The Shrouded Woman
Don’t cry
child, in
your
courtyard
they bathed the
dead sun, and
buried the moon,
before leaving.
— Faiz Ahmed Faiz
Srinagar. 2:00am.
The city burned at night. Burned with desire; burned with flesh dripping in the minds of soldiers; burned in the nightmares of the people; burned with silence, darkness, whispers of death, loss, pollution, and schemes. No one walked at night here. Curfews be damned–what happened at night to those who wandered out had to be worse than the death and evisceration of flesh in the witness of the Sun.
The few streetlights that were allowed whispered as if gas lamps bursting with secrets. Windows were shuttered and the Old City was barely lit by the stars. Brick buildings and their colourful shutters looked like hills of bloodened mud in the darkness. The silence of night was louder than the crushing of bodies and homes. The silence whispered, offering impossible dreams and shutting its eyes from the gore that wanted to rush down the streets. The woman, who stood in the shadows as herself a shadow, was shrouded in the complete absence of light: a horrific fog followed her and became the aari on her chador, viscous. Her presence was a movement in the corner of an eye, the blinking of ancient street lights, the movement of leaves in the wind, part of the darkness. When she made her presence known, she was there for the briefest
moment, two brown eyes piercing and splitting the already broken soul. If it were possible to extend one’s consciousness long enough to know what was happening, the men would know that she was their death.
***
Srinagar, Indian army barracks. 2:30am.
Army barracks fared better, but only slightly better, than the houses and dwellings of Kashmiris. These were the old, skeletal buildings surrounded by electric fences, useless courtyards, and underground rooms that are never rid of the bouquet of burnt flesh, vomit, and melted rubber. One key difference in these buildings was the power imbalance hovering over the citizens and the unlikelihood of barracks being destroyed in blasts or bulldozed in the “search for insurgents”–ironically those who occupied these barracks. At night, if not on a mission, the soldiers sat around skimpy tables under neurotic fluorescent lights drinking beer and playing cards, rifles tilted against the wall, cigarettes eternally smoking in hands, mouths, on ashtrays.
This sweaty busyness of the soldiers (the insurgents) meant that the creeping fog went unnoticed as it rolled in, too quickly enveloping the empty courtyard. The fog was grey and black and when looked at for too long, made one’s neural network blink like the old fluorescents; it was all wrong, but then it was just fog, yes? Just fog. It breathed as it hugged the windows of the flat building, the nose of it inhaling the stink of the men inside and their patheticness. It breathed in a hungry way: she wanted to gorge herself, for she was starving and the brown Earth demanded sacrifice.
Thin weaving fingers formed, curling around the edges and corners of the barracks, caressing the plaster like a lover. The windows were covered with a thick curtain of her horrific fog–light, sound, and scent now absent. The night around the barracks had its own atmosphere,
and the sleeping birds paid no mind. When so much Koshur flesh has been cannibalised, what is it when the State gets a taste of their own torture? The people almost didn’t mind it. She craved it–craved the flesh, the pure taste of fear and the stench of death, the fracturing of already broken souls, and so she sought it out. She was the unknown redemption for Kasheer. As her fog embraced the building, kashida danced in the air, forming paisleys, beautiful, imaginary tendrils of poison. A soldier walked into the courtyard to check his cell signal, something else the people didn’t have.
***
The round little soldier, in his green camos, walked into the courtyard with his back to the closed barracks door. He smacked his cellphone against the palm of his hand and held it up to the sky, as if pleading with God to give him a signal for his sins. In his ignorance, and as a sick blessing of the fog that wrapped around the complex, he didn’t notice the extra absence of light that evening, or the early frost on the ground. He didn’t notice the slow, hot breath on the back of his neck until it was almost too late. He looked up, all the hairs on his harmful little body standing up against his predator. He turned around. For a moment there was nothing in the darkness. Then, a face–beautiful, brown, kohl’d eyes… but no body–but what a fog! What an impossibility! There was no form or shape to her, and suddenly he was hallucinating paisleys dancing in the air, the patterns of kashida so often woven onto the fabric wrapped bodies of the little bitches and bastards all around him in this land of filth, of Kashmir!
He trembled in the fear that can only be felt in the last most painful moments when one’s skin is about to be torn off in a wall of flames with a heart still beating. While she still caressed the barracks, in a quick moment her weaver’s fingers worked on his flesh. In another life, she used her index finger to pull green thread through, and with a similar pattern she split the flesh of
his neck open, exposing muscles, tendons, nerves. The fog held him in place, like the chains held Kashmiri men in place to drip hot rubber down their naked flesh. With her other fingers weaving his living death, she worked on his scalenes, tasting the sickness in his body and feasting on it.
His arteries provided a craft for her. She made a small prayer and dug in further, scraping bone to make her jewels with later. Her hunger could not be satiated as she worked on all of them–all the men there–their necks fountains of sacrifice. Nerves were pulled out and lain in neat rows to make weavings with, and they sputtered and shuddered in their own deaths. Shhh, she offered.
Shhh.
His blood flowed out like a river, joining the other mens, and she danced in it. She moved gracefully, fertilising the mourning Earth, pulling up from their bodies threads for her ghost kashida. The fertile river of blood flowed through the streets of the Old City, and in the morning it would be gone.