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

happened before. It was only later that we realized that some of these men had been among those who had crossed over the border to Pakistan to receive arms training, and this had been a part of their fitness regimen.
    A bomb blast in Srinagar claimed the first Pandit casualty in March 1989. Prabhawati of Chadoora tehsil was killed in a blast on Hari Singh Street on March 14. That month, I saw Latif one day. I was standing with Father at the vegetable shop when he passed by holding a corner of a green cloth which was held on the other corners by three others. He didn’t see us. He was collecting funds, he said, for the building of a mosque.
    I looked at him. He looked haggard, his skin was rugged and his beard thicker. It was then that his eyes fell on me and he smiled. He didn’t look at Father. I didn’t feel right in my heart.
    The party walked on, holding their cloth.

    It was from a neighbour that we heard the first rumours. He had gone to the ration shop to get sugar when he overheard a man exclaiming—‘Inshallah, next ration we will buy in Islamabad!’
    It was around this time that bus conductors in Lal Chowk could be heard shouting— Sopore, Hand’wor, Upore . Sopore and Handwara were border towns while Upore means across. Across the Line of Control. It was meant as an enticement for the youth to cross over the border for arms training, to launch a jihad against India.
    On a hill in the Badami Bagh cantonment, someone had painted ‘JKLF’. One could see it from a distance. It stood for Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. It was rumoured to be an organization of young men who had crossed over the border to receive arms training.
    At school we heard the word ‘mujahid’ for the first time. We knew this word. We had heard it on TV, accompanied by images of men in Afghanistan firing rockets from their shoulders. But in the context of Kashmir, it seemed out of place. What were mujahids to do in Kashmir?
    On June 23, 1989, pamphlets were distributed in Srinagar. It was an ultimatum to Muslim women, by an organization that called itself Hazb-i-Islami, to comply with ‘Islamic’ standards within two days or face ‘action’. Pandit women were asked to put a tilak on their foreheads for identification.
    On September 2, the 300-year-old Baba Reshi shrine was gutted in a fire under mysterious circumstances. On the same morning, a wireless operator of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), was shot in our neighbourhood.
    On the afternoon of September 14, I was playing cricket in the school grounds. My side won the match, and I was about to treat myself to an orange lolly with my pocket money when I felt someone’s hand on my shoulder. I turned back and saw Father standing there. He smiled.
    ‘Go and get your bag, we have to go home,’ he said.
    I thought something terrible had happened at home. ‘Why, what happened?’ I asked.
    ‘Someone has been shot in Habba Kadal. The situation will turn worse. So we need to head home.’
    That was when the first Pandit fell to bullets. Some armed men had entered the house of the political activist Tika Lal Taploo and shot him dead.
    The next day, Father did not let me go to school. We were told that Taploo’s funeral procession was pelted with stones. But barring that, nothing more untoward happened immediately after his death. I went back to school two days later. During the Hindi class, when the Muslim boys would be away for Urdu class, the Pandit teacher got an opportunity to discuss the killing with us. ‘Times are beginning to get tough,’ she said. ‘That is why it is important for all of you to study with renewed vigour.’
    In its preliminary investigation, the state police believed that Taploo’s killing did not fit the pattern emerging from the activities of Kashmiri militants.
    Twelve days after Taploo’s death, the then chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, performed a small piece of classical dance along with dancer Yamini Krishnamurthy during a cultural