Free Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits by Rahul Pandita

gastroenterologist who recommended an injection for immediate relief. The injection caused a bad reaction—severe rashes broke out on his body and his speech turned incoherent.
    It was always at such adverse moments that Ma would turn into a Joan of Arc. She was normally apprehensive. She didn’t let me go for school picnics to the Aharbal waterfall for fear that someone might push me into it. During winters, when we sometimes accompanied Father on his official trips to Jammu, she would switch on her pencil torch the moment the bus entered the Jawahar tunnel, the only connection between the Kashmir Valley and the rest of India. During a storm she would close all the doors and windows and sit frightened in one corner, waiting for it to end. And if it lasted for long, she would look at Father and ask, ‘Do you think this will end?’
    Father would assure her a few times, but she would keep repeating her question till it irritated father.
    ‘No, this is going to last till Doomsday.’
    That day, she somehow gathered her nerves and accompanied Father to the bod aspatal (main hospital) in an autorickshaw.
    The government hospital was crowded, and even in the emergency ward, it was difficult to find a doctor to attend to my father. As Ma ran from one counter to another, a young doctor appeared. There was a mark on his forehead, the result of offering namaz five times a day as is required of pious Muslims. Ma recalled later how the doctor had looked at Father and immediately started his examination. And at that moment Father had vomited. It was so severe, Ma recalls, that it even filled the doctor’s shoes. But not once did he flinch. He had continued to treat my father.
    A day later, Father was back home, although it took him a couple of weeks to recover fully.
    Life went on as usual. But around this time, something had begun to change. It was in the air, something you couldn’t see, but could feel and smell.
    Ma returned home one evening from office and she looked disconsolate. She entered slowly and set down her handbag. She asked my sister to get her some water. Father had come home early that day.
    ‘Are you unwell?’ he asked her.
    She didn’t speak for a moment or two. And then she narrated what she had witnessed. In the bus on her way home, a man had helped an old Pandit lady disembark from the bus. Another woman, who was a Muslim, lashed out at the man, reminding him that the woman he helped was a Pandit and that she should have instead been kicked out of the bus. What Ma witnessed that day in the bus, we considered an aberration.
    Rehman, meanwhile, was acting strange at times. I remember we were getting our attic renovated and he took a dig at us.
    ‘Why are you wasting your money like this?’ he said as he poured milk from his can. ‘Tomorrow, if not today, this house will belong to us.’ As usual Ma dismissed his talk.
    Ravi had gone on a plant-collection trip to the Lolab Valley along the Line of Control, with his department colleagues, including one of his best friends Irshad. In the forest they were waylaid by armed men who asked if there were any Hindus in their group. Ravi was the only one and the men were told that there were none. When they asked for their names, Ravi used a fake name that identified him as a Muslim. But, even then, we still didn’t realize what was to come to pass.
    On July 31, 1988, two low-intensity bomb blasts rocked Srinagar. One bomb had been planted outside the central telephone exchange while the other was laid outside the golf course. These were followed by other blasts. They were considered to be the handiwork of terrorists from Punjab who sneaked into Kashmir to escape the police in their area.
    An uncle returned after praying at the Shankaracharya temple. ‘I saw a group of men racing up and down the stairs,’ he said. The same thing was happening at Hari Parbat. On the bypass road, near our house, even I saw hordes of men doing physical exercises. This had never