Rajeev Kumar Nagotra
This school fell under the purview of a recent order of the DC, Jammu that demanded a closure of all the schools within 10 kms of Jammu’s border with Pakistan. The day the school reopened after this brief closure, there was a strange alacrity all over the campus. Huddled around the arts teacher during the lunch break, a group of students was listening to Bikram’s closest ever encounter with death.
Bikram is a 13 year old kid of a short and stout built. His light pink skin colour, a chubby face and bubbly demeanor tell everything about his pampered and prosperous childhood. Humility, warmth and joy exudes constantly the conduct and the smile of this well-fed and well-loved child. His pocket usually teeming with money is, incidentally, another reason why he is surrounded by steadfast and obedient friends all the time. On a personal note, I like Bikram because of his extremely mild manners and an endearing nature which is quite a rarity amongst the teenagers now a days. However, what I find particularly striking about him is his drawing and painting skills. In him, I get to see an exceptional painter in his formative years. For his age, he shows an extraordinary talent with the brush. The concentration and patience he displays at this age is already indicating that he is going to be name to reckon with in this region.
In the arts class, Bikram was narrating how a couple of days before, a cartridge fired from a Pakistani machine gun from across the border had hit his bedroom’s wall narrowly sparing his bedside window. The conversation at once got me riveted to the chair. He had even brought the cartridge to substantiate his story. It was one aerodynamically designed heavy piece of metal roughly 6-7 centimeters long with spiral scratches at its broadest cross-section. The scratches had formed when the bullet penetrated the wall with the rotating motion of a screw. And Bikram told us that his father had let the bullet cool down for some time before taking it out of the wall. Apparently the bullet was extremely hot. I was seeing a cartridge for the first time in my life and was already overwhelmed from holding a tool of death in my hands. I am sure the students sitting around must have been amused by the expression of a child-like shock and curiosity on the face of their teacher. It took me a few moments before I could gather myself back and try to explain to the students how the bullet’s temperature would have risen when its kinetic energy was converted into heat energy while penetrating the concrete wall against the force of friction. But deep inside, my spirit was numb from the fact that the wall chosen by this firearm belonged to Bikram’s room. The boy was in deep sleep at 2 AM in his cozy bed when the firearms started shrieking across his village. It is only a matter of chance, and the firearm might as well have entered the teenager’s body instead of the wall. His uncle had received a bullet injury in his foot while sleeping in his courtyard during a similar night a couple of years ago. After all, it was the same house on this side and the same enemy on the other side of the border. I had often read and talked about the uncertainty of life but here, sitting in front of this young boy and holding a cartridge in my hands, all my talks and readings seemed so hollow. One of his obedient friends appeared with the samosas and the fries Bikram had wished to eat for his lunch. The generous kid immediately started offering and sharing the snacks with everyone around while at the same time describing to me how the cross-border firing makes his blood run cold. Infact it makes everybody’s blood run cold except his Dadu’s (his grandfather has been an army veteran). Like the snacks, the description was also served with giggles and a childlike abandon. I was wondering as to what was more intense – my interest in this kid’s life on the border or his interest in the samosas and the fries.
Reclining comfortably with legs spawned in front of a TV in our deeply urban houses, we listen listlessly to the accounts of ceasefire violations without feeling the heat of the cartridge of a machine gun. The eerie darkness of our share of the sky is not disrupted by the criss-crossing firearms. Our elders and kids do not have to be packed into a car and taken to safer places at 2AM. It is so convenient for us to lend support to the cries of warmongers when our shops and offices are open as usual for business, children are not missing a single day of their schools and healthcare, transportation, electricity and water are all available without any interruption. However, the life and an appeal for the war is not so easy for the border denizens. The bountiful paddy fields look so promising around this time of the year. The farmer’s hardwork and the nature’s benevolence are about to bear fruits. Having to leave all this and their homes for an unknown period of time is the worst thing to fall upon the farmers of the border villages. The Urdu teacher informed in a separate conversation that all such border skirmishes as well as the wars took place around this time of the year. He himself was having sleepless nights thinking about his family living in a distant village in Poonch. The family could be relocated to a safer place but his greatest worry was about the buffalo he had recently bought. It is not possible to run around with the buffalo in such times. The poor man had spent his savings of three-years to buy this cattle. He was praying day and night for peace to prevail on the border so that he does not have to let go of his buffalo. The economy of a country may depend upon wars (US being one famous case), but the micro-economics of the poor teacher’s house depends heavily on this buffalo. But who cares about him? Nobody. The nation is already immensely elated with the Indian army’s surgical strikes in the POK and is passionately discussing and speculating about the possible response from the other side. Nobody is in the mood to stop his war-hysteria for a moment and think what it really is like for a 13 year old boy to have his blood running cold from the shower of firearms in the middle of a night. Nobody wants to know how it feels when a poor man has to leave his fields and cattle unattended and scramble for safety in some temporary accommodation far away from home.
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