Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits Read Online Free

brinjals, collard greens, chillies, radish, pumpkin, bottle gourd, corn, cucumber, knol-khol, and mountain mint. There were fruit trees in the garden as well—an apple tree in ours and an apricot tree in theirs. When I was very young, I remember other fruit trees as well, but they had been cut down before a family wedding to accommodate a giant tent. Our tree produced apples of the sour variety and I remember Dedda plucking one or two on sunny afternoons and then slicing them with her pocketknife, and applying salt over them with girlish delight. It must have given her immense joy and I believe it was her idea of sin—the sour juice gurgling in her mouth, tingling her senses, resulting in her gently scratching her cheeks.
    Dedda would get up early and light the fire in her hearth. She always cooked in earthen pots until she became old and her daughter-in-law took over, bringing with her steel and aluminium utensils. Dedda stirred her dishes with a wooden ladle, reciting verses of Lal Ded. She was a magician with everything but I particularly remember her delicious beans and dried turnip, and dried bottle gourd and brinjals.
    Often Tathya, my maternal grandfather, brought guests to the house and they invariably stayed for lunch. Tathya would worry that there might not be enough food and he would steal questioning glances at Dedda. She always responded with a smile. She wouldn’t allow even a peep inside her vessels. No matter how many guests came, her vessels produced food. The guests would go away content, their bellies warm with tasty food. ‘Shobha’s vessels have barkat,’ they said.
    My father had constructed our house next to my maternal uncle’s at Ma’s insistence. Their family had fled Baramulla in north Kashmir during the tribal invasion of 1947. As a toddler, Ma had been carried by her 10-year-old brother on his back for miles to safety.
    In constructing the house, my father had exhausted his entire Provident Fund; whatever little jewellery my mother possessed was also sold to help finance the construction. My father often talked about how he started the first phase of construction when he had only 3,600 rupees in his pocket. The other part of the house was built by two of my father’s brothers. So in one house, we had three homes. The house was built in one of the new suburbs of Srinagar.
    I was born a year after my parents moved to the new house. There were very few houses in our neighbourhood at that time, and ours didn’t even have a boundary wall. Shepherds brought their flocks to graze in the open space around our house. The only theft that ever occurred was when a thief stole a bulb and a pair of old rubber slippers that belonged to my father from our veranda. There was a pair of new rubber slippers there as well, but the thief was considerate enough to leave them behind. As I was growing up, the house was also built up bit by bit. A boundary wall came up and pillars were built in the veranda. Smooth red cement was laid in the corridor and wardrobes and cupboards were built in the rooms. We also owned a black and white Weston television that took several minutes to warm up before coming to life. In those days, all of us would be excited about the feature film telecast on Doordarshan on Sunday evenings. Gradually, other families occupied the locality as well.
    After escaping from Baramulla in 1947, most of my mother’s family had relocated to Habba Kadal, an old locality in Srinagar named after the sixteenth-century Kashmiri poetess Habba Khatoon, who wrote beautiful verses of love and longing. My father’s family came from a village in central Kashmir. My father’s father was a Sanskrit scholar and he also dabbled in astrology to make ends meet. He had borne extreme hardships to raise his family. During a period of severe food scarcity in the 1950s, he had saved a sack of rice from a gang of robbers by jumping into a ditch overgrown with nettle grass. For days after, mudpacks had to be applied to