The Gravediggers of Kashmir

My job is neither rewarding nor thrilling. I, in fact inherited it. I am Kabir. I dig graves for a living. My job doesn't rank among the most covetable ones. After all, a 'good day' at work for me is heart breaking for a lot of other people whose near and dear one dies.

In my town, I am not looked upon with much respect or reverence. Meeting me is considered very obnoxious and inauspicious by most of my town's residents. If I am on the way, they always think that I have some dreadful and tragic news to tell. For my town people, I am a necessary evil – one who prepares ground for their last journey towards heaven. My field of work is in the dusty, deserted and forlorn graveyard on the north end road off Regiment Market.

This profession of grave digging has kept my kinsmen employed and busy for generations. We had no land to till and neither any trade or job. My father boasted sometime – the grave digging is an evergreen monopolistic job since it is a profession that is not going to 'die' anytime soon.

When my father took over this job of digging graves from his father, I started out with assisting him. Ten years later, I was full time at my work, after the tough manual labor took its toil on my father's health. He had to do many other odd manual jobs to feed his large family.

When someone in or around my town dies, I am informed immediately. If I am out of town, a man is sent out in search of me without delay. I must be around soon since grave digging in the small and messy graveyard where a right place is very hard to find, is solely my concern, duty and skill. No one else can do this peculiar job. Even if I am ill, I must be present in the graveyard to guide the laborer to dig a hole at a proper place and make grave of right dimension and size.

As the news of death reaches me, I set out on my job be it rain, shine or storm. After retrieving my spade and shovel which remain resting in the shed next to the graveyard's entrance on all other normal days, I hunt around the graveyard to locate the oldest grave, owing to its limited area and place available.

Selection for the new place for a new burial is done by me based on the date of the body buried previously, assuming that the body buried earlier might have completely decomposed and must have become part of the earth.

In some cases, the bones of the buried person are still around, but in other cases horror awaits me underneath the soil – semi-decomposed or non-decomposed body, thanks to the embalming or chemicals injected into the body for avoiding decay. This is done to facilitate a last glimpse of the body for the dead person's relatives when the burial is delayed due to some or other reasons.

If the body is not decomposed, I have to bury it again and dig another grave. If there is present a negligible portion of the dead body, I bury those disintegrating parts within the premises of the graveyard before preparing the grave for the dead person. Since the number of embalmed bodies from Gulf countries is increasing, chances of bodies having not decomposed completely are high. Airtight coffins also contribute to this occurrence.

I am accustomed to the dreaded sights and handling filthy earth. I don't prefer to wear gloves during any stage of my digging job. Gloves restrict free movements of my fingers. Since my childhood days, I am used to handle the spade this way.

The remuneration for this not-so-rosy job of digging deep graves is just a few hundred bucks for me. If the relatives of the dead are affluent enough, then I get more than a thousand bucks sometimes. Ironically my income depends on the frequency of deaths in my area. Sometimes I am called from the nearby places too when the gravediggers there are not easily available.

On all other days, when I don't dig graves, I do a number of odd jobs. I am employed as a laborer, attendant or watchman temporarily at different Super Market outlets. When I was employed as a guard in the Imperial Shoe Factory, I enjoyed that job better. Digging graves is a bit mind-numbing and depressingly emotional job. You see wailing people and feel like howling and weeping particularly when a known person dies untimely.

The business of death has run into bad days now. Apart from God, there are other obnoxious agents which kill people these days. Insurgency, extremists , grenade attacks , remote controlled bombing by militants, crossfire and custody deaths multiplied my work of grave digging sometimes that I have to engage laborers to dig caves at short notices. Though I am suitably paid for that but in my heart I feel for the innocent people losing precious lives for no fault or misdoing. It is all for capturing seat of power. Politics has been communalized and criminalized now.

As the militancy raged, deaths became everyday. There are so many bodies to be buried at short notices that a new layer of soil has to be laid, with a new set of graves on top of the old ones.

I have lifted a lot of dead bodies. I have buried up to 20 bodies together. The graveyards all over other places are overflowing. Militancy related violence has taken lives of thousands of innocent people in the valley.

Who can better feel for the innocent youth of my valley? The number of young and able-bodied boys has come down. Most of them have picked up guns and many other died in fake encounters with police. To raise the morale of forces, the police resort to this practice.

I knew this harsh reality well since I am the misfortunate father of one of the earliest and famous militant commanders –Hamid, my only son. One day Hamid left home to trek cross the border into Pakistan and by summer next year, the young unemployed Hamid had been transformed into one of the famous militant commanders of the time, one of the men who founded the insurgency.

Here lies his grave. The tears in my eyes have dried up. Yes, my son was a militant. When he didn't get a job, he picked up the gun. After three years, he became a martyr. I have got all this engraved on his grave – In the memory of my dear son, Hamid, who ruined his youth and his father's old age. A small tomb has been erected on his grave by Riphat who does this job for the rich people who can afford to buy the precious land in the graveyard and erect tombs and document on stone – words of mourning, love and bereavement.

And this tomb maker Riphat's story is unique and tragic. He moved to Srinagar a decade ago. His father had died when Riphat was only a teenager. His mother sold vegetables to support the family of seven. In search of a living, Riphat chanced to meet me when both of us were working as laborer on Grand Mall construction site. He could cut marble stone like an expert craftsman. Then the construction project was stopped because of public agitation by a local political party which advocated the interests of farmers from whom the land was taken at cheaper rates.

After we were laid off, I offered Riphat to accompany me. Riphat came with me to my town. My son, Hamid had finished college and was trying to get a job. But there was anarchy everywhere. He tried hard. The politicians were demanding big money for a government job. For three years, he went from pillar to post but since he had neither recommendation nor money, he was given no job. He was totally frustrated. And then the inevitable happened. His ears were poisoned by people of extreme ideology. Brainwashed, he ran away from home. Hamid lost his track and he was killed for that. Riphat became my second son. He began to work etching on marble.

He had a good job here. There were many deaths to document on stone. Most of the dead were young people. The scorching days and the frosty nights were very painful. Seeing such a curse of God, Riphat gets into depression sometimes. I try to give a religious interpretation to the 20 years old insurgency in our valley, 'what happened in these two decades was because we dropped the veils from our conscience. We stopped obeying Allah's teachings.'

Not only Riphat but my brother Maqbool, too is scary and uncomforting these days. He lost his son-in-law who was shot dead by militants who mistook him to be a police informer. Maqbool was a helper attached with a reputed doctor at Srinagar. When militancy was at peak, he ran away to his town here and started his practice as a Registered Medical Practitioner. He had a good luck here. One day in 1990, across the town he came face to face with the bullet-gored body of a militant. The government doctor was on leave. The police requested Maqbool to finalize the post-mortem. He started a seemingly unending journey after that post-mortem.

Maqbool had a heart of stone. He even did post-mortems climbing up in Police trucks – up to eight bodies at a time. Bodies arrived with no limbs, no faces, or in pieces. This played havoc with his sate of mind particularly after Maqbool's son-in-law was butchered mercilessly by the militants. Maqbool became so upset that he could not sleep at night. He acquired a bad temper. He became a chain smoker. He used to go into a strange frenzy before a post-mortem, screaming wildly at his colleagues. He was often pulled away from dinner to perform post-mortem and even at odd hours of night.

Now, there are signs that things are on the mend in Kashmir, Maqbool often gets cases related to Kashmir's new realities – suicides by security men, or by civilians who drown, poison or hang themselves amid rising numbers of suicides in Kashmir.

There are hundreds and thousands of mourners like me and Maqbool in every city and town in my beautiful valley for which poets had said that if there is a paradise anywhere, it is here in Kashmir valley. For us, it is a living hell – where each night is horrid nightmare and everyday is a frightening experience. Riphat is hopeful since he is young and he is getting married to Sakeena, my lovely daughter next week. I am happy that once again celebrations will come at the door of my house. I will no long mourn for Hamid now.

The author is an officer with Indian Audit and Accounts Department. His short stories and articles are regularly published in Tehelka, The Indian Express, The Tribune, The Telegraph, Children World, Indian Horizons, Daily Excelsior, Swagat, Alive, Woman's Era, Assam Tribune, The Pioneer, Sahara Care etc.

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The Gravediggers of Kashmir

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