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| ‘I could smell the pain’ | ||||
| Muzamil Jaleel | ||||
 The man, who is witness to a river of blood in Kashmir, having captured corpses and documented pain on the canvas of his photos for years, found his protective emotional shell broken, not by the redundancy of a helpless father’s question outside a hospital theatre – “Will Bilal, my only son, live? He is just 12” - but by the unspoken desperation and uncertainty. Javeed Shah, The Indian Express photographer, was not out to cover a massacre. In fact, he had missed the action, 47 miles away in Shopian where armymen had opened fire on protesting villagers. So he chose to do the easy job - travel a mile to the trauma ward of SMHS hospital to take pictures of relatives carrying the injured on rust-eaten stretchers. He found no wounded but the red bulb of the theatre illuminating. He was stopped in the alley by a lone man with muddy shoes. Manzoor Ahmad Thukur caught him by the collar, asking again and again, “Will my son live?” The photographer decided to stop, join the man’s wait and capture the restlessness. “I thought, it is yet another routine Kashmir story. I have clicked thousands of wailing, grieving people. I have witnessed so many heart-rending scenes,” Javeed said. “It wasn’t any closer to the worse.” There was no blood but as Javeed witnessed the wait, he found the desperation of this father piercing through the “steel” of his ribs. “I would always hide behind the lense of my camera,’’ Javeed said. “But this time, it was difficult. I could smell the pain”. Hours later, when Javeed returned to the Express office, he was carrying the images in his eyes. A man, who first takes out his camera to click the body of his father-in-law, killed by militants last month, and then sits down to mourn, this time had witnessed and felt the tragedy pierce through his immune system. It was a story behind the statistics of victims of bullets and grenades. And he remembered every graphic detail as he began: The father’s legs were heavy, his eyes welled with tears as he anxiously paced around in the gloomy alley that led to the operation theatre. Suddenly, there was a creak of the white door, his heart sank with both hope and nightmare sketched on his face. Inside the concrete walls of the theatre, his only son – 12-year-old Bilal Ahmad – struggled to live as doctors carefully worked to pull out dozens of sharpnels of a shell that had pierced all around his body. This time, however, the door hadn’t opened to give Bilal’s news. Manzoor Ahmad Thukur stopped every passerby. He wanted only to hear that his son Bilal will live. He then sat on the lone bench, hid his face in his palms, at times pulled his hair, rumbled few incomprehensible words. The pain of uncertainty dragged. The story began in Shopian, where Thukur’s only son Bilal had left his home in Matribug village for school, recently opened after a long winter break. He was in class 7. There was tension as the village had been under an intense army crackdown for the past six days. Angry and agitated, the villagers had gathered and marched to the nearby Shopian town. Bilal had left his school bag at home, lied to his mother that he was going out to play and left with his friends to watch the protest, only out of an innocent curiosity. He didn’t understand the reasons nor did he care. It wasn’t, however, a symbolic protest. The villagers were very angry and so were the soldiers. The militants had kidnapped a few army personnel, killed them and left their bodies nearby. Angry over the brutal end of their colleagues, armymen were desperately looking for the militants and Matribug was a suspected hide out. The soldiers kept on returning to the village, searching the houses and roughing up villagers, hoping to get a clue of the identity of the killers. But they were getting nowhere. Meanwhile, the army killed two young men in a neighbouring village, claiming them to be terrorists. And when the rumour arrived, it became clear that the “terrorist” duo were local residents, one of them a baker, who had become fodder in the army-militant tussle in the cluster of these hilly villages deep inside the Pirpanchal range. Unaware of the gravity of the situation, Bilal had joined this journey of outrage with a child’s excitement. But when the marching villagers arrived in Shopian town, they went berserk, pelting stones and ransacking government offices. Within seconds, the Tehsildar’s office was up in flames. Police tried to stop the crowds, fired A few shots and then the army appeared at the scene. There was a rattle of the guns, a few explosions and soon the mob dispersed. But Bilal couldn’t move. His loud wails pierced through the thick screen of teargas smoke. He called for his mother. After a while, a group of villagers returned to find the injured and a neighbour, Jehangir, saw the boy. “It was hard to breath. There was smoke everywhere. We first pulled out a man, who had been hit (by a bullet) in his face,’’ Jehangir said. “Then I saw him (Bilal). His blood had melted the snow.” Bilal was rushed to the local hospital in Shopian. He was bleeding profusely and was in critical condition. But the doctors asked Jehangir to wait till all the other victims, with bullet injuries, arrive. ”They (doctors) said, we can’t spare an ambulance exclusively for him. Wait, let the others come and then we will send them all to Srinagar’’. So finally when Bilal was put in the ambulance, he had already lost 30 minutes and several pints of blood in the close contest between life and death. Bilal’s parents, however, had no idea. His mother was engrossed in the daily chores while his father Manzoor Ahmad Thukur was busy at his shop, 10 miles away. And when Bilal arrived at SMHS, the doctors in the trauma ward refused to take him to the operation theatre because there was no close relative to sign on the ``consent form’’. Meanwhile, the bad news had traveled to Bilal’s father and he had literally ran the 10 mile stretch to Shopian. He jumped into a cab and rushed to SMHS but his arrival wasted another precious half-an-hour. By the time [no comma] Bilal was placed on the table and surgeons prepared their scalpels and scissors, death had already gained an advantage. It was 60:40 against his life. And each time the white door of the operation theatre opened, the chances of Bilal’s life kept on fading. As the minutes went by, his father, Thukur, started biting his nails, and nervously rubbing his hands, Javeed his silent companion. And as dusk fell, Thakur looked like a shadow moving in the yellow lights of the long narrow alley. Suddenly, there were sounds of hurried footsteps and a few women ran to Thakur. Bilal’s mother and older sister had come. Thakur was unable to talk, his throat dried by hours of anxiety. There was still a glimmer of hope and Bilal’s mother and sister sobbed during the wait. Once in a while, his mother would shout loudly, breaking the strange silence of the trauma. “He (Bilal) was born after years of prayers,” she would wail. “We had fought with God, seeking him.” Then she returned to her sobs. Darkness fell. Bilal’s father - Thukur was now silent, as if frozen in the grief. Perhaps he had read the eyes of the white-apron-clad masked men walking slowly out of the operation theatre. After three-long-hours, the doctors didn’t tell Thukur that Bilal lost the battle with death, perhaps unable to put it in words. They just motioned for the stretcher. And Bilal came out, attired in a snow-white winding sheet. Javeed said he couldn’t hear the loud wails, he couldn’t photograph the mother as she tore apart her phiran. “My finger seemed frozen. I hadn’t just witnessed the death, for the first time, I had smelled it. I had lived a life of restlessness and desperation, hope and aspiration of a waiting father,” he said. “Those three hours were so long – longer than anything I had ever done in life.” | ||||
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URL: http://www.expressindia.com/fullstory.php?newsid=42774
Expressindia
| The Indian Express
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