He sat hunched in a chair on the veranda of his house. The house, facing the hills in the east, was at the edge of the village. The village was twenty-five miles south of Srinagar from where Safir had come to visit him. Behind him, he had kept the window to his empty bedroom open so that if either of his sons, Shahid or Kamran, or his wife, Murseh, were to return during the night, he’d hear their footfalls easily. They would call out to him and he would immediately run to open the entrance door downstairs to let them in.
It was late April. The mornings were cool and still but in the afternoons the air became hot and restless. He was in his usual white kameez and light cotton shalwar, although he had also thrown Murseh’s shawl over his shoulders. His sleep patterns had grown erratic and last night he had barely slept at all. He felt cold and chilly. Although he was far from achieving sleep, he kept his eyes shut. His back ached and his face radiated a dull pain. His head hung as though in a reverent bow towards the hills where Kamran was suspected to be hiding in a jungle.
The sun, slanting above the roof, struck the stalks of wild grass in the courtyard with a blinding fury. From the hills, a wind had descended sharply. A page of the newspaper, made crisp by the sunlight, flapped on the table before him, waking him up.
He had read in the Informer about the soldiers’ lusty speculations about Kamran. They had announced a bounty of ten lakh rupees on his head and proposed to capture him soon and kill him as they had killed his brother. For a moment, Abdul Rashid slipped into sleep and in that fleeting moment, his son momentarily fell out of his consciousness.
He jolted awake, opening his eyes wide. Safir appeared before him, bursting into a greeting. He told him that the front door was ajar and when he could not find anyone downstairs, he had come up.
Abdul Rashid invited him to sit down, pointing at the empty chair beside him. Murseh was not home, he said, but would he like a cup of tea, he asked.
Safir seemed like a sensitive young man like Shahid–well-spoken and well-mannered. Safir thanked him and said that he was fine without one. Abdul Rashid had never met Safir before, but he had read and followed his stories in the Informer. He told him so and Safir smiled.
Abdul Rashid was anticipating questions now, about his sons–one alive and one dead–but Safir asked him none.
The wind whooshed and the stalks swayed. Abdul Rashid sat back in his chair, quelling a rising sigh. Safir remained silent. In that, he was not an inquisitor like the other journalists who had visited before him. Abdul Rashid liked the way Safir was sitting with him, calm and cross-legged like his own son. He fixed his eyes on the quince tree at the end of the courtyard. Even the gusts of the gale did not distract him. However, as the force subsided, sweeping away a handful of dusty-green leaves and hurling them against the plastered façade of the house, his gaze intensified on a low branch Safir could not fathom why.
Beyond the quince tree, the mustard was in bloom. The terraced fields rose like a wide yellow ladder towards the hills. With the evening’s arrival, the glazed dome of the sky became laced with light clouds.
Safir muttered something as though trying to begin a conversation. But then, he fell silent again and they continued to dwell in the silence they both seemed determined to keep. The sun sank behind the house and although the call for the dusk prayers was about to be given, there they sat, sharing the consciousness of the other’s presence, saying nothing. The wind died and the fields became listlessly grey. From the village, no cackling of hens or lowing of cows could be heard.
Abdul Rashid rose, clutching Safir’s arm and looked him in the eye. He told him how it was the younger son whose corpse he had imagined coming home. That day, after offering the Friday prayer in the mosque down in the village, when he returned home and sat down in the chair to read the newspaper, Murseh had given him his usual cup of tea.
‘Then there under the quince tree,’ Abdul Rashid said, not completing his sentence.
On the night of the last Thursday in the month of March, Shahid had said that he wanted to go to find his younger brother, Kamran, who had not been home for months. Abdul Rashid sensed danger. Was not life, the fact that we were alive, a prospect of tremendous danger? Upon seeing Shahid’s determination, he did not stop him. Neither did Murseh. Instead, they gave him food in a stainless-steel container, dates and yellow rice. He left at midnight, going over the fields towards the hills. The next evening, the villagers brought a corpse home and placed it under the quince tree.
Abdul Rashid was the father. And Murseh was the mother. She had dropped her headgear and lost her sanity; she ran naked and barefoot from shrine to shrine, dribbling in deranged grief. She talked with Lal Ded, the saint in an ember-embroidered, paradisiacal pheran of fire, long dead but eternally alive; she sang senseless songs. She was far from the young maiden Abdul Rashid had seen in the fields one dazzling spring afternoon many years ago, when her pheran of diaphanous silk seemed to be on the verge of catching celestial fire and he decided, in that moment, to marry her. After Shahid, their first-born was killed, she had disappeared without a trace, leaving Abdul Rashid alone in the house.
(Excerpted from The Night of Broken Glass by Feroz Rather with permission from HarperCollins India)
