Half a Rupee: Stories by Gulzar Page A

beginning, humans carved stones into weapons. They would live in caves and hunt. Some tribes had fire. They were
afzal
, the blessed ones! They left the jungles and started to live in the plains. And they would travel huge distances and conquer foreign lands.’
    Nasir was grinding the smaller stone against the bigger one and was making himself a lethal weapon of stone.

The Search
    They forced me to open my suitcase and went through its entire contents. I could understand their rummaging through my belongings. But when the male soldiers picked out the bras and probed them with lingering fingers, anger shot up my spine. What on earth could be hidden under a bra—grenades? Now, come on, I wouldn’t be smuggling grenades in the cups of those bras. I couldn’t contain myself when they picked up my lipsticks and began to inspect them closely. And when they started to take apart my lipstick cases, I lost it. ‘These are not bullets. They are lipsticks. Keep them. Load them if you can in your rifles! And shoot with them for all I care!’ I said.
    Shameless, he bared his ugly, yellowing teeth and said, ‘Gone are those days of the double-barrelled shotguns, madam. Now we clip hundred-cartridge magazines into our rifles.’ Perhaps the woman constablewith him understood my sarcasm. She tried to explain, ‘We have to be extra-cautious on the Srinagar fights, madam. Come, come this way!’ And she invited me to step into a half-open curtained enclosure for a through body search.
    I was going to Kashmir in search of my roots: to look at my beginnings. However I am not Kashmiri. I just know this much: that my father and mother had gone to Kashmir and when they came back I had already taken root in my mother’s womb. ‘On those icy cold waters of the Jhelum, in a floating houseboat, atop a delicately carved walnut wood bed, when two pious souls were giving birth to a sacred moment …’ Mom would read out in a poetic style her entries from her Kashmir journal, relishing every single syllable, every single memory that her tongue could wrap itself around. She would regale me with stories of Dad in Kashmir.
    ‘He just didn’t know how to ride a horse. A stool would be placed next to the horse. Your father would first climb up on the stool and then the groom would coax the horse near the stool, and then and only then would your dad be able to get astride the horse. Even then, five times out of ten, he would fall on his face.’
    Dad would peep out from behind the newspaper he was reading and interject, ‘Don’t you lie, I fell off only once!’
    ‘Once? And what about the time when Your Highness, the Lord Pantaloon came undone!’ Mom was from Lucknow, and Dad from Kolkata.
    ‘Oh … now, come on … when the legs of the stool cave in, one does fall. It wasn’t my fault!’
    ‘Remember that one time when you found yourself atop the groom and not the horse?’
    ‘Now … come off it … that cranky horse just cantered away … just when I had lifted myself off the table. All right now … that’s enough.’ At this point in the conversation, Dad would turn to me, ‘Shonali, don’t you believe a single word your mother says. When I take you to Kashmir, I will show you how good a rider I am!’
    ‘Kashmir,’ Mom would sigh deeply. ‘Now that’s impossible! Who goes to Kashmir any more? Gone are the days when you could simply pick up your bags and head off to paradise, year after year. Strife’s in the air now. Bullets rend its quiet. Flowers no longer bloom there—death does!’
    It must have been around 1981–82, or was it 1982–83? I was still studying in school. The news on the radio made my blood boil. Who the hell were these Pakistanis to misappropriate our Kashmir? As if Kashmir was my personal property, my fiefdom.
    And then Mom would remember her Kashmir days again and say, ‘We had a Kashmiri servant. A young man … hardly a man, rather a boy … whenever we went to Kashmir, we would hire his services for