Our Moon has Blood Clots, by Rahul Pandita
If you were shocked to find senior journalists in India justifying a series of assaults on the Kashmiri Pandit community by factoring in economic disparities and cultural differences, and want to read literature that serves both as a horrifying account of violence against the Pandit community, as well as a polemic against crass and insensitive mainstream media, this is the book for you.
These first-hand accounts of atrocities against the Kashmiri Pandit community leave you shaken; you grow to further despise and distrust the mainstream jargon about Kashmir that only focuses on brutality by the Indian state and the greatness of the separatist movement.
Pandita is generous with his writing; he starts off with a detailed history of Kashmir and Kashmiri Pandits, going as far back as the fourteenth century. You learn a lot about their customs, their poetry, their tales of Kashmiri life, as well as the multitudes of times the community has been forced out of their land, out of their homes, their jobs and even their faith, by invaders and rulers alike.
He doesn’t jump ahead to the day of his leaving his home; you’re shocked to find the mounting hate against the Pandit community by local Muslims, friends of the family, little boys disillusioned by tales of Azadi and taught to shoot and kill by crossing the border over to Pakistan.
Between the inhumanity and the penury of the Pandit refugees, trying to forge ahead and re-start their lives in large Indian cities, you find melancholic tales of growing up in Kashmir, eating apples and apricots, the festivity of Shivratri and the strong connection the people have to their land, its rivers, its temples, its mountains.
This is very unlike the accounts of Holocaust survivors; tales of survivors may echo in your mind as you turn every page that tells perhaps stories of poverty, or of killings witnessed by children, or of milkmen threatening the end of the Pandit community, or of women raped and being carted off to be sold in Pakistan, or of the inaction by the Indian state, or how murderers are left scot-free because of the disinterest of prosecutors to convict them.
The reader will then decide that it isn’t anything like the Holocaust after all; there have been no reparations, not an ounce of justice for the Pandits.
I can only imagine the scars of the Pandit community if I myself, just a reader, an observer, find it hard to talk about.
A few excerpts from the book:
"They began to cut the tomatoes into half and give them away. I thought I was hallucinating. Or maybe this was the effect of the hot loo wind that, the inhabitants of this city maintained, could do your head in. I remembered our kitchen garden back home in Srinagar, and all the tomatoes I had wasted, plucking them before they could ripen and hitting them for sixes with my willow bat. And now in my hands, somebody had thrust half a tomato."
“I remember the day when I realized I had no memory of her voice. That morning I had been reading the newspapers like I did everyday. I would read a report or two, and Ma would point out advertisements of houses for sale. There were many of them.”
"Then Father made sure the main door was locked so if somebody were to check, he would think the house was vacant, like every other house in the locality. Father instructed us not to switch on any lights and to keep the curtains drawn across the windows. He also urged us to speak in hushed tones."
"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..."
“...the fact is that the prosecution has shown total disinterest in arguing the case, which is in complete violation of Article 21 of the Constitution.”
"“Years later, a senior commander of the terrorist outfit Hizbul Mujahideen shared Girja Tiku’s story with a Bandipora resident. The two had been discussing the early days of militancy in the Valley, and the conversation veered towards the Pandits, and then to the Tiku family. Girja, he said, had been abducted and immediately blindfolded. Four men had taken turns to rape her in a moving taxi. As they were conversing with each other, Girja recognized the voice of one of the men who went by the name Aziz. ‘Aziza, chhetey chukha? Aziz, are you here as well?’ she asked. Aziz got worried. He knew that Girja had recognized him. So, in a final act of barbarism, they took her to a wood-processing unit and cut her alive on a mechanical saw. This is what the seekers of freedom were doing to the religious minority.”"
Edit: Feb 16, 2021 : Rahul Pandita put up my review of this book on his Instagram story!
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