Horrors Hiding Behind the Poplars

Soon,Indian soldiers,on the hunt for militants,close in on the village,which gets caught in the crossfire between the armys arrests and the Islamist fighters barbaric reprisals for perceived betrayals. Everyone flees the village,except the headman,who resolves to hold his ground with his family,while his son finds himself with the unsettling task of collaborating with a perennially inebriated army captain: the son takes trips into the valley where he once played cricket with his disappeared friends,haunted by the thought hell stumble across one of them in the piles of corpses he scavenges for arms and IDs schoolboy trophies for the captain.

The book depicts the isolation and claustrophobic vulnerability of living in a militarised wilderness where no one,no one,will ever come,to whose horrors nature bears sole witness. As he picks his way through the tangled limbs of the dead,the rows of mountains that surround him become a sad,disquieting dark,while the river winding past seems to pause now and then to reflect on the macabre change in the scenery around it. After seeing his first dead body that of a schoolmate,whod been tortured after his brother became a militant he wonders if the dead boys house,obscured behind towering poplars and keekars,reflects the tragedy that befell its inhabitants. After he is taken along as a would-be informant to a crackdown in nearby Poshpur,where women had earlier been raped by security forces,poplars casting surging shadows echo his torment and rage.

Meanwhile,the governor,variously described as a monster,shaitaana,devil and the King of Curfews,pays Nowgam a visit after a brutal three-day crackdown during which its residents are held hostage on a field. He descends in a helicopter with the outsized wings of a giant fly,and with his lips like fat worms in a tight embrace assures the exhausted,shivering,terrified crowd that the curfew is to help the armed forces to hold off external elements.

Keekars and poplars arent the only witnesses to the unabated violence and unease,and the many ways it takes a toll on the residents of the quiet settlement on the border: from everyone needing aaram pills to get to sleep to the six-year-old who plays a beheading game with his younger sister. The book itself is an act of witnessing,of committing this conflict to memory and history,of making the horrors hiding behind the arid headlines vividly real and it does so powerfully.

When a spooky backwards azan wakes up the headmans son in the dead of night,we feel his mounting dread give way to terror as he hears an explosion,and SLRs and AK-47s stuttering beneath his window. We survey,with him,the desolate valley where graves multiply like eager new housing colonies. As he roots through the debris of the disappeared,choking on the fetor of decay,we are startled by the ghostly bodies,bones nudging into each other… red and blue and purple buttocks,sometimes with big chunks missing from them,sunken rib cages,portions of dinosaur-like spines visible under the skin,shameful somehow they make you look away. The headmans son says bleakly,of his field of corpses,No one is punished here. It will only ever be a story.

While the story effectuates a stirring catharsis,like the work of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish,it is slightly less effective at exorcism. The sole false note is struck by Captain Kadian,a caricature of gloating evil,whose pulp villain-style expositions of fiendishness are less than convincing. He rails constantly against stupid hacks and lefty human rights fers,and makes declarations such as: We dont ask their nationalities man,we just gun them down and Mass graves,my dear,are passé. If this dipsomaniac were a little less garrulous,hed be a little more menacing.