Pakadi's fauji

After three days of snow the roads are for the first time clear for movement. Thankfully the road connecting Haripora and Srinagar is NH1A, the lifeline of army supply. Had it been some other road we would still be stuck, like the tourists in Gulmarg who have now started selling their cameras and jackets to pay hotel bills for overstaying. NH1A is strategically very significant. In the Kargil war it was Pak army’s main target. Cutting it off meant easy capture of the Leh area. Today the road looks very different. Fields on both sides are covered with over a feet of snow and the vast whiteness on the sides is contrasted only by leafless trees or the solitary security man at every kilometre. Standing alone for 12 hours with feet dug deep in snow may be his duty but not quite something he enjoys. Who knows where he belongs. He has no stake here. Before he came here probably he didn’t even know K of Kashmir. Like a robot he just followed orders and marched north. Because if he didn’t, his wife and children, probably in some far off village in UP or Bihar would starve to death. With about a fortnight of training on an automatic he holds it like a baton, as if completely oblivious of its lethal power. The machine dangles from his shoulders like a liability. When he moves, he drags it like a broom. When he is bored, tired he uses it, the only companion he has in this wilderness, as a prop to rest his tired legs. His bodyweight on the gun that’s supposed to bring peace. It does. It fires. The bullet rips apart the chin making its exit through the temporal lobe. Pakadi’s fauji is no more. He has died a ‘martyr’s’ death.