Kabir

Growing up, I didn’t dream of becoming a freedom fighter. I dreamed of being the best batsman in India.

I was mad about cricket. I would be out of the house by early morning and return late in the evening, my hands sore from gripping a bat. I bunked school, broke curfews and ran away from home if I was forbidden from playing. My parents got tired of shouting at me, searching for me.

My brother always knew where to find me. He was the only one patient enough to fetch me home, make me eat and make me do my homework. He was ten years older and had a job at the local printing press. On the rare day that he had a holiday, he would join me on the cricket field. Together we would play, plan and dream. ‘You have real talent,’ he would tell me. ‘Don’t stop playing. You could play for India one day, Afzal. Imagine that!’

I dared to imagine playing for India. It was a forbidden dream, because around me the valley burnt with hatred. Young boys fought pitched battles with the police, matching bullets with stones. Everywhere there was talk of ‘aazadi’ for Kashmir. And I was dreaming of playing for India.

We were playing cricket one day when the world changed. My brother hadn’t wanted to come along. He was tired. But I insisted. Finally, he got on his cycle, and I climbed up behind him. I had been practising, and I couldn’t wait to show him my next shot.

The minute the ball touched the bat, I knew I had got it right. It was there in the crisp sound, in the way it flew off the bat. It was a six. I knew it even while the ball was in the air, and I began jumping in excitement.

At the far end of the field was a dusty path that cut across it. A jeep was driving past, and the ball headed straight for it, smashing through the windscreen. The driver lost control and the jeep swerved and rolled, spilling out the occupants. It was an army jeep. Two other jeeps behind it swerved madly to avoid a collision. Men in khaki began to emerge from those jeeps and run towards the accident.

My brother grabbed the bat from my hand. ‘Run!’ he said. ‘RUN!’

I ran.

The army men took him away. The incident was described in the papers as terrorists attacking a military convoy. ‘A young militant trained in Pakistan’ had been caught.

My parents went begging from door to door. They spoke to everyone of influence they knew. My mother waited patiently outside the army camp for days, requesting anyone who came to the gates to give her news of her son. It was five days before we could even find out where he was being held.

They refused to return him to us. The charges had been made. He had simply crossed the fine line that kept ordinary Kashmiris from the chaos. He was now a ‘suspected militant’, and that is what he would stay for the next three years until they sent him back to us.

No one said a word to me but I knew it was my fault. I had changed everything. Most of all, my brother. When he returned, it was a stranger that the army jeep dropped off on the path in front of our house—three years after they had taken him. A stranger who stood hunched and hesitant outside the door. A stranger who cringed away from my mother’s kisses, my embraces.

My mother insisted on a celebration. My father tried to stop her, but she would not listen. All the women from the neighbouring houses came to help. It was a proper Kashmiri wazwan, hours in the making. But when the relatives and friends began arriving, the stranger who wore my brother’s face and clothes became angry. He emerged from the room he had shut himself in to stand there, stick-thin and furious. ‘What are we celebrating?’ he shouted. ‘What is there to celebrate? That they sent me back? What about the three years they stole from me? What about what they did to me in those three years?’

My father tried to talk to him and calm him down. My brother went into his room and slammed the door.

‘Let him be,’ said my father. ‘It will take time.’

I stood outside the door and begged. ‘Bhaijaan, please open the door. Please eat something.’ What I was really saying was ‘please forgive me’. Forgive me for everything. Forgive me for the nights my mother wept, stifling her sobs in her razai. Forgive me for my father’s stony silence, his blank eyes. Forgive me for the look on my mother’s face as she stood day after day outside the jail walls. Forgive me for the way my father grovelled in front of people, begging, begging for his son’s life. Forgive me for that moment I handed my brother the cricket bat and made him give me three years of his life in return. Forgive me. I would take it all back if I could.

Late in the night, after all the guests had left, he finally opened the door and seized both my shoulders with strong hands. ‘You will never play for India,’ he said. ‘You will play for Kashmir one day. For aazad Kashmir.’

The seventh day after he was back, my brother took the path into the woods. It was the path taken by the angry men. The Mattoos’s son had done it two years ago after a lathi charge smashed his shin and left him with a permanent limp. Two other boys from the colony had walked away one summer. My brother left on a full-moon night, the path silver in the dark.

My parents didn’t say a word when they woke up to find him missing. I think they knew it was coming. They never mentioned him again. It was as if he had never existed in the story of our family. The photographs of him vanished from the album. His clothes vanished from the cupboard. Only the tears remained. The secret tears my mother wept late at night. The defeated hunch of my father’s shoulders.

My brother had gone, but he left me his anger. I began to look around me and see what he saw. The injustice. The callousness. The everyday humiliation. The cringing, suffocating lives we all lived. The fear that misted in every breath. My ears filled with his words. How does a man live with someone’s foot on his neck? Is justice to be a fancy word written on paper, or will we make it with our own hands, our blood?

I stayed with my parents for a year. But in the end, even I took the path into the woods. My brother was waiting under the trees. He embraced me and whispered, ‘We will have a new life now. We will have new dreams. You will be part of them.’ I was fourteen years old. My brother was twenty-four. And we were both ready to lay down our lives for our dream.

The first time I saw Aman, he was shaking. His mouth was sealed with tape, his eyes were blindfolded, and he was shivering from the cold. His legs had been tied together so tightly with rope that it would be a couple of hours before he could even try to stand again.

‘Keep him safe,’ said my brother. ‘If anyone finds him, we are all dead.’

‘Who is he?’ I asked.

‘The son of a bastard,’ said my brother. ‘An important man.’

They left me alone with Aman in a safe house that was miles within a forest. It was the dead of winter, and we were all alone. Even I didn’t dare to leave the house. A person could get lost in a matter of minutes and freeze to death in an hour.

I waited till they were long gone. I untied him and removed the blindfold. He croaked, ‘Thank you.’ When he tried to get to his feet, he fell over. I locked the door carefully and looked at this boy of my age, who lay there trying to smile.