One More Life

MAY 2007

One more life
I am not an apologist for gunmen, serial killers or mass murderers. Not a fan of annoying television shows which dissect the killer’s psyche after he mows down innocent people. Anchors with patently fake earnestness quiz mental health professionals. A cliché fest. “Sir, do you think the movies he watched drove him to shoot people?” “Could a rock band have influenced his behavior?” “Was he nursing a broken heart, a stubbed toe?” “Did his mother love him enough?” Crazy is what crazy does, guys. So take these damn shows off air, will you? As Chris Rock once famously said while hosting an Academy Awards event: “we can’t call them crazy anymore…whatever happened to crazy?”
That being said, I have a tale to tell.
A real life story. It sounded stranger than fiction when I heard it from a man who sat hunched on a chair in an impersonal cop’s office. Truth, they say, can set you free. The jury is still out on that. But truth can turn out to be stranger than most things imagination can invent.
The man’s story had a beginning, a middle, and an end. But the end was begging for a new beginning. In real life, this is a fairly common problem. Ends tend to be a messy business. No such thing as a clean cut, a bloodless incision. You can live through an experience and move on. But when you walk into a new scenario, ghosts of the last episode of your life trail after you. Ends, like shrapnel, are embedded in you.
There a chosen few who can carry off perfect ends. Writers for example. Or film makers. You create the perfect end for your cast of characters... And then they lived happily ever. Untouched by memory or regret. End of story. Or they melted into a splendid, dizzying, digital sunset as violins serenaded them on dolby stereo. Fade out, end credits. All is well. That ends.
But in a real life story, the lines are blurred. I met a man in Kashmir a week ago. A place so complicated you can be forgiven if you think you walked into a fictional set-up. The air thick with intrigue like a dark John le Carre novel. Plenty of violent twists and turns like a Forsythe plot. Official versions and unofficial versions. Official body counts and the real deal. The truth, invented, interpreted and recycled. By the army, the police, the paramilitary forces. By mainstream politicians, militant outfits, spies, informers. By people who are caught in the crossfire. By people who engineer the cross fire. By vested interests. By innocent bystanders. By those who have nothing left to lose. Their lives, written off as collateral damage as old power games spin completely out of control.
The man’s story begins in 1983. He was 15 then. He woke up to an ordinary day in Kashmir. The day, like any other, would see several bloody encounters between security forces and militants. The body count rising by evening. The breeze smells of bloody ends. Explosions of pent up rage. The sound of strident war cries.
He was 15. He left home for school in the morning. His green satchel slung over his shoulder. In it, school books, a pen his father gifted him on his birthday, the lunch his mother had cooked in the eerie grey light of dawn.
The man before me speaks in a flat voice drained of emotion. As if he is speaking of a third person. Reliving the story of another life, not this. Another’s story, not his.
“I left home and didn’t go to school.” He says, fidgeting in his chair, throwing a wary glance at the cop in the room. I have taken special permission from the cops to interview this ex-militant who surrendered to the authorities two years ago. They agreed, on the condition that a cop would stay in the room during our conversation.
“I teamed up with a guide who took me across the border,” he says. He is a man of 35 now. A thin wisp of a man, browbeaten by life. When he gestures, I notice the nervous tremor of his hands.
“I saw a gun for the first time. I was trained to use it. Aim and fire.” He looks at the cop. .
“Tell her more. Did you kill anyone when they let you out of the camps?” asks the cop with a lopsided grin.
“No sir. No. We lived in the jungle next to a village after we came back. I shot some people, wounded them. Never killed anyone sir.”
He lapses into silence. The cop clears his throat.
“Why did you join the militants? You were just a school boy.” I ask.
“Most of the boys from my village were leaving. We were curious. We wanted to find out what was happening out there.”
He gropes for words. “It was like a typhoon. A wave of violence. We were swept away. When you are that young, you don’t think of consequences.”
He makes a fist and stabs at the air. An empty gesture of emphasis. “I had no idea what I was getting into. It was a wrong decision, but it took me a few years to realize that.”
He raises his voice and flings a question at no one in particular. “Who doesn’t make mistakes? But don’t I deserve a second chance now that I have given up the gun?”
Life after his surrender has been hell. His wife is a nervous wreck. They receive threatening phone calls, letters, midnight knocks on their door. The message is always the same: prepare to die. Militant groups see him as a traitor, a turn coat who deserves the worst. His two-year-old daughter and wife have moved from their village to the city, hoping to find safety here. He works as a daily wage labourer at a construction sight. He reports regularly to the local police station to keep them informed of his whereabouts.
“The cops don’t trust me. The militants threaten me and my family. We could be bumped off anytime.” He looks up and makes eye contact. “All I want is a peaceful life. A second chance.”
Does he deserve one?
Who decides?