“I had a dream last night, a scary dream…”
“Is it? What was it? Tell me.” My voice had a touch of friendly assurance.
“Er…It was a beautiful valley…So beautiful that the slopes of the mountain ranges rose from it like the huge walls of an unending dancing hall in a king’s palace…So very beautiful that the trees created reflections on the land itself…So utterly beautiful that the setting sun at every dusk bent down really low to gently touch the rooftops of the houses in the valley…But then…”
“But then? Then what happened? Why were you scared?” I asked casually while I tried to open a packet of wheat puff with one hand as I held the phone in the other.
“Then…Then this man, this young man…He began running. Behind him was a police jeep. They were firing at him. A bullet bounced on his shoulder. He ran through lanes and by-lanes. The jeep kept chasing him.”
I put down the packet and concentrated. “Do you…Could you recognize the man? The man who was running?”
“Ye…Yes…Not specifically…He was like a friend. He had been inspired by the life of Jamal Mir Wani.”
I adjusted my glasses and with a quick look around, asked him, “Are you referring to the ongoing struggle there? The war? The militants and the…I mean, the freedom fighters and the government?”
He did not give a direct reply to my naïve and insensitive question and continued with his narration of last night’s memory. As always, he was not too articulate or accurate in his choice of words.
“He disappeared into a jungle after some time. The jeep went away. He lived for years in the jungle. He never came out. How he survived, what he ate, where he slept, we don’t know anything. His family thought he had been killed. There was no news of him. Then one day it seemed things have changed.
He had a good opportunity to come out now and begin his life again. He stepped out after years, after five years maybe. And then…And then as soon as he came out, there was a police crackdown going on in the nearby villages. They saw him and recognized him, and before he could hide or hit back, they killed him with two gunshots.”
As silence sets in when all machines in a busy factory shut down, so also, save the sound of our breath, there was perfect silence between us through our hand-held phones.
I took a deep breath.
We have had conversations over phone often, and occasionally we did interact about the situation back at his place. But we had never exactly talked about something so specific as what he had to tell me on that day.
Afar I could see a group of junior students making merry as they made their way into the canteen. One with an expression of mock anger and in the midst of issuing dire threats was chasing another who pretended to look very scared, presumably because the latter had been teasing the former. Others were pushing each other in laughter. Time for everyone to relax, the day’s work over for everyone.
In a world without bullets and hot pursuits, how we find reasons to invent fear!
I had spent many afternoons in similar frolic when my old group of friends had been here during our days of graduation, before most of them moved out to different places to pursue their career decisions. Three of them went to Delhi, one to Pune, and he, my present companion on the phone, Tausif Butt, a Kashmiri, went back to Kashmir, to his home, to his home in a war-zone.
Clearing my throat and breaking the ticking silence, I said, “Er, did you tell me a dream…? Or…Or an incident?”
“Both. Here incidents replay in our dreams, through our fears, hopes, and sorrows.”
I gathered myself for a brief speech. “See, Tausif, don’t be scared. Don’t be disheartened. You believe you are fighting for a just cause, right? So keep hope, keep faith. Something will emerge out of the present situation.” Then, to lighten up his mood, I added with a tinkling smile, “You are so proud of your freedom fighters, aren’t you? They have to go through a lot of pain, a lot of struggle. Don’t feel scared.”
Strangely, since the first day I had always felt responsible towards him, as though it was my obligation to nurture his mind, to protect his emotions, to give him a shelter.
That is somewhat surprising because he and I had been batch-mates in college and we have always been friends since that rainy day we had met on the dark corridor which went down to the students’ common room. Such was my affection for him that our common friends used to often remark in astonishment, “You interact with him as though he is your son!”
I myself had been surprised initially when I had found myself accommodating his childish innocence beyond acceptable limits.
Maybe because he carried a fractured soul within, perhaps because his face perpetually looked troubled, even when he smiled, or maybe due to the fact that I spotted a sea of melancholy whenever I looked into his eyes.
Or it could also be because he had always been a trifle indecisive and hesitant even when he would be with us, his friends. So when all of us would be chatting away, shifting from topic to topic like unruly waves of a turbulent sea, he would, I had noticed, look away for some seconds as though he was disinterested, perhaps search for the right words and expressions, try to check the grammar in his mind, and only then speak. At such times I would be his only listener, for the others had finished what they had to say and had scarce little time to wait to hear what he had to say.
Or maybe because one afternoon as were heading home, our common friend Prabhat had signalled to me with his eyes and as I had come over to his side, Prabhat had whispered in my ear, “Don’t get so friendly with him. He is a Kashmiri Muslim. You never know what he is up to. Keep a distance.”
“He is a Kashmiri Muslim! So? What will he be up to?” I had felt very indignant. “And…And, he never talks about the political situation there. Have you ever heard him talk about the militants and the army and all that? No! So?”
Prabhat had nodded his head on both sides and lightly slapping on my elbow had said, “Still. You can never trust them completely. I am telling you for your own benefit. Why do you have to send him text messages? And click pictures with him?”
I had looked at him in disbelief. Then after some thought I had asked, “Is that the thought on your minds when you all avoid going out with him? Is that why you never quite regard him as a friend, fully and completely?” In anger my eyes had tears.
Prabhat had looked at me with frustration and had then walked away.
Thereafter in our group of friends I had made it a point to especially include Tausif into every discussion, every plan, every group activity. I would cast a quick glance at Prabhat, or at times at Sneha who I came to believe shared Prabhat’s misgivings, and be by his side, assist him at every point of difficulty, ask him over at home for lunch, celebrate his birthdays in a very special way, provide him with the right words and idioms when he spoke, support his choice of canteen food, vote for his preference of Café Latte as a better beverage than everyone else’s pleas for lemon tea, offer things to him before all others, in short establish a public spectacle of our friendship.
His limping wounded existence sought succour in me, and I, without holding myself back, poured out my tenderness towards him.
A few weeks after Tausif and I had this conversation over phone, one of my cousin’s assignment as a young photo-journalist matured. She was to visit Jammu for a week to click some prized photographs of the place amidst the dusty dreary days of autumn, before the mist and freeze of winter set in completely.
“Wait, I’ll get you connected to a close friend of mine. He will come handy if you need any help.” I said confidently as I took my phone out to call Tausif.
The call was not received.
“Ummm…I shall talk to him and let you know. He will arrange for a car there.”
Later that evening I called him again. This time too no human voice appeared. The unfazed recorded message informed me, just as it would have informed a thousand others, that the person is not available to take the call.
Is he unwell? I wondered.
For the next two days I did not remember to call Tausif.
On the third day I called him again. The same recorded voice said that his phone was switched off.
I kept calling for the entire next week. The recorded voice did not tire in informing me the same way every time.
Rummaging through my memory cells I recalled an aunt of his, a distant relation, a kind of a half-relation, so to say, who used to stay somewhere in central Calcutta.
One Adeeba…I could not recall her surname…In a flat at Aafreen Towers…He had stayed for a weekend there once…The view of the congested city, he had told me later in college, from the eighth floor…The incessant flow of vehicles and the anxious, tired, busy feet of a thousand pedestrians negotiating the traffic down there…Like countless clockwork mice…A laterally spread sheet of mindless struggle for survival…Or something of that kind that he had said…About people living and dying for no reason, useless lives and pointless deaths…I had asked him a bit surprised, why do you say ‘useless’? Everyone’s life is important for one’s own self and for people around him. He had not replied.
I set out after lunch that Sunday.
I would have to look for Adeeba, a middle aged woman must be, on the eighth floor of one of the buildings within the Aafreen Towers.
After two completely misdirected attempts at two flats in the same building, the third attempt in another building seemed to work.
The middle aged man who opened the door ran his hand over his dyed beard and repeated after my initial enquiry, “Adeeba…Yes, yes, Adeeba…You are looking for Tausif Butt?”
Seemingly on the verge of getting the information that I was looking for, I became quite impatient now.
“Yes, Tausif…Is he your nephew? I am looking for him. I have been calling for the last two weeks. Has he changed his number? Why is his phone always switched off?”
The man’s kohl-lined eyes narrowed to the point of becoming straight lines almost. I thought he was about to say something but he did not. Impatiently I asked, “Do you know where Tausif is? Has his number changed? We used to talk frequently on phone. What has happened to him now? Why is he keeping his phone off? Is he unwell? Hospitalized?” I thought of his frail physical structure and his bouts of indigestion while in Calcutta. My expression shifted between impatience and concern.
Taking time to pull up his pyjamas to his waist, the man finally said with a slight grin, “Are you his girlfriend?”
My eyes shot out bullets of fire at his query.
“Why? I can’t ask if I am not his girlfriend? Only girlfriends are allowed to look for people suddenly gone missing? I am not his girlfriend! So?” Taking a quick breath I added, “What has my status got to do with where he is? And, in any case, why don’t you just let me speak to his aunt?” I turned my face away and faced him again in an instant. “Who are you, by the way, that you want to know who I am!” I shrugged, with the certainty of my logic sprayed on his face.
“His aunt isn’t here. And I don’t know where he is. Try calling him. Maybe he doesn’t want to talk to you.” His voice was disinterested and casual.
I gave him a hard look for some seconds. I wondered if he was a plain idiot or a calculated evil man. His beard appeared like the feathers of a hen. He stroked the hen again. Unable to think of anything more to say, I slowly turned away from the door. As soon as I started climbing down the stairs I think I heard a disgusting laughter from behind me and within a second the door shut with a bang.
For a couple of months after that I repeatedly called Tausif. The ‘switched off’ number soon became ‘this number does not exist’. Sad, worried and puzzled, I went about my usual work every day.
In the meantime my cousin had returned from her assignment. One day over coffee she showed me some of her best clicks. “These will go into the coffee-table book. This one, see, the sunset, I have a few more sunsets, here they are…And look at this one! See how the light travels through the cobweb!”
“Aha! This is such a beauty!” I poured over the photograph. Then as I looked very closely I saw a tiny insect trapped inside its lacy net. “This is a spider’s web actually! See! The spider has got a prey in here! And look at its shadow on the table!” Looking up at my cousin with pride and affection I said, “You have captured it beautifully, dear. I think this is your best.”
She nodded in agreement and as she was putting her things inside her backpack she asked, “What happened to that friend of yours? Did you get to talk to him? You had said he wasn’t taking the call.”
“No. I didn’t get to talk to him.” I said very briefly.
That evening I called the number one more time, the last time. It did not exist. It meant, he does not exist anymore. All technology-dependent relationships fuse us with our gadgets, I thought. He did not exist…I uncomfortably resigned myself to this fact.
“Tausif Butt? I…I am not sure…I am not very sure…In college I had many friends…”
“Of the many friends Tausif Butt was your close friend, with whom you clicked photos often, went out to cafes, sent text messages, isn’t it?”
I scratched the back of my ear once. “Well, now that you say…Yes, I think I had a friend by that name…”
“Recall, Madam. Recall properly.”
Feeling quite troubled deep inside I asked as nonchalantly as possible, “Anyway, what is the issue? Why have you come to look for me? Why do you need to know who my friend was?” I shrugged mildly.
The officer took out a pen and handed it to his companion and the latter started ticking and crossing entries on sheets of paper inside a file.
Neither of them answered me or even seemed to hear what I had to ask.
“Why have you come looking for me, officer?”
“Why have I come looking for you! You had also gone looking for him, didn’t you? To the Aafreen Towers?” His face looked like that of a predator.
I felt an invisible net draping me.
“Er…Will you please tell me what exactly is going on here?” I softened my voice.
“Tausif Butt. Your friend. A militant, a Kashmiri terrorist. The mastermind behind the attack on the Armed Forces High Command two weeks ago. As many as ten anti-terror officers were killed.” After a slight pause he added in a tone of disrespect, “Don’t you read the news? Did your friend not call you either, to inform you about his success?”
I suddenly thought of the coffee-table book.
The ever-appealing landscape, the forever-inviting paradise, I thought of the soft rays of the sun forming patterns on the walls, on the ground, on tables, and of lacy intricate webs.
Clearing my throat and mentally rehearsing my words I took time to say, “I haven’t been in touch with him in the last one year. He was just one of my friends in college. He left after finishing college. Since then we have not been in touch. At all.”
“Are you sure you haven’t heard from him since he finished college?”
“I am absolutely sure.” I held up my chin.
The officer looked at me sharply.
“We have with ourselves telephone conversations between the two of you. Conversations in which you encourage him to join the militancy, in which you show support to militancy and refer to it as they do, as a freedom struggle. Do you want me to give you the dates and the times? It’s all within the last one year.”
I threw up my hands in the air.
“This is crazy! He was my friend! I might have spoken to him once or twice after he left college. Is that a crime?”
“Asking him to join the militant movement is also justified, is it, Madam? Lending support to the movement, excusable, right? A rubbish ideology that justifies a programme of endless killing of all Indian government personnel? Why? Because Kashmir is not a part of India! So it is okay to kill people who have a duty to oppose your ideology!? Great!” His eyes were angry but his voice remained controlled.
“I never did such a thing! When…When did I tell him to join? What support did I show?”
The officer turned to look at his companion and addressed him, “Dwivedi, bring the recorder out. Since she refuses to admit…switch it on…”
Dwivedi followed his instructions and brought out a sophisticated looking tiny gadget, a kind I had never seen anywhere before. With a slight push somewhere at its side, he switched it on. A red light appeared at the top left corner. A faint metallic noise started coming from it. I waited with a look of impatience and dread both. Then gradually, first a little indistinctly and then quite clearly, my voice, our voices in fact, mine and Tausif’s spoke out of it.
In the next few minutes, or it may have only been some seconds, for I could not keep track of time, as the officer kept looking at me with narrow menacing eyes, menacing yet so victorious in his act, his lips twitched at the sides with a smile of utter satisfaction, as Dwivedi also concentrated his gaze on me, first a little hesitantly and then, perhaps emboldened by his more authoritative senior companion, fully and sarcastically, I felt like a naked person sitting in front of the two of them, as exposed as a long stretch of a highway through an arid desert zone.
Bit by bit, conversations after conversations were replayed in our drawing room that afternoon. Things that I did not even remember saying, expressions that I had only exceptionally used, a comment about the crackdown by troops on militants that was completely unnecessary, a query about the exact location of his home that was so very irrelevant, my private giggles, my very private voice modulations, all my words, and the pauses in between them were all drawn out of a large forgotten rusty trunk, the key to whose lock I had never even known was so carefully and perfectly preserved.
“Brave men, right? Difficult lives, isn’t it? A lot of struggle for a just cause, right, Madam? And they deserve so much respect from us! Such a lot of respect that you keep locating their villages and towns on Google maps! To pay homage to the martyrs, right?”
My eyelids felt heavy.
Struggling for appropriate words I could merely manage a single word, “Officer…”
He looked at me inquisitively.
“Officer…It wasn’t like that…I didn’t know he would do this…He had never been like a militant…He had always been innocent, very timid, completely innocent…I was just trying to trace his home because I could not get in touch with him on phone…”
“Timid! Yes! They are all like that until they get radicalized. Fully brainwashed. And then they wash other peoples’ brains. Like he did to you.”
“No, no!” I protested with all my might. “It’s not that. I am not a supporter of the militancy. He isn’t…I mean, I didn’t know he would become one…We were just friends in college. We never had such discussions…I mean, nothing serious or involved…Those were just general conversations. Officer, believe me! We didn’t talk about these things with a purpose to encourage or support…”
The men were already packing their things up. They hardly heard me.
“Officer!”
He looked at me once again. “Yes?”
“Believe me, officer. It isn’t like what it appears.”
“The rest of our team will discern that. What it appears like and what it actually is.” Turning towards Dwivedi he issued an instruction which I did not comprehend. Dwivedi brought out his phone to check something.
“Er, officer…Where is he now? Where is Tausif now?” I muttered.
“Hmmm. Yes! We know you haven’t been in touch with him for quite some time now. You will come to know soon. Don’t worry. Anyway, you will have to accompany us to our office now. Please get ready fast. Worldwide web, Madam! It’s like a huge net. Anyway, get ready fast please. We shall be waiting downstairs.”
As they were stepping out of our flat, I stood motionless.
Dwivedi had already begun going down the stairs. This man, the officer, suddenly stopped on his way out and bent down over our wall cabinet. My eyes followed him to see what had drawn his attention.
“Lovely photos! Where from? Jammu and Kashmir? Your interest in the region is truly remarkable, I see! What are these books called…? I keep forgetting … Centre-table books, is it?”
Shrutidhora P Mohor (born 1979) has been listed in several competitions like Bristol Short Story Prize, Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, the Bath Flash Fiction Award, the Retreat West competitions, the Retreat West Annual Prize for short story 2022, the Winter 2022 Reflex Fiction competition, Flash 500. Her writings have been nominated for Best Micro fictions 2023 and the Pushcart Prize 2024. A collection of short stories titled A Moon-Measure of All Things (Alien Buddha Press, February 2025) is her latest publication.