On an autumn Sunday morning in 1961, six of us set out on an adventure. Among the group were Corporal Ivor Ray, the devil-may-care chauffeur of the Commanding Officer, Leading Aircraftsman Michael Rogers, Aircraftsman Class II Leonard Ward, and myself—an Aircraftsman Class I and the only pure Indian in the group. Joining us were two young teachers from Burn Hall School: the plump and pretty Dulcie Pinto and the beautiful Yvonne Barretto, admired for her shapely legs. The girls, excited by the prospect of visiting the famed St. Joseph Church, carried candles in anticipation of the visit they had heard so much about.
Our trip was unauthorized—not because it was a Sunday, but because the sky was overcast, and the snow-capped mountains were hidden beneath a thick, grey shroud. The flight commander had called off all flights for the day. Ivor, the only NCO among us, hadn’t sought permission from the MTO to take the jeep, nor did he mention anything to his direct boss, the CO. Since refuelling at the official petrol station at Palladium would have left a record, we pooled our money and filled up at another station, hoping to keep the jeep ride off the records.
With that hope in mind, we set off north-westward, singing We’re Going on a Summer Holiday, planning to reach Baramulla in a couple of hours—a place where history still lingered in crackling embers. Our goal was to make it back before anyone noticed the missing jeep.
We soon lost our way on a desolate road lined with Chinar trees, far from Srinagar. Luck was on our side, though. Not long after, we spotted a middle-aged man in a brown Kashmiri achkan and a white crocheted cap, kneeling on a prayer mat beneath a tree. Respectfully, we waited until he finished his Namaz before greeting him.
“You wish to visit Baramulla, I know,” the man said, his English precise and clipped, much like the gentry from the island across the seas.
“Yes, of course—to see the church and the hospital where those terrible killings took place,” I replied, perhaps too eagerly.
Michael nudged me discreetly. He confessed later that he feared the Muslim man might take offence at my words.
The Kashmiri, unfazed, introduced himself as Suleiman Bhatt. There was a note of pride in his voice as he revealed that he was the first cousin of Muqbool Sherwani on his father’s side. We exchanged puzzled looks—none of us had heard the name. Suleiman’s expression shifted. He narrowed his eyes, staring intently at me, then even harder at Ivor’s grey-green eyes, as if searching for something unspoken.
“Are you guys from India or not? You should know that if it was not for Muqbool, Kashmir would be with Pakistan today.”
I learned the history of Muqbool Sherwani’s sacrifice for India’s cause many decades later from an old internet search engine and regretted not congratulating Mr. Suleiman Bhatt in the autumn of 1961 for being the hero’s cousin. Muqbool was caught and shot several times and his body was hung up as an example for the locals by the Pakistani raiders when they discovered that their volunteering guide from Kashmir was deliberately misleading them. If they had been shown the right route, they would have captured Srinagar before the Indian Army and then the Air Force could react.
“This is a small town, Pattan.”, Mr. Bhatt said, rolling his prayer mat and placing it cozily under his arm
“My home is over there, just past the culvert. I come here to pray in peace under this tree. St.Joseph’s Hospital is some 20 miles from here. The church is also on the same ground. I have not seen the Mother Superior there for a long time. I can come with you if you could make it convenient to drop me back right here on your way back.”
We readily agreed. He squeezed in with us and during the next hour’s drive described the atrocities committed by the so-called (his adjective) lashcars from Pakistan. When we arrived, he walked into the church leading us where a nun greeted him, brimming with obvious pleasure. Mr. Bhatt introduced us to her, Mother Maria, Mother Superior in the church, and also of the St. Joseph Hospital next door.
The Mother’s voice was faint and barely audible; Mr. Bhatt explained that she had not recovered from the trauma of witnessing the brutality that happened in the church and the hospital fourteen years ago. She saw them coming, alerted the Priest, and ran to hide in a toilet in the hospital next to the church. The priest who thought he could talk sense into the invaders and held up his Bible like a shield was cut down. So were the nuns, one of them sliced vertically. In the hospitals, they killed the patients and the visitors. They threw babies up in the air and caught them on the tip of their swords. She pointed at our guide and said, “Mr. Suleiman had seen it all. He had come to pick up his wife and the baby. And and..”
Her soft grating voice faded off. Suleiman repeated the words for our benefit.
“They stabbed my Bareen and the baby whose face I had not yet seen and never saw.”
He began to sob in long lurches of breath. The Mother Superior patted his back in sympathy tears rolling down her pink and freckled cheeks.
Yvonne began to sob. Dulcie held her shoulders, but in a moment began to cry herself. The Mother hugged them both and whispered a prayer. The effect was magical. They stopped crying and wiped their tears. They went to the chapel to light candles. A few minutes later, Dulcie beckoned us from the chapel. We found a faded portrait of a young nun who died while trying to protect the Mother Superior of the time. Below the portrait was a printed caption that said she gave her life for the people of Kashmir.
A couple of nuns joined us while visitors and patients stared.
After we patted a couple of babies and waved to the women, Mother Maria bid us goodbye. On our way back, Suleiman told us his own life history.
In 1935, with a degree in English that he acquired in Sri Pratap College, and no job prospects in Kashmir, he went hitchhiking to Jammu, and then switching buses and trains which took him several days, reached Bombay looking for a decent job. Somebody told him that with the colour of his skin and good looks, he should try a film studio in Nana Chowk where they made talking movies. He tried the only studio there but was summarily ignored.
Defeated, but not ready to give up, Suleiman sailed as a stowaway in a ship he couldn’t name but was caught and was given work to serve the passengers. So he didn’t starve but was troubled by sea sickness. When the ship docked at the Port of London three weeks later, the captain left him to his fate with a tip of five pounds. They jailed him at the port but let him off after a month. Out in the streets, although he had a first class degree in English, he found communicating with Londoners difficult initially. He found work in a bread-and-eggs shop run by a Sindhi Hindu on the corner of a street in Brentford. Within a few weeks, because his education helped, his keen ears helped even better; he landed a job as a postman in the Royal Mail Service. He rented a small room in the loft of a Victorian house owned by an old couple. The old man demanded ten, Suleiman bargained for five and was almost turned away when the old lady called him back and settled the rent at seven pounds a month
“My Dea sa’ah, this man might pay you the first month’s ‘ent, then that will be youah fune’al.”
Your funeral? He was shocked when he heard the phrase for the first time and volunteered to pay a couple of month’s rent as security. Sarah cocked a snook at her husband, fanning the one single-sided white note and a black fiver in his face.
Simon had to have the last word. ” Look, Mr. Whatsyoname, People from India make a lot of noise. Close the door gently. Don’t call out to your friends or a taxi from the window. Don’t put waste food in the water closet.”
” Come on, Simon Dea. That lady from Calcutta did all these only once and then you corrected her.”
Four years later, when Suleiman e thought that his pastures were greening and the oldies were demanding a raise in rent, Chamberlain declared war on Germany. By October 1939, London was being bombed night and day. Suleiman had run out and lain on the ground several times a day while buildings came crashing down around him. The government wanted his old land lady to get away to a faraway rescue place for women and children, but she stayed put.
The earth tremored, window panes shattered and the roof threatened to fall even when a bomb had fallen a mile away. Roof tiles lay scattered in the streets. For many months, even after the bombing stopped and a long lull followed, his ears kept ringing and his bed, he thought, kept shaking. He stuck on in his rented room in the house where the lady was friendly, the man blamed him for all the noises, even the war. He insisted that ‘if the English had not gone to India and spent the good King’s money on educating the thankless blacks, the’a would be no previous woh, and no ho’ble woh such as the one happening ‘ight ovah oua heads“
The old lady would say: “Dea Simon, shut up. You’ve gone mad. If it was not for Indians, we wouldn’t be, like, winning this war.” The way bombs were falling like confetti, Suleiman wasn’t sure that England was winning
After the Normandy Landing in mid-June, 1944, which Eisenhower named the D-Day, Londoners thought that soon peace would prevail. After a lull, flying bombs and rockets began to shower down again. His house collapsed on one of those bombings, crushing the old man to death. After the dead was retrieved and buried at the back of an Anglican church, he led the old lady to a deep shelter in East London and lived nearly the whole year “like being crushed in a vice when you tried to sleep”. The V2 bombs came and fell without a sound; you didn’t know you were hit till you died. Yet his postal service carried on whenever there was a lull.
Hitler probably killed himself, Churchill who called for an early election won at Woodford, but his party, the Conservatives, was roundly defeated. Attlee became the Prime Minister and a thoroughly pissed Churchill went on the Radio babbling incoherent nonsense. Things changed dramatically, the newspapers where already forecasting that India would be given away to Indians as if it were a benign favour.
Suleiman did not win a medal as he had hoped, but the Royal Mail Office promoted him to Postmaster. In 1945. With wartime restrictions and rationing, 25 pounds a week wasn’t all that good, but he could scrounge and save up for a trip to India in the next couple of years , and, as a Vilayat return, marry a pretty Kashmiri girl. Sadly, those were the days when London was recovering from the shock of shattered homes and buildings; bridges and hospitals, there was no hope of bringing a bride with him to England.
“That was the greatest tragedy in my life,” sighed Suleiman.
During the Christmas holidays of 1947, he took a long leave, half of it on pay, sailed to Bombay, took a train to Delhi, then a bus to Jammu and hitchhiked to Pattan. His father arranged his marriage and negotiated the Mahr and bought new wall-to-wall Nur Jahan carpets to welcome the bride. Within the next ten days, he married Bareen (“so beautiful that I couldn’t take my eyes off her”) from the village of Aram Pora.
Life was like a dream for the next six weeks, holding her hands in European style in a bus to Srinagar disregarding stares, roaming Naseem Bagh on the banks of Dal Lake in the first week of marriage, riding a shikhara in the lake, holding her close while the shikara man looked away shyly. They then returned to Pattan, spending a week in a relation’s house near Mansabal Lake and rowing a rented shikara with her by his sidefor whole days and taking photographs of her with mountains in the backdrop with the box camera he had bought in London. When it was all over like an hour’s dream, he kissed the tearful Bareen goodbye and set off on his circuitous journey back to London.
“ My marriage lasted six weeks,“ he said, staring straight ahead.
Seven months later in late August 1947, along with the news of the independence of India and Pakistan, he got a letter written by Bareen and posted in April that she was expecting their baby, “Allah knows boy or girl, but I want you, , inshallah, to be the first to hold our baby,”
He set sail in mid-September.
News reports from Kashmir were scary; Shake Abdullah who favoured India was jailed; and Muslim conference was, like, opting to join Pakistan. The Maharajah tarried between independence and India. His Dogra army fought the Muslims, said one report; there were also internal skirmishes between the Muslim Conference and the National Conference while Pandits played safe not giving out any point of view. They knew that Harisingh only thought of his own and his family’s safety. The rumour was that another bloodshed was on the boil.
Worried to the bone, Suleiman Bhatt travelled past Srinagar where everything appeared peaceful. The talk in the streets was that there was bloodshed in Poonch where the raiders and the local militia fought, and then many in the militia switched sides and killed their brethren. Suleiman reached home a day before the Baramulla massacre.
His hometown Pattan on the outskirts where we found him seemed unaware of what was happening except that Akbar Mir, the soft-spoken Mullah, had sold all his land for a pittance and took his family of eight to Kupwara, hoping to make a home in Pakistan. Muqbool Sherwani had been crucified by the Pakistani raiders who wore tribal clothes but had swords and military-grade three-not-three rifles in hand.
His father had shrivelled more with fear than age; he told him that Bareen was admitted to St. Joseph Hospital 40 kilometres away. In Baramulla. He borrowed a friend’s motorbike and arrived at the hospital a few minutes too late.
He watched the killers disappearing with shouts of Allahu Akbar and rattling their weapons.
“There was no one alive who could give me a couple of fresh bed sheets to shroud my darlings When I was shouting for help, this Mother Superior – then Sister Maria – came out, sweating and shivering, and found me a couple of white bedlinen for shrouds. I couldn’t bear to see the face of the little one; even to check whether it was a boy or girl. It was the Imam in Pattan who later told me that my child was a girl; blue-eyed and beautiful like Bareen.”
When his face clouded again and a sob seemed imminent, Michael reminded him that it happened so long ago – nearly 14 years; if we did not let time heal our sorrows, who will? Suleiman nodded in doubtful agreement. That was the first time I heard Michael Rogers philosophize in his Bishop-Cotton accent.
When we dropped Suleiman Bhatt near the street that led to his house, he said: “ My father is dead, but I will be less of a Kashmiri if I don’t invite you to my lonely home.”
I said thanks, but no thanks; that he had been a great help and a wonderful friend We hoped to meet him again someday.
“Next week I am flying back to London. I will return to India – or would it be Pakistan? – only when I retire. My pension will see me through the rest of my years here in lonesome comfort.”
I assured him it will always be India, the land of Hindus and Muslims, and of Christians and Sikhs for the sake of which his cousin Muqbool Sherwani gave his life.
Yesterday was a historic twenty-nine degrees that Nicole said was like being in a furnace. I told her we called it good weather in India. Then it rained all night and this morning, and for me, it was winter in Kashmir.
“Take the river bus,” Nicole had told me. “Very few on board this time of the day and the year, and no commentary with stale Cockney humour. Look out if you want to, there’s Westminster, the London Eye , St. Paul’s, the works. otherwise close your eyes and just relax. That’s what I do once in a while. The boat takes its own time. You can buy coffee or beer, if you like”.
“Just a hundred metres that way to the pier,” she said and dropped me outside a sprawling Vauxhall apartment block and sped away. The drizzle was depressing as if I needed one more reason.
I entered the river bus, trying to hide my shiver. A girl tried to collect my umbrella and jacket, I handed over the umbrella but kept the jacket on, telling myself that at least the inner wasn’t wet.
I found an empty set of seats and sat by the window. The air was grey, and the city stood shrouded in it. Even in the rare sunshine, view of London from the Thames is no match for Shanghai viewed from Huangpu River. In any case, I wasn’t too keen on sight-seeing nor for taking photographs. One could always buy a dozen picture-postcards with one’s photo in it in a few minutes’ time and pay the price of a plate of re-heated samosa in an Indian restaurant.
Just as I was opening the Guardian. I noticed this couple in loose saffron clothes and heavy, pitted Rudraksh-beads. The man walked a little unsteadily hunching forward, the woman, thin like a reed when viewed from behind walked ramrod straight. A thick-set man, properly freckled and of about forty in jeans and T-shirt led the way as they went a few rows ahead, found a couch that faced my direction, and sat down.
The younger man noticed me and said something to the oldies. The woman, darkish and pretty for her age, draped in a sari and long-sleeved and midriff-covering top saw me and smiled across the several seats and a few brown heads.
“Another Indian guy,” was probably what the younger man said.
The oldie placed his hand over his eyes as if the grey interior was in glaring sunshine. Then he stood up and walked towards me.
“Arnold,” he said, stretching his hand. “You fuckinn’ Anglo, so found your ‘Home.’ Eh?”
My generation of Anglo Indians never mentioned England as ‘home’. Yet in India that was another joke plastered on our back.
Safron Clothes of a Sadhu, here in this city, language of an old railway guard from Geroge Town, Madras. He wore a red U-shaped streak on his forehead with a long exclamation mark in the middle.
““Of course I recognize you. How can I forget.?”, I said, standing up to shake hands, and lying through my teeth. His thin voice, distorted by the gruffiness and shiver of old age, rang a bell. But I couldn’t quite put a name to it.
He sat next to me. Even the whiff of his presence felt familiar. Where did we meet last? In the military? My home town? An old classmate from UCC?
“You are here visiting your son, I see”. I said.
“I know you don’t recognize me,” he said in one panting breath. “You’ve grown a beard. Just a few creases –very few – on your cheeks and this bledy white hair – but I recognized you. .
The ‘bledy’ for bloody settled the matter. A south Indian with light skin. Absence of melanin gave him a lot many onion-rolls on his cheeks and strings of creases under his chin.
I pointed towards the forty-ish pseudo white who kept looking at us with a smirk.
“You look more like home here,” I said. “A white son and all.”
“Not my son, but a self-styled disciple. Someone told him it’s easier to get the charas if he’s with a Yogi.”
“And you proved that someone right.”
“Shut up,” he said in a hoarse whisper. He looked around furtively and dusted the empty seat near mine. His adopted pseudo-white son walked up and sat down on its edge, apparently resting on one buttock, Indian style..
“I am here for a series of discourses. The Hindu union in four universities have invited me. Every time a Paki rapes a child, the newspapers scream that an Asian did it. The Hindus get a bad name. So they have invited the press, big and small, for my discourses on the Hindu way of life.”
“I smell Radhakrishnan there,”
His forehead corrugated in a frown. “You have read Surveypally Radhakrishnan, you dancing-singing, Tony Brent lip-syncing Anglo?”
“I read Philosophy in College.”
Suddenly, it dawned. Kurien Markose, the loud-mouthed one who once stood at the gate of the school and measured the size of breasts with his eyes and commented on each when girls filed out. When he complimented one with a larger bustline, she slapped him. Next day he was kicked out of school. Last heard, he was training alcoholics and drug addicts in a Christian meditation centre. A course of dhyanam, they called it, meditating on Christ who only imbibed wine.
“I know you Kurien, but how did you get to be a Hindu Sadhu preaching discourses in England?”
“Well, there was some Yoga in the Meditation centre. The promoter said yoga was not of Hindus, but invented by St. Aquinas who could do levitation. Then I discovered that Hindu Ashram had many more tricks in their yoga, not just a handstand reciting the Lord’s prayer. I joined Sri Varadananda Swami, you know, the incarnation of Lord Shiva who got arrested a few months ago and is still in jail”
“For rape,”
“Ill informed idiot. For sodomy on little children. Something perfected by our – I mean- Christian priests. Blow jobs perfected by a Cardinal in Australia, Techniques, like those in the trade and movies, pirated by Hindu priests and Muslim Imams.”
He chuckled and sat more comfortably in the seat. “That time he was famous with thousands of followers. I learnt yoga by joining one of his public TV performances and, whenever I could, his live shows. Soon enough I came to his notice.”
“You had smooth light skin and hairless face, the way I remember you. In the UCC, we used to call you Payyan, the soft boy. No doubt, the Guru was inspired by your smooth light skin.“
“Matter of fact, yes,” he chuckled. “But he turned out to be a passive sodomist. You know, what you Anglos call a pansy.”
“A gantu,” I helped.
“That’s it. Once on his many Hamalayan tours travelling first class, paid for by his devotees, we reached a great Ashram near – have you heard? Gangotri.”
I told him the name of the Ashram.
“Yes. There the old bastard practically sold me. For the next 8 years, I did chores in and around the Ashram, learnt some Sanskrit – well, enough to quote the famous verses – the four Vedas, Upanishads, Brahmanas, Gita, you name it. I decided that the gods who carried weapons all the time and acted as contract-killers for a tribe called Devas, were happier gods than Jesus who carried his own cross to be nailed up on it and to wail like a baby. But by then I grew hair all around, a long beard, and, turned – well, unattractive.”
“For the Active-Passive thing.”
He shuffled his bottom and looked around again. ‘Yes,”
“When I left, the swami graduated me to Ramananda Swaroopa. Which means the true form of Rama’s bliss. They call me Ramananda Baba. “
“Must have made a lot of money,” I said, hoping that envy did not show through my eyes.
His eyes narrowed. “Not much. Bought a 120-acre plot in Himachal near Manali. My chelas are building an Ashram there with arrangements for skiing and trekking for the materialistic whities seeking spirituality. Bledy cutthroat price even in such a place.(That bledy again!) I am negotiating for a smaller place in the Ayrshire Coast in Scotland., A virtually abandoned old hotel and a few acres of land. After my last engagement in Oxford, I will need to go to Scotland to find the place which is already paid for..”
“By your chelas.” A contemptuous Hindi word for disciples.
The boat was slowing. I suppose when you are with a Yogi, time passes in no time. We were nearing the Greenwich pier. Even in the quiet suburban London, city noises let you know you were getting closer to land.
“Got a lecture on Oriental Spirituality and salvation in the University here. Tickets sold out. If you wish to attend, I will manage you a press tag from the BBC. For free.”
“No need,” I said. “I found my salvation when Jennifer, once my childhood sweetheart at Frank Anthony’s, whom I married and lived miserably with for fourteen years. She found another idiot and gave me a divorce.”
Without turning and looking back, he signaled backward with his eyes and whispered: “The skeletal bitch there is my wife. Passionate like hell in bed, but not passable for my kind. So we stroke each other and discuss the collection of the day. We’re riding this slow boat because someone at Wales Trinity told her that the view of Westminster and the London Eye are breathtaking from the Thames.”
He tried to silence his chortle with the back of a fist which ended in a series of coughs.
The boat slowed down, its chugs spacing out longer by the seconds. The next pier, which the onboard loudspeaker hailed as Greenwich North, was closing in.
He stood up and made a gesture of Namaste. As he bowed, his Rudraksh-garland grazed my cheeks.
“Sorry, can’t stop to talk. There must be a car waiting. I was due by a previous Clippers.”
“A Mercedes-Benz for sure,” I said.
“I’ll blacklist the university if it’s not a Rolls Royce.”
He was boasting, of course. Even Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had to buy a new Rolls himself every time he went to a new place. Could be, for a change, the Beetles bought him one when he landed up at Liverpool.
As Ramanand Baba began to shuffle along the heaving boat, the pseudo-white disciple in his trail passed me a slip of paper scratched in bad writing. A London phone number.
“Call me whenever,” he whispered, getting closer. “The best stuff. Old man loves it after a hectic day.”
I thought his breath stank a mixture of stale Marlboro and – well, to ethically name it, decaying garbage..
I pointed in the direction where Ramanand Baba had disappeared, looking for his Rolls Royce in the garb of a Kia Sportage.
“Does he raise your kundalini?”
He chuckled silently, his shoulders shaking as if his back was itching. Then he elbowed his way through the few who were trying to get out into the wharf drenched in a depressing drizzle.
https://vishumenon.com/2017/06/23/sacred-horror-stories/
