Earlobe-Eaters’ and Scholars

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Do you find a link between the two?

NOSTALGIA BY ZGM

Small is beautiful. I am not talking about a book of the same title written by E.F. Schumacher. I
am not talking about a book ranked amongst the hundred books that influenced the world. And is
a loveable read even after thirty five years of its publication- I am talking about my small world
— full of dreams; many broken and scattered on the bare floor of our history like the bangles of a
Hindu widow.
I tumbled in my small world in ten feet by ten feet room. It was like moving from a smaller
burrow to a small one. Like many children of my age group I opened my eyes at my home and
not in the hospital. The glare of the arc lamps did not dazzle me. The white walls of the S.M.H.S.
Hospital did not click shutter of my eyes. The soothing green clay daubed walls of the square
room with two latticed windows with an inverted cone-shape blub dangling from a silken wire
interwoven like the braids of village belle on the middle beam of the room greeted my half-shut
eyes. I do not know when I wide opened my eyes- ever since it has happened I don’t think I ever
closed my eyes. I was not a precocious child but inanimate objects revealed to me the painful
stories and agonizing tales of my birth burg. The floor of the room was covered with hand
crafted rugs “Ghabas” made of old blankets with intricate floral designs. The gaudy flowers
spoke about dexterity of hands of the craftsmen and vivacity of their hearts but they were painful
reminders of the day when this land had lost its freedom- it were the Moguls that had introduced
this rug in Kashmir.
The room might have been agog at my birth I was the second son in the family but the outside
scene on that day was weird and bizarre: Men wearing red caps with wooden rifles, that could
never shoot a fire slinging on their semi-famished shoulders strutting like rooster outside the hen
house greeting dark complexioned turbaned militia- and hounding their own brethren wearing
green caps and carrying green crescent flags on their sunken shoulders. I never believed my half-
shut eyes …but it was reality that I learnt much later from books.
My first birth cry had drowned in the deafening sound of the mortar fired from the gun fitted
atop the fort on the Kohimaran hillock. Like the cries of the millions that continue to be
drowned in the roaring of guns, drone rattling and devastating shrieks of cruise missiles, ballistic
missiles and guided missiles my cry had also gone unheard. So has perhaps of many children
born that day. I do not know how my first cry sounded- my parents, the midwife and my
grandmother also had not heard it- I do not know if I bewailed on adding one more bonded to the
swarm of bonded- that had once revolted but were drowned in a tributary of the great veth. It was
the last cannon fired from the fort announcing the noon time. - After this fire the guns atop the
fort turned silent forever- but the bondage did not end up.
The fort atop the legendry hillock that our forefathers believed was the first symbol of our
deliverance from the oppression and the tyranny of the demons that gulped humanity was
reminiscent of the cannibals that ate the ‘earlobes of the dead’. The last cannon fired from the fort
much before the yellow and red flag atop the mast was pulled down turned me elegist. I mourned
the ‘learned’- I mourned the “learned” that had joined the ‘earlobe eaters’, the mosque-lockers,
and those that peeled humans alive like hot potatoes and hanged them on the crossings. With
half-opened eyes I did read on the daubed walls the stories of these “learned” that sucked blood
of their own brethren like blood-sucking conenose.
I remember the mast on which yellow and yellow and red flags had been unfurled for hundred
sixty years in my childhood looked like bare spine stripped of bones and flesh- it craved for a flag
but no flag was hoisted on it.
In my childhood when cannons no more announced the noon but gongs from the shrines in our
locality continued to remind the faithful five times about the prayers- the hey days of the
“learned” who had joined the ‘earlobe-eaters’ had ended but they continued to swagger like the
Pharaohs of Egypt. These “learned” were no Mehmood Gami or Rasul Mir that enriched the
literary landscape of this land with mysticism and romance. They were no Gani whose ‘soul
soared’ but they were haughty quislings whose coffers were packed to full with skeletons.
Much after my birth - the stark flag posted atop the Kohimaran continuously reminded me of the
olden days- now I never looked at the fort or the ramparts around it as symbols of our dignity but
as reminders of the ‘beguilers’ and ‘ear-lobe’ eaters. But it was my dream and dream of my
friends to put a flag on the naked flag post overlooking entire city.
I remember many times I and my school friends planned to put a flag on the mast.
I remember during one recess period we climbed hillock- we climbed from the Western side- we
crossed every ridge and jumped over every crevice, climbed over boulder in which the Tantric
artists had seen stars of David and many other had seen images of deities and painted them red
and yellow. After toiling an hour or so we reached atop the hillock and were just a jump or two
away from the flag post that had remained symbol of authority for more than two hundred years-
but on finding out that we had no flag with us to hoist on this post we returned to our school – I
am now grey but the fort continues to be without a flag- perhaps the flag is also yet to be decided.