Our village stood on the river Sandren.Very early that morning father
woke us up and we followed him. I had always followed my brother, who
had always loved following him. Ajaz, who is three years elder to me,
was and perhaps continues to be my father's most-loved child. As we
followed his quick focused steps along the grassy bank, our hazy eyes
opened with the cold dew touching our feet. We could see a clean blue
towel wrapped over his strong shoulders. As we vied to keep pace with
him, the scent of white Lux soap in a pink soap-case in his right
hand, made us to take soft pulls with our noses and we drew joyous
smiles at each other.

A burgeoning canopy of willows overhung and the water
coming down from the spring Vaernag up above in the mountains ran
smoothly over brown slimy round stones. The sun was yet to come out
and the growing morning light mixed with the biosterous twitter of birds.
In the serene sky a few fluffy clouds appeared to move. By now we
understood that our father wanted us to take a fresh river bathe.

He put off his clothes and then only in cotton underwear
which covered him from near below the naval to near above his knees,
he went to take a dip. This part of river was deeper and we could see
water leveling him up to the nipples on his chest. I was a bit scared.
My nanny has already told me many stories of mongoose and other
water-monsters and as I now understand, to keep me away from the
potential drowning in the river. I was assured of my young father's
strength. He was stronger than my brother and my brother of course
stronger than me. After some playful dips, my father applied scrubs of
soap over the wet bony Ajaz and the white foam over his
well-proportioned body formed into points and dripped down from the
tips of his pink earlobes.Ajaz joined him and they began to swim
gently. I wanted to join them because I was fascinated by my father
joining us which was very unusual in Kashmiri society. But the
interplay between my father and brother and the jolly sounds of splash
made me happy. At home I had never felt so thrilled about our
relationship which was restricted to by the conventions of a joint
family. It was like my two fathers playing in joy and a being watched
by their small appendage. Ajaz unbuttoned my shirt and helped me to
unwind the drawstring of my trousers and I also took dips and swam
with them clutching their shoulders. As the sun peered with its first
glitters from above the eastern Korakarom mountains, father climbed up
the slightly raised stony bank. He would always leave early to our
saw-mill around the near-by bus-stop on the highway, not far from our
home. He had been one of the most successful businessmen around.

He has told us to go to our saw-mill after the Friday
prayers. We were very exited about the shops in the central market,
Lal Chowk, of our hometown Anantnag, where he was taking us. Earlier
he has taken us many times there and brought us fashionable clothes
from the new trendy shops. He would always emphasize on cleanliness
and wearing the best clothes available in the market. He would tell us
to live an upright life and his hard work in managing his own business
exemplified how to achieve that. Though he would always dress in
kameez and shalwar, he would occasionally bring us stuff for coats.
Ajaz who was attending an Indian army school in the nearby cantonments
of Khanabal, would always have to be dressed immaculately like a
little prince before he would leave for school with our cousin brother
Aashiq. After being bathed and dressed in glistening white shirt and
blue stockings by father,they would have have a proper milk and egg
breakfast and will leave very early with their red ties hanging about
their necks,on a tonga.

From the very beginning Ajaz was brighter, healthier,
smarter than me. But unlike my elder sister Nusrat,who was my mother's
favourite and elder to Ajaz by three years , I never was able to see
all that by making any comparisons with myself.I felt bright, smart
and healthy by walking beside him. If my father was Ajaz's father,
Ajaz was my father besides our father.I hardly existed beyond them.
Any knowledge of myself realized beyond their realm of existence and
influence was painful and terrifying.

But while walking through the street of Lal Chowk where in
every grubby nook a bunker had sprung, inside sadly-uniformed
ghostlike men from India, my father would stretch two fingers of his
right hand and I would hold them. i would relish them taking in my
hand and while Ajaz holding my hand from the other side, we would
hurry past the street where most of the grenade attacks had been
performed.I often thought of the young boys which were rumored to
throw them. Just within a few seconds you throw a-big-pear-like iron
ball and kill a dozen of them. I would blush because I thought my
fathers could even see what I thought. I would feel acute pain raising
in my chest and be terrified with myself within a few moments.

The sight of the new clothes, however,would bring me back. The
shop with "ready-made clothes"was on the ground floor with a
glass-front and a few attendants.It stood in the lane which was less
punctuated by the bunkers.In the backdrop stood a pine-covered hill
with a clear spring gushing out of its lap.After father had taken his
own things, my brother would point to some sporty dress and smile at
my father.The shopkeeper knowing his business well would pack it.Then
I would look at the smaller version of the same dress and smile at
Ajaz who inturn would smile at my father and the attendant following
the course of smiles would smile a businessman's smile and with a
triumphant move of his arm pack it for us.

Some years later, one sunny day while Ajaz had been away
playing cricket, Aashiq came running to our home and told us that a
Sikh Indian trooper from Punjab, has slapped father around the busy
market near the bus-stop. I was surprised not be shocked at all. My
eldest brother, Showkat, who was graduating from the local college,
then a rebel at home and a rebel outside, burned with anger and
started abusing himself. My mother was thrown into ambivalent silence.
Perhaps she was unable to decide whether she should feel happy because
last night like many other nights, she had an argument with my father.
But I continued not to be shocked at all.

When I went to our saw-mills I saw father.His cheek was not
red.He was busy in instructing the labourers while I looked at his
face. His white kameez and shalwar were not spoiled. Under his round
skull-cap his graying hair shone while the saw-dust rose amid tall
stacks of many-sized logs stretching over a compound about two hundred
yards wide. Father was still the same.The one who would always go to
negotiate with the officers of the Indian army if they handpicked any
boy from our village.Father, whom I respected because he was my father
and whom many others around respected though he wasn't their father.

I faintly remember what the Sikh soldier looked like whom he
argued with because he passed unruly comments to the women coming back
with vegetable-laden wicker baskets from the shrubberies across the
highway. That he was tall like a camel and an untended quiffs of beard
grew over his swarthy face with wine-bleared eyes, as parodied in the
joke which the gossip-makers had about him.I was my father's decorous
son, his son was also my father. It was difficult to figure out who I
was beyond them. I didn't remember any shock or anger welling up in me
against the Indian soldier.

But last summer after spending many years in India, when I
returned home I found my father slightly unwell .Sixty years old
father still trying to maintain the life-long schedule of going to his
saw-mill early in the morning and coming back late in the evening .But
one day when his leg-and-joint ache returned too severely ,I
accompanied him to a doctor in the oldest part of the town, Cheeni
Chowk. Earlier in the night It has rained, the day ushered into a
fresh August morning. We went in our old car and the driver who is a
good friend and studied with me in the childhood told me about how
much my father cares about me while I am away. The shops were closed
as a sign of unity with the peaceful protests that were going on in
the northern parts of the Valley Kashmir. The killing spree which the
Indian troopers indulged into against the harmonious almost
revolutionary waves of protestation in Kashmir, seemed to drive many
more people into hopelessness and disease. In Anantnag especially as
reported by one of the Indian magazine, the mass consumption of
medicine and the consequent increase and drug addiction has increased
massively in the last one decade.The violence which has seeped deep
into society has left it vulnerable to appropriation by a certain
business class which proliferated on the trade of medicine. As we sat
in a muddy dark room with medieval patterns of woodwork diminishing on
its worn-out wooden windows, one could almost touch the ghoulish
hangover of the grief encircling the broken patients thronging the
room. The flow of pain seemed seamlessly permanent while the number of
pines on the nearby hill has conspicuously thinned out and the spring
oozing forth from its lap made a swish of unnoticeable silence.

My father is old and this is not only the worry that
troubles him but also why his sons have opted not to be the inheritors
of the trade which he practiced and perfected his whole life. While we
went back with the a polythene full of prescribed medicine from the
doctor, who hardly consults anybody but in his own speedy fashion
blesses people with a touch of stethoscope and a look across the eyes
and body, we were stopped at many places. The northern valley and
Srinagar,the summer capital, was under curfew and many innocent boys
like me were being killed everyday.The army man who stopped us growled
at my father and me and my driver friend turned furious. But before
we could say anything they beckoned us with their fully loaded guns
to go away.

Back home I saw Ajaz ,who is now researcher of Chinese
Economy at University of Kashmir. He has came back after I called him
up telling him about his father. We hugged after a long long time and
surrounded our father.My brother has many times told me about the
Quran as being the inexhaustible and unmistakable system of thought
and Islam as the only socio-political system which could redeem man.
But taking a somewhat different route of life from him, over the years
I spent in many North Indian universities, has permanently distanced
me away from them. With my own eyes, in the depths of nostalgia and
nationlessness, I have seen even the last remnants of my fathers dying
inside me. Simplistically this might mean the birth of myself as a
negative individual and in my case a permanent recourse to literature
as a source of solace and alternative possibilities to one's
historical and eternal problems. But I know all the readers are my
friends. They won't tell my fathers that I died a painful death to
kill them while I was being born. But that never meant the intensity
with which I love them has died. My love is still more intense and
still live in me through it .