Saffron
‘The more I run from this place, the more I find myself coming back to it. I still wake up to the nightmares of it. It keeps haunting me,’ said Harpal. At 78, he could walk faster than me. His long flowing white beard was in complete contrast with his colourful personality. His right arm had a very distinct and disgusting burn mark which he showed to me with pride. ‘When they burned my house, I got this burn. When it aches, I can see the day clearly when it all happened.’
He was arranged as my contact person by a close friend for this specific tour. I was to travel 70 km towards North Kashmir, into a picturesque village, surrounded by the thick conifers on three sides, and in the background, the distant image of mighty Himalayas added to its beauty. It was the last village on the route, fading into the wilderness that went all the way to Pakistan on the other side—only separated by an imaginary line drawn virtually on a map between the two countries.
I had taken a public transport bus while my guide advised against it. It was 8:00 in the morning. The weather was cold. The most common outfit you see on a Kashmiri is a Firan; a plus-size long-sleeved, full-body woollen outfit resembling a raincoat. Most people had retracted their arms within to hold the Kangri; a fire-pot filled with burning charcoal to keep them warm while their sleeves hang lifeless. The 52-seater bus had packed over 100 people, dropping and picking several more on the way. The people hanging at the door and on the window-grills cluttered my view of the outside. The scent of tobacco mixed with burning charcoal, along with a hint of bittersweet fragrance of sweat, made me a little uneasy in my seat. In winter, people will take a bath once a week, usually on Sundays, so that they can sit inside their houses in the warmth of Bukharies.
The reason for my visit was the annual commemoration festival hosted by the local Sikh community to pay respect to over 6000 Sikhs killed during the Kabali raid in 1947.
Harpal was a survivor. ‘I was 15; I was the only one from my village who got out alive.’ He had told me earlier.
‘You see these forests; if you walk by foot across these, you will reach the next village in around 40 minutes. It’s uphill first, and then down for at least 2 kilometres and then up again to Gohina.’ He said, pointing towards the dense jungle.
‘In winters everywhere-here is covered in snow. I’ve seen snow leopards come out to hunt cattle, dogs and sometimes humans. We keep inside post-dark in winters.’
I could hear faint sounds of Kirtan, the Sikh prayers using harmonium and tabla. One kilometre down, the cold wind drained me out. Thinning oxygen made me gasp for breath. Harpal, on the other hand, was full of energy. He was born and raised in the mountains. This was easier than his more vigorous morning stroll. The single-storey mud-and-wood houses with sloping tin-roofs lined the path to the village centre. We headed towards the village centre, which hosted a large playground and the Gurudwara, the Sikh place of worship and our destination for the day. The village spread out from the centre like the spider web and merged immediately with the jungle on two sides, step-farming land cleared out by cutting trees on the third and the entry from where we were coming.
‘Our house used to be here,’ he pointed to an empty space and stood there contemplating. ‘After it was burned down, we made the new house near the gurudwara.’
Many Sikhs with their colourful turbans--red, blue, violet, black--ornated the pathway while walking to the gurudwara. Harpal was wearing a saffron turban.
‘I was inside, hiding on the kaini(storage space under the tin roof) when it happened. They had killed every single man and raped any women they could find.’
He took a long pause, both in his stride and his speech. ‘Some women escaped and jumped into the well to protect themselves.’
‘You know, we heard so much about what Kabali’s did to the surviving women, that my uncle beheaded at least five women, including his daughter and wife, to protect them from falling into the hands of those monsters. He beheaded them. With his own hands.’
‘And when he killed the first one, the other four came forward, presenting their heads to him, asking him to kill them, requesting him to kill them’
An unannounced attack was the modus operandi of Kabalis, who killed around thirty-three thousand Sikhs in 1947 raid to free Kashmir from India and annex it to Pakistan. Village after village fell to their brutalities; men and women jumped into the wells, elders beheaded women to protect them, mothers took their children along to jump into the Jhelum. In Harpal’s village, the Kabalis set on fire the houses after killing everyone. In one of those houses, he was hiding on the roof.
We reached the gurudwara in 10 minutes. I was exhausted, physically from the journey and the walk, mentally and emotionally from Harpal’s ordeal. The Kirtan soothed my nerves. We sat down, closed our eyes and listened to it for hours.
Bupinder Singh works as an Associate Editor for The Universe Journal and as a reader for The Masters Review. His works have been published in The Week, The Delacorte Review, NonBinary Review, The Antihumanist, Whale Road Review, and several others. He is on at Twitter on @fidoic