Our Moon Has Blood Clots: The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits by Rahul Pandita

Author:Rahul Pandita [Pandita, Rahul]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9788184003901
Publisher: Random House India
Published: 2013-01-19T05:00:00+00:00

My father continually urged me to study. But it was very difficult. I wanted some private space, and that was impossible. I would sometimes hang a sheet between the television and the string cot to hide myself from the rest of the room. I liked to think that I was in a room of my own. I imagined myself in my first-floor room back home in Srinagar, in the room with the wooden bookshelf.

In exile, salaries of those in government service were being paid. But the employees could not be accommodated in their respective departments in Jammu. So, like everyone else, Father and Ma would visit their office in Jammu once a month, collect their salaries, and return. It seemed like a nice arrangement. But after a few months, unemployment for my father’s generation meant that all of them would just sit and think about exile and the difficulties it posed. Some of the younger lot had found work elsewhere, but most people like my parents were at the stage where beginning to work in an entirely different set-up would have been a nightmare. Since they had so much time at their disposal, we would receive a steady stream of guests from early morning till late evening—my parents’ colleagues, former neighbours, new neighbours, friends, relatives. This made having a little privacy even more difficult.

With whatever little money I could save, I had bought a few audio cassettes of the music of the popular films of those days. But there was no cassette player to play them on. Our Philips two-in-one had been left behind. Late in the night, while everyone slept, or tried to sleep, I would climb up to the rooftop and listen to songs over a small pocket transistor. I dreamt of saving enough money to buy a Walkman.

Around this time, in 1991, a catastrophe struck our family again. Though we all helped, a large chunk of the housework was left to Ma. She ran the kitchen and tended to all the cleaning, among other chores. The lifting of countless heavy buckets of water had taken a toll on her back. One morning as she bent down to mop the floor, a cry escaped her lips and she fell down. She was in extreme pain and she was unable to get up.

We took her to a doctor immediately; he explained that the alignment of some of her vertebrae had altered, putting pressure on her spinal cord. She was advised complete bed rest. With her completely grounded, the kitchen duty fell to my sister. Father and I pitched in as well, helping her as much as we could. She was in college after all and needed time to study.

It took more than two months for Ma to recover enough to get out of bed. She could walk a little and do light household chores, but she had to wear an orthopedic belt around her waist almost all the time. The doctor also said that she could no longer sit or sleep on the floor.

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