[Reader-list] Remembering Kashmir's Bombay Beauties shop

[Rahul Pandita]

In the modern-day Hastinapur, a few men sit these days, all of them carrying loaded dice in the pockets of their Khadi kurtas. They drink tea, perhaps nibble at digestive biscuits and, read out a few sentences in front of the television cameras. And then they go. 

In the lexicon of the Raisina hills, this is known as an all-party meeting. The dice never comes out of their pockets. And yet, the stakes are pronounced. The line between Kauravas and Pandavas has never been so blurred. 

There has been firing in Srinagar near what used to be my home. It happened on the road that leads to the Chrar-e-Sharif shrine. As kids, when we grabbed our share of history from inspid textbooks, we would call this road the Grand Trunk road. 

On this road also flourished the Bombay Beauties cosmetics shop. 

No matter what time you went to the shop, you could get to hear the best of Mohammed Rafi’s songs. The shop’s owner was a young man, Latif Lone. His two major occupations were: listen to Rafi sahab and delicately push colourful bangles into the wrists of shy girls. On Fridays and on the last day of July, the shop would be closed. Friday was for prayers and, on July 31, Mohammed Rafi had bid his goodbye to the world. We used to joke that even in his prayers Latif would be silently reciting Rafi’s songs. 

Latif bhaijaan, as we kids called him, was my cousin Ravi’s best friend. He would come to meet Ravi almost every day – Ravi’s house was next to ours. If he was in the bus and a lady from our family boarded it, Latif would make sure that she got a seat. 

In winters, when we had to spend a major portion of day indoors, the dull programmes on the Doordarshan would almost put us to sleep. Instead, we tuned our T.V. antennas to Pakistan and watched many interesting serials. In a month like December, however, the weather would play spoilsport, uprooting the antenna. In times like these, Latif Lone would be in demand. 

I still remember him appearing at Ravi’s gate, wearing Pheran over his faded blue jeans. He would climb atop the roof in a matter of few seconds while my mother prayed below for his safety. He would hold the antenna in his hands, look towards his right and then left, as if offering namaz, and then set the antenna in proper direction. Latif Lone was my hero. 

In 1988, I saw very little of Latif Lone. Ravi was pursuing a Ph.D at the Kashmir University, which kept him very busy. I would ask him about Latif and he just shrugged his shoulders. 

On July 31, 1988, on Rafi’s eighth death anniversary, two bombs exploded in Srinagar. A few days later I saw Latif Lone. His beard had grown thicker and with three other young men, he was collecting donations for the local mosque. At the provision store, on a small transistor, Rafi’s voice reverberated in the warm summer air. I looked at Latif. For the first time I saw that his lips were not moving along with Rafi’s song. 

In less than two years after that incident, we had turned into refugees, like thousands of other Kashmiri Hindu families. Leaving a house of 22 rooms, we took shelter in a 10 by 10 feet room in Jammu, which would be our home for many months. It was here in June 1990, on a particularly humid morning, that I read the headlines of a local English daily: Dreaded militant Latif Lone shot dead. For two days, afterwards, our hearth would remain cold. Mother refused to cook anything. She lay in one corner, crying silently. 

Life moved on like a silent movie. We gradually picked up the pieces of our lives. Ravi got married and became a father. In 1997, while going back, after summer vacations, to his school in Udamphur’s Gool area, where he worked as a lecturer, he was dragged out of the bus and shot dead along with his two other Hindu colleagues. My mother could not bear that shock. She suffered a stroke and gradually lost her voice and the ability to move. 

I kept on going to the valley from Delhi, where I am based now, kissing the Kashmiri soil, like Yasser Arafat, every time I landed at the Srinagar airport. In Delhi, I am always torn apart in a million pieces. In Kashmir, while breathing my own air, I become one. In twenty years we have shifted so many houses. But no dwelling has ever become my home. 

Despite being an affected party, I was willing to give peace a chance. I guess that is what reading too much of Majaz's poetry does to you. Every time I went to Srinagar, I would tell my friends that the time had come that we begin asking ourselves questions. It didn’t make sense any longer to blame Jagmohan or Pakistan. The time had come to sit and openly discuss, amongst young Kashmiris, what happened in Kashmir in 1989-90 – like South Africa had done a few years ago (by setting up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission). 

Before this could happen, the few men mentioned in the beginning, took a totally unnecessary call – they transferred land to the Amarnath Shrine Board. The truth is, as the senior police officer Aashiq Bukhari told me in Srinagar, hundreds of acres of land right from Pahalgam onwards has always been at the pilgrims’ disposal. “If this house of mine is at your disposal – you are free to use the bed, lay on the sofa, use the bathroom, cook food in the kitchen, play in the garden any time you like, then why should you press that this house be transferred in your name?” he explained. 

“I tell you, all our good work of twenty years has gone down the drain in one stroke,” lamented another police officer. 

The truth also is that, in 1996, outside the historical Raghunath temple in Jammu, a cup of tea was sold for fifty rupees to the Amarnath yatris who were stranded due to bad weather, by the same people who are now coming out on streets and chanting: Bam Bam Bole. 

In Srinagar, meanwhile, there is no space again for Rafi. It it is back to pro-Pakistan slogans. As the Line of Control has shifted to create a chasm between Srinagar and Jammu, the Dhritrashtras in New Delhi just kept silent, their one hand resting on another. In Kashmir’s Mahabharata, it’s the Shakunis who are having a field day. 


Rahul Pandita   
www.sanitysucks.blogspot.com  

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