blazing, orange light dashed across the entire length of the
horizon at what see-med like the speed of light. The skies crackled with the
sharp piercing electrical sound of rockets taking off, one after the other,
hundreds of them in a matter of seconds. In the midst of this, I was trying to
say something suitably coherent into my microphone, knowing that here there
would be no Take2s. No one had any idea what would come next. And although I
nearly jumped out of my skin the first time a rocket went whizzing past my
head, once again the tension of keeping pace with events blocked out the sense
of danger. Within minutes there were only four of us left standing on the road.
The rockets had invited immediate retaliation—it was raining shells on
Drass—not the intermittent, sporadic shelling that we had witnessed on the
highway, but direct, concentrated and cease-less bombing. Chaos broke out, as
hordes of people, journalists and army men, were jostling, pushing, tripping
over each other to somehow get out of there. In front of us, bodies collapsed
into small heaps on the ground, enveloped by orange flames rising from the road
because of the impact of the shells. Miraculously, as we waded through this
burning maze, Jami never stopped rolling his camera, prodding me to keep on
recording my observations. There are those who saw these images on television
and accused
us of glamourising the war, of giving it a "larger than life" image.
But the truth is that in those hours we were mere chroniclers and the story
unfolding before us was larger than any reality most of us had ever known.
By now, the road was deserted and we were just running with no idea of where we
were headed, when an arm shot out to catch me. It was an officer I had never
met before, a young major with a bunker just off the road-head. We were all
shepherded inside, only to discover that we were sharing that tiny space with
dozens of others. There we sat, one atop the other, someone’s leg atop
another’s back, waiting for further news. Outside, Drass was enveloped in
darkness and the war raged on, seeming to get louder and louder. Inside, and I
will never forget how stunned I was at the juxtaposition, a decrepit little
tape recorder was belting out a Hindi pop song. Guns. Shells. Film Songs. At
that moment, for all the power of the camera, I felt I would never be able to
convey the strangeness of this war, how moments like this pulled you in and
left you completely confused and inarticulate. Humming along with the music,
the soldiers seemed unperturbed and it would have been easy to confuse that
calmness with a gung-ho endorsement of the war. But to understand these boys,
was to know that the outward calmness was merely their painstakingly learnt
formula for dealing with a situation they had no space to question. The army
was a cold taskmaster, an effective indoctrinator, cultivating in its followers
the art of fatalistic acceptance. Time and again, we’d heard officers pleading
with their
brigades that they were not ready to "go up" at a given time—either
for military reasons, or just because they were sapped of strength. But when
the orders came, they threw their packs of cigarettes into their rucksacks and
started the trudge up with this suppressed pain. That would come bursting out
if you scratched the surface just a bit.
There was this one officer in the bunker the night of the Tiger Hill assault,
whose eyes were half-crazed, but filled with sadness, the eyes of a man who
wanted desperately for this war to end, for his "boys" never to have
to climb another mountain. Ever. Sensing the intensity of his rage, his junior
officer, who was only 21, would constantly crack cavalier jokes about life and
death. But when word came that their unit had to go up again, he turned around
and said quietly, "I can feel my whole life passing in front of my eyes,
like a short film. I can see all my loves and my fears. But I know I can’t
afford to think about it, can I?"
Thirteen hours on, at the crack of dawn, we toasted the ‘victory’ at Tiger Hill
by passing around a casket of gin. An entire lifetime had been lived in that
one night. Later, still crouched in one corner of the bunker, I watched as the
euphoria crumbled and collapsed, when the orders for the next assault came in.
The unit was to move up that very evening. Would they survive to tell the tale
this time around? The Hindi pop song had been replaced by a Kenny Rogers
cassette.
Country music in the hills was our flimsy veil, our wall to hide behind. It was
time to return to the moth-ridden, no-electricity, no-water Hotel Siachen in
Kargil. If I hadn’t been so conscious of being a woman reporter, whom everyone
expected to be fragile, I would have cried openly and loudly, instead of
burying my head in my shirtsleeves. And if someone had asked me why I was