Bullet

It’s 7 pm. I head to the drawing room, switching on every fan in the house. This is that season again. No matter where you are, sweat will find you. Heatwaves have become de rigueur.

It is toss time. The camera cuts to the pitch. One team in garish orange marked by asymmetrical black lines, another in textured dark blue. The cricket should be exciting - a powerhouse batting lineup against Boult and Bumrah. But there is something wrong with the sound of it all. The IPL is usually a sensory assault. Today it feels a bit quieter, hardly able to break through the knot in the stomach.

Harsha Bhogle’s face speaks before the words arrive. “..the killing of innocent Indians enjoying a simple holiday in their own country. We will play today, but it’s only a game.”

The previous afternoon, five men, carrying M4 carbines and AK-47 rifles, emerged from the dense pine forests surrounding the Baisaran Valley meadow in Pahalgam, where tourists had gathered to experience Kashmir at its most divine. The terrorists asked for names and religions, forced men to recite the Islamic kalima, checked for circumcision to identify non-Muslims, and then shot from close range. At last count - 28 dead, at least 20 more injured.

The Baisaran meadow is the one you see when you search for ‘Kashmir valley’ on Google Images. The shapes and colours from the first page show a shade of Kashmir that we immediately recognise from our binoculars: lush green fields, chinar trees, rivers sliding under low wooden walkways, houses that seem to have popped from paintings, tall peaks in the backdrop.

It all looks different now. The green is muted, a shade of pale, like grass left too long under the sun. Bold red captions shout from screens. A woman in beige, newly married, numb, sitting next to her lifeless husband, at the same spot where honeymooning couples spread picnic sheets and bathe in golden sunlight.

The pictures from Pahalgam today are speckled with blood clots. The videos have loud crackles of gunshots followed by a chorus of primal shrieks. It’s impossible to look; harder still, to process. Indian news channels are useless on good days. Today, they have gone over the edge. No information on the how and why, just a screeching demand for wine bottles filled with blood.

There is a palpable sense of anger bubbling outside the windows. Rage, to be precise. Rage at the breaching of security in the most heavily militarised zone of the country; at terrorists who brought death to tourists carrying nothing more dangerous than chai and cookies, cameras and clasped hands; at the way religion was used as a viewfinder in their guns; at Pakistan; at Kashmir; at an ideology that many believe prescribes bullets and grenades as toys; at Muslims.

Pat Cummins and Hardik Pandya are gracious. They send heartfelt condolences to the grieving and condemn the heinous act. I sometimes feel I only ever hear “condemn” around killings and murders. I have read it some 50 times in the last couple of hours. There is a one-minute silence before the game, honouring the lives lost. Players, umpires, and commentators are wearing black bands on their arms.

The cricket is a touch drab. Trent Boult and Deepak Chahar have the Sunrisers Hyderabad batters in a daze. I unlock my phone and order food. There is an amazing bagel shop near my house. They make one with spiced cream cheese, scrambled egg white, and a thin slice of bacon.

I refresh the Reels page, and find a store in Bombay selling filter coffee ice-cream in tubs. A few beads of sweat leave my forehead and land on my flabby stomach. I shouldn’t. The next reel is hilarious. Baba Ramdev surfacing from a pool to the background music of “Tip Tip Barsa Paani.” I send it to some close friends, and a couple of others who I only speak to in memes.

I go to my homepage. The entire timeline is burning. Alongside the streams of condemnation and condolences from blue-ticked handles, I see the yellow flames of rage turning orange. I see a friend - well-educated, thoughtful, gentle - ask for a “Final Solution.” Another pleading the govt to ensure a terrorist-free country, even if it comes at the cost of 1000 AQI, a broken infrastructure, a broken economy, or all of them together. One says, “We have seen enough. They live on our land, eat our food, and kill us the first chance they get.”

It is a sobering sight, seeing people you have shared meals with, gone on trips with, exchanged books with, picking up weapons.

I see another picture from Pahalgam. It’s a list of names, all very familiar-sounding. The caption tells me that I should be threatened. It insists that an entire religion is out to get “my people”.

Threatened? I’ll tell you what I am truly afraid of. Birds. Every morning, I go up to the terrace to drink some Vitamin D. There is an eagle - I am convinced it is the same one - who sits on the parapet. It stares at me as I walk in cirlces, stretch. It is probably biding its time, sizing up prey. The eagle doesn’t know that I am easy meat. It could've been a pigeon and spooked me, no stress. If there is a pigeon in my room, I am not in my room.

I am threatened by heights sometimes. I have a condition fancifully known as bathmophobia. Look it up. It has nothing to do with hygiene. It is the fear of falling down stairs, and I have never once fallen down a flight of stairs. Yet, I can’t come down the stairs in my house without pausing. It makes no sense.

I fear losing the ability to speak, to remember things, to walk and run and join occasional football games. Very often, I fear losing the smooth flow of the C-minor scale beneath my fingers.

Rohit Sharma tonks Pat Cummins deep into the stands. A couple of months back, his bat seemed to exist in a different postcode from the ball. He will be 38 in three days. But, in the last two innings, he is showing some of the skills that made him an artist, his bat a brush. I guess some things don’t leave you. Suryakumar does a Suryakumar; Mumbai wins easy; the bagel is delicious.

I go up to the terrace for a night walk. The air is thick, humid but gentle. The eagle isn’t there. It never is, at this time. I am thinking of Parvez, a friend from Delhi. Well, less friend and more trusty partner at our football games. Parvez was a special footballer, the kind who sometimes made my amateur bones cramp with jealousy. He knew the field like the back of his hand. I was a midfielder, and he was the dream forward to aim the passes at. I always wondered why he never went beyond the Delhi under 19s.

By spirit, Parvez is pure north Indian. He can talk for hours. Once he kicks into gear, he doesn’t stop. You could call him at 3 am, merely mention chhola-kulcha, and you’ll hear the ignition of his car before the call is over. By temperament, he is Parvez. Unlike anyone else I know. He reads a book a day. He once went to a first date carrying roses touched with a spray of his cologne and a collection of Mary Oliver’s poems.

Another time, after a game that Parvez won us with a hat-trick, we had all gone for a celebratory meal. Parvez mentioned that he had moved offices to some place in East Delhi, and was struggling to find an apartment within an auto ride’s distance. Being a bachelor was a tall enough barrier, but his name seemed to lock many doors. Sometimes, owners refused to show him their house.

I remember the tone of dissociation in his voice, as if this was a small pebble in his shoe, part of walking through a dug-up street.

By the next evening, cricket has shed its solemnity. The cheerleaders are back and the DJ is blaring third-grade Bollywood music. Jofra Archer is bowling Test cricket stuff in T20s. The ball ricochets off Virat Kohli’s bat into the boundary hoardings. I almost had tickets to this game.

Someone sends me a news report of Kashmiri students being hounded out of their dormitories and rented apartments. In Jammu and Kashmir, more than a thousand locals have been detained already. Just for questioning, the police and army are keen to offer.

Later that evening, a fourteen-year-old boy, with a face as cherubic as his age, dispatches Bhuvaneshwar Kumar into the stands. Rahul Dravid can’t stop smiling.

On newspapers, news channels, and social media, public figures have been pulled up. Filmstars, athletes, and journalists. Everyone apart from the public servants elected to ensure safety in the country. Some news channels have created Marvel superhero-style edited clips of the home minister climbing the stairs of an aeroplane. Will they take the final leap of faith and play the Top Gun theme? Might as well.

Neeraj Chopra, one of India’s greatest athletes, finds his patriotism and integrity questioned for inviting Paris Olympics gold medalist Arshad Nadeem to India for an athletics event in May. He has been forced to issue a statement on his social channels. The pain is evident in his words - saddened that a life’s work of taking Jana Gana Mana to Olympic podiums has now been reduced to a small detail, blanketed by his crime of not showing the middle finger to his fellow athlete in green. Two Olympic medals for India is not patriotic enough.

I am thinking of Neeraj's mother, Mrs Saroj Devi. On the night of watching her son finish second to Arshad Nadeem at Paris, she had said, “Hum toh bahut khush hain. Gold jiska aaya hai, woh bhi hamara ladka hai. Mehnat karte hain sab.” (“We are very happy. The one who won gold is also our son. Everyone works hard.”)

It’s impossible not to think of Arshad Nadeem’s mother too, raising Mrs Saroj's grace with some of her own. “He (Neeraj) is also like my son. He is Nadeem's friend and also his brother. Wins and losses are part of the sport. May god bless him, may he win medals. They are like brothers, I prayed for Neeraj too.”

Someone I spent eight years in school with has posted a message on Instagram. It’s simple and succinct: “I hope Modi kills them all. And to the Pakistanis who are sitting in our country, the Hindu civilization is coming for you.” The same person who used to call her friends aap, who was so soft-spoken that we had to sometimes poke her to make her point.

In Kolkata, a gynecologist tells her patient, a pregnant Muslim woman, “People from your religion are killing people from my religion, you people are murderers.”

I am reminded of an episode of Black Mirror. It begins with a soldier hunting down an enemy. They call them roaches. These grotesque creatures with distorted faces and bodies, built to trigger disease and death. Our soldier hunts them through rubble-strewn streets and deserted villages. But, all of a sudden, his neural implant malfunctions. And then, he sees. Those weren’t monsters biting through human bodies. They were people. Just normal, average people. Their faces had been masked by digital phantoms, their voices twisted into shrieking, inhuman registers. His heroic narrative collapses into something far more sinister - he is not humanity’s shield but its sword, chopping down the marginalised, the hated, the inconvenient.

The AK-47 fires the 7.62×39mm cartridge, which typically travels at about 715 m/s from the muzzle. These bullets are known for deep penetration into organs and bones, often piercing through the entire human body.

But a bullet pierces through so much more than flesh. It pierces through the hearts of those sitting many miles away, wondering if lives are this cheap, if the terrorists had even paused for a breath before firing at faces they had never seen before, who had done nothing to antagonise them. It pierces through the psyche of a people already filled with mistrust, and their willingness to smile at the stranger on the street; it pierces through conversations, kindness, compassion, rationale; it pierces through dignity in a country where we measure belonging by the sound of a name. It infuses new poison into the black river we drink from. A bullet, when it pierces a body, takes out a bit of humanity and leaves behind a hollow exit wound.

Every time a Pahalgam happens, we measure its death toll the wrong way.