Morning or night, Friday or Sunday, made no difference, everything was the same … What did days, weeks or hours matter?
—Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Illych
We say that the hour of death cannot be forecast, but when we say this, we imagine that hour as placed in an obscure and distant future. It never occurs to us that it has any connection with the day already begun or that death could arrive this same afternoon, this afternoon which is so certain and which has every hour filled in advance.
—Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time
He wasn’t easily convinced of the size and space of his grave. For some days now, he had been doodling on a stray piece of paper, holding—in his trembling, speckled, bony hand—one of his great-grandson’s eraser-topped stub of a pencil, drawing a grave.
Shabaan Kaak was the oldest person in Hawal, and widely revered in the heart of Srinagar’s downtown. He had three sons, six daughters, twenty-three grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His wife had been thirteen years younger than him and had died years ago from tuberculosis. His eldest son was a retired overseer and the youngest a Class-A contractor of construction. The middle one, Dr. Imtiyaz Ahmad, was a psychiatrist who lived at Raj Bagh, some eight kilometres from Hawal, in a separate house, with his small family. Shabaan Kaak had seen a lot in life, which was fraught with both sense and nonsense, and lived through the strangest of times. In his last few days, he was very nearly content.
Along with a property will, Shabaan Kaak handed the map of his ancestral graveyard to his eldest son. With neatly pencilled arrow marks, the map indicated exactly where Kaak’s grave ought to be dug. Also, the map showed the geometric dimensions of the trench and the lahad, the vault, of the grave.
Aged a hundred and two, Shabaan Kaak would often say: Hati heor gasi insaan pan’ni marzi marun (above hundred one must die at one’s will). One morning, when one of his grandsons told him about the death of a teenager hit by an expired teargas shell on the Hawal crossway, Kaak blurted: Baasaan chhu Khuada saebas chhus ba mashith goumut (looks like God has forgotten only me). But most often he would wish and pray: may I die on a sunny Friday.
He also believed: All Kashmiris know me, know how old I am, and that there couldn’t be less than, at least, ten thousand men at my funeral prayers.
He had witnessed all the major political and social events, changes and upheavals in Kashmir. The rise and fall of cruel monarchs and charismatic political leaders, each India-Pakistan tussle over Kashmir. He had seen famous legends, borne witness to historic treaties and understood the fickle temperaments of several public figures and politicians. He had seen how some revolutionary events had become cyclic, how true legends and old sacrifices would come back time and again. He had observed that it was the common man and the good leader who truly mattered in the circus of power, that it was their own deeds that shone on in public memory. And finally, he had come to the conclusion that nothing was more important than a return to God. He was more faithful to God than religion could have made him.
All his great-grandchildren spoke in Urdu, so Shabaan Kaak had to struggle with his broken Urdu, always funnily mixed with Kashmiri words: Asal kami karni aastaa hai! Ikhlaaq saan jado-jehat karin aasta hai aur Khuadayas zaarpaar karun aastaa hai! Bas mein aur kuch nahin dapta hai! (Good deeds, struggle-with-ethics and God is what I preach; rest is all farce!), he would say at least one hundred times a day. The children giggled at his sayings, but he ignored that and maintained the same formula until his death. In his old heart, he had forgiven almost everyone who had caused him harm in his long life.
Shabaan Kaak had also always prayed for an ‘easy death’, but more than that he was conscious about dying on a sunny Friday and having a minimum of ten thousand men at his funeral. He fell slightly ill for a few days before he passed away. Just slightly.
Kaak died at the start of a strict curfew imposed in the city following the killing of a schoolchild hit on the head by a teargas shell. The curfew would last a week.
It was ten-thirty in the morning of a long Thursday in July. The silent lamentation took place in the grand old house. Prevented by the severe curfew, his middle son Dr. Imtiyaz could only call his brothers over the phone and enquire about the progress of the funeral. The cellphones in the old house would ring time and again and sometimes nobody would pick up the call. Then Kaak’s middle son would call his nephews to ask about the funeral. ‘Hello! Hellooooo! When are you giving him the final bath? … Okay … Has the shroud come? … Okay … Will the Army and police allow you to take him to the graveyard? … Okay,’ he asked all these questions.
Shabaan Kaak was old enough to be noisily mourned. Given the curfew, his sons could barely arrange for a tailor to stitch their father a proper shroud. There was nowhere to find the particular white cloth he deserved. Nowhere to find myrrh to scent the bathwater for Kaak’s gosul, the final bath. In desperation, his daughters-in-law disarranged all the hung, folded and well-ironed clothes in the wardrobes and old tin trunks, searched through every bureau or drawer or hanging wicker basket in the house, looking for a ball of camphor in vain. Ultimately, it was borrowed from a neighbour. Fortunately the local mosque was only a few metres away, so Shabaan Kaak’s grandsons brought the taabood, the bier, home.
When the body was ready for burial, Kaak’s sons sobbed and wailed, not particularly for the loss of their father’s soul, but out of worry for what would happen if they were not allowed to take the body to the graveyard for burial.
The vantage points of the main road were littered with large stones, spiky barricades or coils of razorwire; bevies of policemen and Army soldiers patrolled in riot gear, holding transparent shields and swinging transparent canes, as if dressed to play some odd game, something between cricket and rugby.
Gradually, and with the help of some neighbours, Kaak’s sons somehow managed to talk about the matter to a police officer stationed outside the colony. After an hour of pleading with him, Kaak’s sons were allowed a maximum of ten men to accompany the body to the graveyard.
Shabaan Kaak’s funeral prayer was offered in a narrow lane outside the old house. The lane couldn’t accommodate more than two short rows of men. So only twenty-two men offered the janaaza. The Molvi sahab of the local mosque was on leave, so a neighbour had to lead the prayer. Later, the same neighbour would offer the fateha at the grave, full of mistakes in the recitation, and it would become evident that the funeral prayer too had not gone well.
Finally, two of Kaak’s sons, five grandsons and three neighbours carried the bier, covered in a green velvet pall, to the ancestral graveyard. The weight of the bier was much greater than that of the body. Sometimes, while carrying it to the graveyard, his sons even doubted their father’s presence inside the box. They wondered if they were bearing an empty taabood on their shoulders.
The sunless sky and the swelter of midsummer were making the late afternoon stuffy. The two most prominent sounds in the breathless air were either the sirens of police vehicles or the concert of diverse birdsong, something normally drowned out by the daily din of traffic and anxious human hubbub. Since Ghulam Rasool, the gravedigger, belonged to the other side of Hawal and couldn’t be reached, Kaak’s sons and grandsons had to dig the grave themselves, something they had never imagined having to do. The first rectangular pit they dug was shallow and the vault couldn’t even bear the weight of one human being over it. It crumbled. Then they moved to another side of the graveyard, where, if he were alive, Shabaan Kaak would never have wanted to be buried: under the shade of an acacia tree. The level of the earth here was lower than that of the first spot. This pit began to fill with water as soon as it had been dug.
They threw the mud back into the pit and moved to another side of the graveyard where there was a sprawling bank of irises. At once they again began to turn the earth inside out. Being inexperienced at digging, Shabaan Kaak’s sons and grandsons sweated, panted and cried. Again, it was not because they had just lost their father. Instead, they were worried about whether this pit too would fill with water and prove useless.
At last Shabaan Kaak was irrevocably buried.
Late in the night it drizzled. The next day being Friday, the order for a stricter curfew had been bellowed across the city.