Fayaz was not heartbroken when he came home in the evening to see that his wife Zeenat had left him. Their last few months of living together had created a menacing atmosphere, made of laconic silences and forced composure on his part, and implied condemnations and endless sobbing on hers. Perhaps it was for the best that she was gone. His life was partitioned into the many masks he had to put on when dealing with work, with the family, with Zeenat. The only people around whom he felt truly comfortable were his small circle of three men. Over the years, he had deliberately lost touch with many other friends, paring down his bonds to the ones that mattered most to him–with Imran, Rehan and Gul.
Rehan and Gul were his friends from the days of schooling in Srinagar. Gul, who had been their senior by a few years, had stayed on in the city when Rehan and Fayaz had gone to Delhi for their graduation. They had continued living there for another year after their degree to attend the cram school for the civil services examination. Fayaz had qualified and returned as an officer, but Rehan had failed and given up, deciding instead to pursue a tricky career as a journalist in Kashmir. The two men were rather different from one another, but numerous years of shared history and experiences together had led them to understand each other well. Rehan often challenged conventions and displayed a scrupulous integrity at work. Somewhat vain, he was quite the charmer, a man who could recite poetry at the drop of a hat to make hearts heave and lashes flutter. In spite of having a long-term girlfriend in Delhi, his court of worshipful admirers was not much less diminished in Srinagar. Fayaz, on the other hand, made up for his lack of frivolity with his intelligence and discretion. He carried a witheringly necessary need to please those who mattered to him, but was not always able to reconcile with what this required of him. This also meant that he could be squeamish when it came to facing up to resolutions and consequences.
Gul, all in all, was a reliable maverick. He defied the expectations of his family by deciding to join the police services. Without a doubt, it was a career that allowed a significant exercise of power over people, but it was also a profession marked by ignominy and profligacy in Kashmir. His father had been a reasonably respected religious activist, and his son’s job would bring them a little envy and a lot of shame. For most people living under difficult circumstances, everyday travails grind down cherished principles to fine dust, which soon vaporizes; and so, as Gul became established and well-connected, he was sought after by his friends and neighbours who might scorn him in private but who needed his help to get files moved through dusty offices, permissions signed, permits arranged, and for their sons to be rescued from police stations when in trouble. When Gul’s family wanted a daughter-in-law to keep his mother company at home, he dutifully married. A few years later, when the clashes between his wife and her mother-in-law intensified and assumed the nature of a feud, he again did what his mother suggested, and remarried. The first wife had borne him a pair of twin boys and the second one a baby girl in the previous year. He took the changing seasons of life in his stride and focused on simplifying things whenever possible.
Imran was Fayaz’s nephew, the child who had grown up in front of him and who had almost been like a younger brother to him. Fayaz felt a special sense of protectiveness towards him, a motherly feeling that he could not fathom at the root. He saw something of an alternate future for himself in Imran’s struggles to choose his path in life. Fayaz was sure that his own parents had tried to do their best for him, given the circumstances in which they had lived. His mother, especially, had endured excessive hardship, living with relatives and bringing up his elder brother Junaid during all those years when his father had taken up the jihad for Kashmir with HM and the gun. But, knowing this, he also felt that they had been somehow amiss in what they had done to him and expected of him. As a little boy in that Srinagar seminary, he had reproached them inwardly for letting him be there, far from the open fields of his village, far from their love. He had shackled his life to the fruition of their expectations, done what they wanted at every step.
As Imran was maturing into a young man, Fayaz understood better the complexities of what was involved in letting a young man do what he wanted. Imran, for instance, had from a very early age wanted to be a cricketer. But who would recommend that as an option? He would never have the facilities for the required training or the significant connexions that were necessary to be picked for a team. And would Imran himself want to play for the Indian team? In all his attempts to dissuade Imran from this ambition, this last question had been the clincher. Imran had finally given up, but then he had started to spend too much time with the problematic young men of the village. His father Junaid had become fearful that he might one day run away to join the militants. So, Fayaz was prevailed upon to persuade Imran to see sense and move to Srinagar. For an extra measure of oversight and safety, Imran was later settled into the household of Fayaz’s friend, Gul the policeman. Ever since his transfer away from Srinagar last spring, Fayaz had not been able to be as involved with Imran’s life as he once was, and he reproached himself for this. He hoped that the young man was studying as expected. However, what did that mean in this city where, due to curfews, hartals and routine outbursts of rebellious unrest, exams were delayed every year, semesters were left incomplete, and young men chose stones or phones to express their anger and anguish!
(Excerpted from Nitasha Kaul’s Future Tense with permission from HarperCollins India)
