The Taj Conspiracy by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar Page A

brothers? Turn our back on a struggle of five decades because the president of Pakistan wants to warm his chair till he dies? What about the new initiatives?’
    He glanced at the sheet of paper in his hands and read aloud. ‘An agreement has been reached by India and Pakistan to start a bus service across the ceasefire line in Kashmir. To put life back into a flagging peace process and give Kashmiris a chance to have a say in their future.’ The nostrils of his distinctly Pashtun nose flared to impressive size until his firm mouth opened to spit, ‘Betraying the blood of the Kashmiri mujahideen!’
    The link between jihadi ideology and the Pakistan army was old. In 1948, Pakistan was stinging from India’s refusal to hand over Kashmir, and people were angry. But the angriest were the conservative Pashtun tribesmen in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province, hundreds of kilometres away. They held tribal jirgas and for hours the elders sat, sipped tea, and debated. They waited for the Kashmiris to revolt, and when that didn’t happen, they scrambled together a volunteer army in the pioneering use of mujahideen to liberate Kashmir.
    Jalaluddin strode down the narrow room, hands clasped behind. To calm his mind he focused on the mission that his ex-general in the ISI had assigned him. He smirked as he pictured a marble monument in his mind, bustling with kafirs, and then exploding the next instant, showering dust, skin and bloodied limbs. He turned to the young mujahid and spat out, ‘First the Hindus demolish Babri Masjid. Then they give us the carnage of Godhra. Now a “bus of peace”. In turn we’ll present these Hindus with something they will never forget. Something so huge it will shake their complacent dal-eating selves! And ridicule them in the eyes of the entire world.’

Diary
    I killed my father the day I turned six.
    It was after he had gifted me my brand-new Hero bicycle, its shiny red colour heralding what was to unfold. He was unaware, of course, and had chosen the particular colour after consulting me. ‘Apple-red,’ he had smilingly endorsed, ‘for the apple of my eye.’ But apples have worms in them, sometimes. An apple is also a dangerous fruit: don’t Christians and Jews believe that one bite condemned mankind to death? Anyway, apple-red it was and I picked the colour because it is the colour of blood— though, I have to admit, the varied symbolism of ‘apple’ that I learnt as I grew struck me as particularly appropriate.
    The bicycle was brought home and I rode it in the veranda, then the lawn, to the proud applause of my parents, and the guarded enthusiasm of the gardener, the cook, and my ayah—frequent victims of my childish pranks. Ayah, though, was privy to some of my ‘oddities’—a term my father used to describe some of my behaviour.
    Like the fact that I still suckled at my mother’s breast, despite father’s explicit command to discontinue the practice.
    But I liked to nestle against my mother’s softness, her long black hair veiling my face, the red bindi aglow on her smooth, fair forehead. She liked it too, the times when I nibbled a nipple and she winced, making as if to smack me, instead arching her back as I strengthened my suckling. It was what I had seen father do to her. On hot, sultry afternoons, when father returned for his siesta and my mother and he retired to their cool bedroom, I pretended to sleep in my room. After Ayah left, I would sneak into the rambling garden outside the windows of my parents’ room. The windows would be shuttered but one slat was broken—enough for a peephole. I did not like what my father did to my mother, but my mother seemed to enjoy it. I studied that look on her face and strove for it when I suckled at her breast.
    But returning to the birthday present.
    After I had ridden my bicycle and eaten the celebratory dish of halwa-poori, my father retired for his customary evening bath. It was the middle of February, a wintry dusk had