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

his body to provide him relief. Every morning, even in the harshest winter, he would wake up in the ambrosial hours and walk to the shrine of our family goddess and recite the Durgasaptashati .
    Everything in my grandfather’s house was done with extreme care, as per Hindu tradition. Early in the morning, grandmother would clean her kitchen, applying a paste of mud and dried straw over its walls for purification. No onions or garlic were allowed. Often, my grandfather would invite home the sadhus and ascetics and scholars who came to the Kshir Bhawani shrine from all over India. Some were believed to have supreme yogic powers—one of them, it was said, could pull out his intestines from his mouth, wash them and push them back in. Grandfather was particularly fond of an ascetic from Bengal who visited the Valley in the summer. He would sit on a straw mat, speak very little, and would only drink a glass of sugarless milk. I have faint memories of him talking to me. One summer he did not return and we never saw him again.
    Grandmother was betrothed to Grandfather at the age of thirteen. She would remember those days with a faint smile on her lips, of how difficult it was to cope with her father-in-law, who was a widower and prone to opium-induced aggression, and would come home late in the night and demand a curry of dried fish spicy enough to set the rice afire.
    In Father’s village, many things could be obtained through the barter system. The family grew paddy and kept some cows as well. Often, fishermen, plying their shikaras along the small river that flowed past the house, would give fish in exchange for rice. Food was easy to come by in villages. But in the city, it was harder. After finishing school, Father had to stay with his aunt in Srinagar to attend college. It was difficult to feed an extra person. Often, my father said, he would buy a sesame bagel from the baker, moisten it with water and eat it for lunch.
    In those days the results of the Board Exams would be declared on the radio. The day Father’s higher secondary exam results were to be declared, he sat glued to it. But they wouldn’t announce his name. Distraught, he thought he had failed. But it turned out to be a mistake. Afterwards, at his father’s insistence, my father joined government service and worked with the irrigation department.
    It was in the city that my parents met and later got married. Around that time, there was tension in the Valley. Riots had broken out over an episode of a Pandit girl marrying a Muslim boy. The Pandits had risen in a rare gesture and launched an agitation. On the day my parents got married, curfew had been declared in some parts of the Valley.
    After the wedding ceremony, the newly-wed couple arrived at my father’s village in a tonga. It had rained earlier, and there was muddy slush all around, and heaps of dried straw had to be put on the road to enable the bride from the city to walk without getting her shoes soiled. For years my mother would taunt Father about that particular evening.
    Ma was hard-working. She would often carry dirty utensils in sub-zero temperatures to wash them under a tap in a corner of the street in Habba Kadal where she lived with her parents before marriage. She was also known to have climbed up on the tin roof of their house wearing her brother’s Duckback gumboots to shovel down the snow lest the roof collapsed under its weight—a feat that only the most courageous men could achieve. It was this spirit that led her to start working right after completing her education, choosing not to be a housewife. She served in the state health department.
    One of my earliest memories is of her wearing a red sweater with a floral pattern. It was much later that I came to know it was a gift from my father, who had ordered it from Amritsar through a visiting cousin. For years, I think, the image of India for an ordinary Kashmiri was restricted to Punjab—to Amritsar and Ludhiana. Kashmiris went to