Conversations with a Jehadi

They call me a schizophrenic. They can’t hear the soundless words that scream inside my head day after day.

They can’t hear the baffled screams that died on my lips the day I saw your face; you cold, dead eyes that looked into mine without remorse.

I can still see him lying their on the cold marble floor. He looks like he’s tired and is sleeping this soundly after a long time. He looks like he’s tired of all the fighting and he wants to come home.

I look at his placid face and I wonder how long it would take for him to wake up and walk up to me, and hold me; tight in an embrace that would melt me and I would seep into his skin and become him, once again. I wait for him to open his eyes, while he still lies their in make belief, and wink at me; the way he loves to do; frighten me with his silly one acts and drive me insane with his stupid jokes.

I wait. While they tell me that he’s never going to wake up again.

**********

Do you sometimes wonder what happened to me after the day I forced them into letting me meet you once? Do you wonder how I sleep at night when I think about your deep dead cold eyes that greeted me that winter morning and turned my life into a thudding shade of bleeding gray? Do you wonder?

Do you wonder if my dreams still haunt my nights and my silent screams still fill my day? Or do you wonder if I still remember you each morning, noon and night? Do you wonder if the pain has dulled… and the embers died down? Do you wonder if I can sleep at night?

I wonder if you can, Jehadi.

I wonder.

Every single day, ever since I forced them into letting me see you once, and your greeting me with your cold dead eyes, I have written to you, Jehadi. One letter for every day spent here in the Psychiatric Ward of Research and Referral Hospital, New Delhi.

You know, they think I’m mad. Oh, they won’t say it in so many words but then they say it, in whatever words they can. They think I am mad, and irony is that I think so too. But then once I read somewhere that a person who knows he is mad, is close to sanity; maybe I’m hovering on the fringes of sanity, too.

You know, it’s for you that I retreat into the world of silent screams every time sanity inches closer my battered mind. It’s for you that I live in a nightmare that began two years ago, never to end, Jehadi.

I wonder, when I’m gone, would they forward you the letters I have written to you so meticulously, almost religiously. I doubt they would do that but then fantasy has been my only game for these two morbid years of my life.

Fantasy, and splitting time in parallel alternate universes where I control the motions and not you. It’s in these parallel moments that I live and they call me schizophrenic.

I wonder what you would call me? I wonder what you would think…

Do you ever go back to that moment in time, do those scenes flash before your cold eyes and blind you with that metallic glint that ricochets from the metal casing of the bullet that started from your gun, pierced his chest and finally lodged in my head? Do you? Do you remember the look in his eyes; naked fear sprinkled with dazed astonishment, when in that split second he decides to tarry and you grabbed the moment and pressed that trigger… the trigger that triggered an avalanche in my life, do you remember?

Does it come back to you, the moment when that bullet, it spiraled through the inches between you and him; then it flew, in slow motion, like a nightmare caught in a time warp, it slowly pieced his skin, then it thrust in like a malignant intruder, in his heart that gave up too soon. Does it come back to you? The fear that crossed his eyes in that second, in that moment of truth when it dawned on him that his life had just gotten over; that the hunter had just become the hunted.

Does it come back to you? Or you’re comfortably numb? Or, you’re head is filled with so much hate and wrath that you stopped feeling a long time ago; or all you ever feel is the sinking pit of hatred that consumes you with every mutinous thought that’s held you captive ever since you became what you are.

Tell me you story. I need to know; I need to know it to know mine; to know why I lost that which was worth more than a fanatic just doing his job, than a Jehadi just fighting his Holy War.

I see you’re not telling me your story. Maybe I will tell you mine.

**********

He was a bright young man, like a golden sunflower with a breath of sunshine for his full smile. He was smart and intelligent and diligent. He was also brave.

He could have been a lot of things but he used to say that in the scheme of things this time over, it was a soldier he wanted to play most.

I was just another girl who walked into his life while he was doing his Young Officers Course in Ahemdnagar. He was wild and he was young and was brave and free. I was reticent and shy; dubious and dark. He took me into the folds of his sunshine and for the first time in life I knew how it was to drink a cup of full laughter.

You know, we loved like crazy. He would steal out of his bachelor’s quarters at night and we would drive across the town, onto the highway. I sat pillion and I held him like I’d never held onto anything in life before. Our hair was whipped salty by the cool night air and our faces grew cold when met by the icy gusts that made secret noises as we swished past them gliding like rain in air.

He would hold my hand to his chest and I would rest my head on his back and we would drive, away into magic that waited that take us in its fold, away into love.

You know our Army rules are strange. A lieutenant cannot marry before he’s done his Young Officers Course. He was always in a hurry to marry me and five months were long enough for him.

I wonder what it was that made him so anxious but then maybe you came to him at nights. Those nights when he would wake up scared and sweaty, his eyes wide with fear; dreaming up the bullets that flew across the scenes filled with gore and screams; maybe you came to him, like a premonition that he couldn’t understand; maybe he did.

We married as soon as he completed the Young Officers course. Three months into the marriage and he was notified that he was to serve his compulsory deputation with the Rashtriya Rifles Counter Insurgency Corps.

You know, three months into marriage, while the passion filled nights still didn’t let off the steam and starry eyes still didn’t let go off the dream, he was to move.

Do I need to make this poetic? I would have if it was. You know it never was like it’s in the movies. All we were worried about before he left was how many times he would be able to call in a week and how difficult it would be to stay away from what we had begun to mean each other.

There were no clairvoyant moments when your face would’ve cropped up before my eyes and I would’ve held onto his hand and asked him to not go lest a monster would unleash his fury on his heart that loved me so much…

He left.

He left for valley. You call it Kashmir, isn’t it, Free Kashmir, the land where you fight a holy war for freedom against Kaffirs… huh? He left for Baramullah sector in Kashmir. Sounds familiar, isn’t it? Your breeding bleeding ground, Jehadi?

They say it was a Search and Destroy operation; one week into his arrival. They had to search for you and four of your other angry friends. The village where you took refuge was a hostile village. They hated the Indian Army. The intelligent reports said that it was a dangerous territory and you and your friends were vicious and bloody. You had just bombed a temple in Jammu and escaped.

He was with a Search Party of eight men, his comrades, his friends. You and your friends butchered two more men, good men, beside the best man that ever lived.

They say that it was a close quarter combat; it’s always very dangerous. Its ironical but in your freedom with offensive you can get away with butchering as many civilian lives as you wish and they are but causalities of war for your conscience; but, for our men fighting on defensive, its alarming rise in the statistics of human rights violation. Ironical, isn’t it?

The man who watched you two size each other up tells me that he was very brave in his last moments. That he was brave and righteous and human to his last breath. That he looked at you and shouted at your to put your weapons down; that when you didn’t heed to his call he fought you like a soldier; that he could have gunned you down seconds before you had the chance to raise your weapon to him… that he could have killed you much before you killed him. That he stalled… only because he saw you, head to toe, and a universe of something flashed before his eyes and his wonderstruck eyes stayed dazed till you pumped three bullets into his chest and he fell.

**********

He was awarded the Shaurya Chakra, the second highest peace time Gallantry award. His CO wrote him off as a brave soldier and an honorable man. They, his friends said that he was an Officers’ Officer.

They said that I was indeed lucky to have him as my husband.

I laughed.

I laughed when I watched them fold the tricolor and place in my blank staring hands and I laughed when I realized that I was to sleep alone on our bed forever and more.

I laughed and laughed and laughed till they told me that they’ve finally caught up with you; that finally, you have been captured.

That was the day the silent howls started filling my head. That was the day I asked them that I wanted to meet you… once… to be able to give the hate seething inside me a face; to be able to hate in peace.

And then, Jehadi, I saw you. And I know why he died; and why he stalled and… for the last time I cried…

For him and for me… for when I looked at your face and your dead eyes I knew why he couldn’t fire at you before you did… for when I looked at your face I knew why the hate howling inside me would never feed on your face.

I knew then I couldn’t hate you Jehadi.

I knew I couldn’t hate a child.

I knew then that when he looked at your sixteen year old face, all his dazzled eyes could have remembered would be the scrawny face of his younger brother… with his still cackling voice and nearing manhood wisps of hairs for a beard… I knew his fingers would have frozen on the trigger when he would have seen your once innocent now dead cold sixteen year old eyes and he would have stalled… only to be pumped with three merciless bullets that spelt the end for him… and me.

I knew I could hate you Jehadi. I knew I couldn’t hate a child.

**********

So you see, Jehadi, how I live in a parallel universe; where you’re a full grown man I can hate… and he’s still alive… where the sounds of silence don’t guard my lips and tired screams don’t haunt my head…

I dream of Utopia Jehadi.

And you’re always on my mind.

I wonder what you’re thinking Jehadi… Is it me you’re dreaming of?