ISSUE 52

‘The spy women are roaming the market again. Come quickly,’ a male voice on the other side of the phone informed Saqlain. It was Zubair. Before Saqlain could ask any questions or say anything, Zubair hung up, leaving him wondering if it were really possible that he had seen the women. Saqlain had himself just returned from the market and seen them entering the street where they lived.

‘What is wrong with this aunt-and-niece pair? If what Zubair just said is true, then, definitely, there is something fishy about these women,’ Saqlain thought. He unplugged the charger from his phone and left for the market.

Rumours had been rife that the pair worked for the army and the local police, and informed on people of the locality, especially the youth. These rumours stemmed from the fact that the duo was spotted several times a day at different places, each time in different attire. In the morning, they would be seen with their faces covered, jogging along a stretch of the national highway just when the armed soldiers from a nearby camp patrolled and searched with mine detectors for explosives that might have been planted by militants on or near the road. At some time in the afternoon, they would be spotted entering and exiting the cluster of villages that comprised their little town. Immediately after lunch they would walk up to a small playground in the neighbourhood, where young men and children gossiped and played different sports, spend a few minutes near the fence, and return. And in the evening, they would be seen eating at stalls, where traditional Kashmiri snacks and other food items were sold. These were their routine outings. They could, however, also be seen at other times of the day, anywhere, always together, and always dressed nicely.

This irked the young men intensely and brought back old, haunting memories. Many of them had been in jail and beaten for their alleged role in stone pelting and pro-freedom rallies, all because some ‘reliable source’ from the neighbourhood had told the police of their involvement. Some had, in fact, been filmed pelting stones at the security forces. No one was sure if the women really spied, as for several years now there had been neither protests nor incidents of stone pelting. Everyone was busy doing their own work. But their suspicions did not die down, as more and more people began talking about the women to the extent that they were now dubbed ‘spy women’.

*

Why Saqlain took a special interest in this matter was because the pair happened to be from his native village where he was born and had lived for twenty-three years. He knew the place and its people inside and out. Secondly, all the residents of that village, especially its women, were known for their courage. They could put up with the most difficult situations that arose during a protest rally, which could, in a span of minutes, turn from a singing and sloganeering crowd to a chaotic mob running for cover, dragging the injured to safety, and leaving, finally, just a few young men facing the government forces at a distance so that if a teargas canister or a bullet were to be fired from the other end, there was a little chance that it would miss the target.

Saqlain shook his head in disbelief as he approached the market that consisted of two serpentine lines of different types of shops on either side of the two-lane road. He looked around for Zubair but did not find him where he expected him to be waiting. Since the aunt and niece were not there either, Saqlain thought that his friend might have gone after them. Yet, he took a detailed look at his surroundings, just to see what people around him were busy with on this cold late morning. Standing outside a closed stall at the tail of the market, Saqlain’s eyes, as if guided by some unknown force, fell on a pair of paramilitary troopers standing outside a grocery shop across the road. The spot where they were standing was one of the many where paramilitary forces would station for the day, leaving for their camp only in the evening. The troopers were conversing with each other and occasionally one of them showed his cell phone to the other. Saqlain gazed at them for a while and thought of them empathetically, ‘God knows which part of the country they may have come from and here they are standing in this cold,’ though the troopers had a proper gear on. Saqlain pitied them and their families for having to live away from each other. He imagined them with their families and playing with their children if they had any.

‘Saqlain Lala, what are you doing here?’ a sweet, female voice reached Saqlain’s ears and brought him back from the imaginary family get-together of the troopers.

‘Salaam Khala,’ Saqlain greeted the woman, surprised. ‘I was just waiting for a friend. He will be here any minute,’ he said politely.

The woman, Aabida, who was Saqlain’s paternal aunt, complained, ‘You haven’t visited your aunt even once in these three years,’ and sandwiched his head between her hands and planted a kiss on his forehead. Raising his shoulders, Saqlain looked his aunt in the eyes for a fleeting moment and then immediately hung his head. It was partly because his aunt and father had been involved in a legal fight over some part of their ancestral property and the rift it had caused between the two siblings and their respective families, and partly because Saqlain always listened to elders with his head down.

‘You don’t need to say anything. I know,’ said the aunt, her right hand on Saqlain’s shoulder. The aunt did most of the talking until the spy-woman duo appeared behind Saqlain and greeted his aunt in unison. Saqlain’s aunt let go of his shoulder and returned their greetings, wrapping her arms around them and kissing them the way she had her nephew. It was her wont, and the last time Saqlain saw her kissing someone’s forehead was two years ago when she had kissed her slain twenty-two-year-old son while his body was being prepared for burial. Aabida had been called to bid him adieu as her son’s pallbearers made their way out of the main gate of her house onto the road where hundreds of men, women, and children cried alike. Soon she went by the name Mother of the Martyr and was respected by people from all genders and age groups.

Saqlain had a moment to himself as his aunt and the spy women engaged in a conversation. He was reminded that they were next-door neighbours and Aabida probably knew everything about them. ‘Khala Jaan,’ Saqlain interrupted his aunt, hardly able to contain his excitement, ‘I am coming over for lunch today.’

‘Sure, darling,’ Aabida turned to Saqlain and found him waving at her while he slowly took some steps backwards, and uttered, ‘I will be there for sure,’ before he took off.

‘Where the hell are you right now,’ Saqlain lashed out at his friend, Zubair, over the phone, who, at the very next moment, tapped him on the back. ‘Calm down. I was watching all four of you,’ Zubair, said, and took Saqlain behind a standee that stood outside a clothes shop.

‘Where do you think they will go now,’ Zubair asked.

‘I am not sure, but I have got something very concrete that will uncover the mystery surrounding them,’ Saqlain said. ‘We don’t need to follow them anymore.’

‘That sounds like a real breakthrough,’ Zubair nearly punched Saqlain in his stomach, his signature style of celebration. He had copied Bruce Lee, ever since he had watched ‘The Way of the Dragon’. He stopped short of mimicking the late actor’s iconic screams while fighting due to the presence of shop-goers around.

‘My aunt has invited me to her home for lunch today,’ Saqlain began to recount how he thought he was going to get to the bottom of the mystery of the ‘Spy Women’.

‘That is impossible,’ Zubair was quick to interrupt, knowing that the bond between the two families had so weakened over the years that no relatives visited each other even on great occasions like Eid.

‘Things were never that bad between us. And I actually asked her if I could come over for lunch today. Leave it for now. Let’s just focus on the task at hand,’ Saqlain placed his arm around Zubair’s shoulders and told him that he would call him after lunch.

Heading back to his home, Saqlain kept thinking about the questions that his aunt might ask when she discovered that Saqlain was more than interested in the lives of the women who were neighbours than in her own wellbeing. She might well say that her nephew had a crush on Ulfat, the niece, whose big kohl eyes, as the youth in the neighbourhood would say, doubled as two high-end surveillance cameras. Saqlain, however, brushed these thoughts aside and decided to tell her what the youth in his neighbourhood thought about the aunt and the niece. ‘She will not interrogate me further if I manage to time my questions well,’ he decided, and kept walking towards his home.

*

Sitting at his aunt’s house, Saqlain noticed that neither of his cousins were home. They had both gone to write their end-semester papers, and their father was in another town for some work. So, it was just Saqlain and his aunt at lunch. Saqlain found himself struggling to find a way to allude to the spy women during the conversation, as his aunt seemed more focused on how he could eat more from an assortment of dishes kept around his plate.

‘Khala, I have a question,’ Saqlain mustered some courage. His aunt looked at him as if it was her brother sitting and eating in front of her.

‘Yes, ask dear,’ Aabida said.

‘A lot of people are talking about Ulfat and her aunt. I don’t find that nice at all. Rumour has it that they snitch on people, because they are seen roaming everywhere and every day. Can they really do that?’

‘Your elder cousin was talking about this, too, the other day. He had also heard it from someone in the bazaar,’ Aabida put it in a way that suggested that the rumour had no truth to it. ‘Finish your meal, I will tell you the true story behind why they are seen on the move quite often.’

Saqlain, despite getting closer to the truth, began to regret, his decision to ask his aunt about Ulfat and her aunt. He felt it had made it seem like the sole purpose of his visit. Looking down at his plate, Saqlain had a few more morsels of rice, some shreds of chicken leg and mutton goshtaab.He glanced at his aunt’s plate on the other side of the dining cloth and estimated that he would need to slow down, make more shreds out of the shreds of meat already on his plate to finish eating at the same time as Aabida. Having done that, he helped her with the dishes and folded the dining cloth and emptied the crumbs from it into the bin in the kitchen.

‘These are actually grief-stricken and helpless women, who have been completely misunderstood by society, especially boys like you and your cousin,’ Aabida said to Saqlain as they settled in the kitchen.

‘I have never judged them, and this is why I chose to hear it from you, as you are both their neighbour and a righteous woman. You will neither say bad about people nor will you tolerate others doing that, even if it is your own son or me.’ Saqlain’s words caused a faint smile on his aunt’s face.

‘One of my childhood teachers once taught me that no humans are perfect, no matter how hard we try to be. One way or the other, we all falter and fail. But it doesn’t end there. Some of us overcome our failures and become stronger, while some simply give in and become what they never used to be: helpless in most of the cases. And in the case of these women too,’ Aabida said in her orator-like style. ‘Ever since Ulfat lost her grandparents, not a day has passed without a fight at their house with her uncles and their wives. It is a cycle that repeats itself every day. All it needs is a small trigger, even if that happens to be a word said in passing. I spoke to the family on many occasions about this continuous fighting and the impact it is having on them and on the neighbourhood. But the chaos and misunderstanding keep widening with each passing day. They cannot stand each other’s company anymore. Whenever they assemble at home, they start quarrelling. And that is why, to avoid tearing each other’s clothes up at home, these women spend most of the time outside. They are too oppressed by their own troubles to snoop on people. They are just running away from their own pain rather than let it be a tool for others.’

While Aabida talked, Saqlain’s eyes fell on a picture, which was enclosed in a gold-rimmed frame and hanging on the wall. It showed his father and Aabida in school uniforms eating from the same tiffin box in what appeared to be a green patch of land with a canal flowing behind them.