ds’ must be hunted down asap much before the media storms in next morning. All four of them have been killed so far except for their mastermind commander who was still at large in the same building. “Yeah. I must find that Maa*****d myself before they find him and ***k him much before he gets me ***ked up here! He owes me way more than what he owes them.” He is somewhere responsible for all this devastation too; not only the government is; and he should make him pay dear for it, an indecent seething Salik vows as he spans his eyes widely across the once beautiful, but now blazing hamlet. He is charged back again in the war. Meanwhile, no mercy pleas are heard anymore from anywhere. The noise has been gradually faded away to silence. O-n-e by o-n-e, the giant trucks march ahead and o-n-e by o-n-e, every voice is slowly silenced to death as if beneath their enraged tires. It’s a deadly silence again bewitching the entire hamlet now… as though nobody was ever alive here or as though, everybody was already dead since ever. No one pleads and no one cries. Salik is not struggling with his decision anymore as he encourages and boosts himself to complete his self-ordained mission. He is probably the only man left alive now and this must be the only reason what he was born for. This must be inner calling. Before the onset of dawn, he would throw out that maa*****d commander to feed the Indian dogs and reclaim his inner Azadi by avenging his entire village. The doom had been primarily brought out by him, hadn’t it? Had he not stormed into the village with his fellowmen, this all would have never happened. Alarms ring high, announcements higher and warnings deafening. Speeding jeeps zigzagging across the field dodge enemy bullets and screech to halt, more dogs set free to search and more artilleries deployed on ground. Considerably distanced rubber tires keep burning fierily all along the entire perimeter of the cordoned rectangular building. Large oil drums painted horizontally in white and red, contrast with the dark background, shielding behind an entire troop of the armored commandos. Fences are razed and grenades hurled. Thirty three bodies have so far been lined out and counting. Air force has been well informed in advance, just in case.
Fifty-seven. He is now searching that fourth commander in that spread quilt of a midnight’s snow and at least save some of the remaining lives in the village in turn, his eyes occasionally thrusting close to every engineered snowman raised so lifelessly by the playing children of the day’s noisy neighborhood. He minutely examines every falling crystal of the white snowflakes disappearing down into a sheen blanket spread silently across, as he hides behind the stilts of the only building in the entire village. The footprints in the snow have vanished in the wake of the fresh snowfall of the early night. The entire beautiful village is dark except for the successive patches of golden incandescent lights falling meekly from the improvised oil lamps in emptied whisky bottles, encircling the entire cordoned village on electrified concertina wires. He cannot be certainly anywhere beyond or outside, not when the surveillance is so strict and the field is an open expanse.
“Oye!”, a bullet is fired in the air
Is he caught? He runs a risk to storm up back to his hiding and locks the door behind him, gasping for breath sharply. A recurring anxious movement of highly armed silhouettes below crossing each other impatiently around the building prevents him to prove his identity. He runs back to his room in the third floor.
Salik is sorrowfully still at his ajar window again, incapable in his venture, his eyes utterly capsized as if in some insane lost love “But that’s not a God damn priority as for now! I must somehow prove who am I lest I get shot too.” he hollers at himself. Despite his resolute stand as a soldier, he rises but again wrenches in pain as he struggles to watch what he precisely wants to see…, a smiling family photograph in his fields, if not his entire family tree.
By now, hundreds of body parts are laid outside in clean disciplined lines, mutilated, maimed, dismembered and marred. Faces defaced and many other bodies simply dead.
He shudders himself to senses again, slings across the long rifle of a gunman, discards a cowardly suicide plan and reads: IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, THE MOST MERCIFUL-THE BENEFICEIENT. Puffing up his lungs with as much of the air as he could, he presses his lips tight, opens up his eyes round and focuses on his only foe. “I will use this gun. I can do this” he assures himself. He was intuitively sure that commander Abdul Satar must be alive somewhere, only to die at his hands. The first thing he would do before killing him was to ask him something- a question only he could answer. The second thing was the killing itself for the carnage he had inflicted upon the entire village. Teetering along in his high leather boots and calculatingly taking the bare possible twelve careful steps, he manages to crouch outside the door dreading himself being shot at in the dark, mistakenly. He is on the square landing shared by the opposite entry doors of the two quarters. Habib Khan, his neighbor from Bihar is dead at the staircase. He courteously lifts his hanging head from the first step and places it against a leaking water pipe of the refuse chute. Water soon pours down his face and makes small creative patterns against various contours and depressions of his face, particularly the hole in the left cheek that has some metal struck fast into it. He gets enthralled by the reflecting turbine effect. But he must not concentrate there. He must get down and find Sattar.
Salik switches on his torch, descends the staircase and enters the long corridors stealthily and slowly shifts glances between his either sides after every watchful step, but comes out single-handedly every time, even though his pledge was to behead him right away, no shoot him, and throw his bloody skull to the starving dogs outside. He sneaks in every nook and corner sniffing the potential danger like a trained animal and searchs in all the hideous places of the building he could, the only commercial and concrete in the entire village. Electric control rooms, overhead water tanks, roof attics, verandahs, desolated quarters, behind the doors, beneath the beds, in the cupboards, on the shelves and like a madman in the drawers too but to no avail. Hollering starved bloodhounds continue dribbling outside in their unfinished search but the long lull from the both sides guarantees a promising ceasefire for some more time until he would at least find his dead body. There were a least of 600 surrounding security personnel and an entire dead village anticipating his death. Everybody wanted him. Dead or alive. 13 militants had until now been officially confirmed dead. But the mastermind could still not be found. Nowhere and neither could he be heard firing back in retaliation. Salik did not leave even a single room of the building unsearched.
“Maybe he is already dead” he grins.
He was now panting and sweating exhausted in his lone struggle. However, shrewdly escaping the perils and sight of the security forces at his each step, Salik sat down, still calculatively hopeful of finding the commander. It was a battle, yes, intensely fought. What mattered now was the light of the day so that he could come out clean back to the refuge of his employers. The night of no avail had almost passed by until things begun to change, when the only Muslim Muezzin in the Army called out loud its usual Morning Prayer call, in the village of dead-
“IN THE NAME OF ALLAH, THE MOST MERCIFUL-THE BENEFICEIENT”, She melodiously calls out far and wide:
“ALLAH IS THE GREATEST-
ALLAH IS THE GREATEST-… “
The seeker’s plaint in the voice of the female Muezzin broke a thousand closets and equally shocked him from within. He clasped his hand to his mouth. Curling up his hands, he pressed his amulet hard to his chest, and started to cry…’a female muezzin from the army!’
Withdrawing out of the building with dropped arms and drooping shoulders, broken at the very first sight of the dawn, Salik knew all the answers, only Abdul Sattar knew. He with light footsteps slowly descended the stairs from the door of his mind to the room of his heart. ~ Roohi-his childhood sweetheart was dead inside~, her faint smile frozen across her pink lips, and her face not glowing with any wait anymore, howsoever. He walked out defeated the third time. A torrent of bullets soon ripped apart his chest into a thousand splatters; and he inconveniently fell scattering into a million shards before another board that peacefully reads “SORRY. INCONVENIENCE REGRETTED.” The last minutes of the search operation was covered live by the entire national media. Breaking news flashed across television sets across the globe. The entire team was assured higher ranks and luring perks. As the red fountain pen kept bleeding profusely from its broken nib on the only Devri stone where his head was smashed, they say History lost one of its most valued poets. But the militant could never be found.
The writer is a practicing architect at INTACH who is also interested in Visual arts and literary fiction.