There are soldiers who look at photos of Bombay actresses like Shilpa Shetty (and vamps like Helen) for hours while others listen to songs on transistor radio. Some engage in thirty-second open-air pissing and spitting contests. Fluids freeze before hitting white ground. I have my Sony tape recorder here. Sometimes when I need to be alone I put on my parka and underpants under pure wool fatigues, and lace my Swiss snow boots and put on my gloves and baklava and black goggles and step out for a walk in loose, deep snow. I take my Sony along, and when I am far enough away from our camp I play Chef Muller’s German music. The music is foreign to my ears and perhaps that is why I like it more than our own.
We wash once a month. We use kerosene oil to melt ice. Kerosene stoves run twenty-four hours in the tents. We have learned not to waste even a single drop of water… Kerosene blackens our faces, our fingers. We step out for the call of nature. We shit on the Icefields. The doctor has instructed us not to expose ourselves longer than thirty seconds. It is so cold on Siachen.
There is something wrong with the way we eat here. Precooked food. Canned curry and subzis. Canned rice. Chappati is a luxury. Unhealthy Maggie instant noodles. No Balti chicken. Mango frooti juice in tetrapacks. Salted Amul cheese. Butter. White bread. Cadbury chocolate bars are not for eating; we unwrap the bars and break them and dump them on the ice floor in our tents; chocolate makes ice less slippery, allowing us to walk without falling; we step on chocolate burfi, literally. I hate chocolate. Rum is free-flowing. Rum, too, allows us to walk. Sometimes jawans steal kebabs from the plates, which are sent to the officers’ tent. I approve of this wholeheartedly.
Mustard oil is our savior. It doesn’t freeze.
The Sikh soldiers experience more pain than the rest of us, he writes. Sharp crystals and icicles form in their beards. Long hair inside their turbans becomes matted automatically. They cry in pain trying to comb the hair. Halat khasta, they cry. Kip would have been dead by now.
Don’t believe if someone tells you that men on the Icefields die like animals. No, they do not die like that. A mule when it slips into a crevasse cries out of agony for one full hour before slipping into deep silence. Men die either instantaneously, or take several days. On 4 March Naik Surendran died in his sleep due to HAPO. Two days later a second-lieutenant fell from a height of 14,000 feet. The rescue team failed to retrieve his body. They returned with a dead corporal, the soldier’s fingers stitched to his public hair.
There are a few breaks in the entries after this point. Two or three pages later he starts repeating himself. As if he is stuck inside a cold white vortex. Armies are supposed to be mobile tigers and foxes, he writes. But we have become ice.
Everything is white here, even time has turned white. These are my white hours. This Icefield is not for the weak-hearted. We are being killed not only by the Pakistanis but also by bitter cold. It is so cold here it eats one’s brain and belly and freezes the heart. Men use jerry cans of kerosene oil to thaw the Bofors guns. We are lucky we have the Swedish Bofors guns. They can lob the forty-kilo shells (which look like jackfruit) into the enemy positions thirty or forty miles away. The guns are helping us sheeshkebab the Pakis. But to use the guns one must stand out in the cold. Men complain about mountain sickness, this condition is called HACO – a human brain drowns in its own fluids, a human body turns blue, and HAPO – a lung fails due to lack of oxygen. Men can’t sleep. We hallucinate. Some hear the cries of djinns. Men become impotent. Yesterday a gunner while eating his meal broke down. He was telling us about his victories with women, and then suddenly he broke down and started weeping and said he can no longer get it up. It seems to me the reason he lost his manhood is because he stayed too long at this altitude. Six months without a break on Siachen. His officer could not find a replacement. I tried to console him, but he punched me in the mouth and said – what do you kitchen people know?
I did not know how to respond to this man. He was not very young, in his late twenties perhaps. The moment he broke down all the laughter in the tent ceased, and people stopped eating, and we were no longer able to talk about the red-light district of Bombay: about Kamathipoora, where Pal and Thapa had picked up gonorrhea (at first they feared it was HIV), and where Inder had slept with the impotent ship captain’s pretty wife.
Flipping through these pages, I say to myself on the window seat of this train, this does not seem like the journal of a man about to kill himself or about to make a serious attempt. In the journal he writes that he admires officers who simply look the other way when men do not follow their orders on the glacier. Siachen is a strange place, he concludes. Bonds between men grow strong here, and they grow very weak, and get blown away by cold winds. If I can admire or pretend to admire the beauty of this icy wasteland, and find poetry in the tents and igloos and seracs and pinnacles and icicles, and the black soot on the walls of the igloos because of kerosene oil bukharis and braziers, and parachutes dropping parts of Bofors guns, and canned food and sheep, if I can admire all these things…
Then suddenly Chef writes about me. It was the second time I found myself written about.
I do not think the boy Kirpal will stay for long. He does not really belong in the army. Kip is fixated on his father. That is why he is in the army. The boy has a sensitive sense of smell – almost like a dog. One day he will sniff out the truth.
One day he will learn that to live properly, one must allow one’s parents to die. Once I saw his father kiss a Kashmiri woman in the Mughal garden. I was on the other side of the fountain – they could not see me. The woman’s face was wet from the mist, she spread a calico sheet on the grass under the plane tree, she sat at the edge of the sheet, hands dangling on her raised knees, she fussed about the embroidered dupatta on her head, tucked neatly behind her ears and falling on both sides of her blue kameez. It was then he took the woman in his arms and turned around to check if someone was watching and once convinced that no one was close by he kissed her. It was brief, but it was definitely a kiss. She pushed him away as if trying to tell him not to take such liberties again, but really she wanted him to do exactly the opposite.
Kirpal’s father belonged to the tradition of officers who were gentlemen. Officers like Maj. Gen. Khanolkar and Maj. Gen. Thimayya, Gen. Harbaksh Singh and Gen. J.S. Aurora. They knew duty, honor, humanity. Officers like him (despite the fact that they succumbed to women during weak moments) are the main reason I am still in the army. Some of our commanders here on the glacier are extremely abusive. They make this hell a bigger hell.
There are no trees here, Chef writes. One day I saw a tree and started walking towards it. But a soldier told me that it was three days away. The captain said that the tree did not exist at all. ‘Go to the CO’s tent if you want to see the real thing. Smaller than the size of your prick, a Japanese bonsai.’
Yesterday I saw a djinn, he writes a week later. He was on a serac, smoking a cigarette. Save me, the djinn cried. I found it difficult to bear his agony. Save me, he screamed. Have you people forgotten how to scream? he asked. Stop it, I said. Stop smoking that bleedy cigarette, I said. Go away, you dwarf. You Ma-chod. Bhaen-chod. Bhon-sadi-day.
This journal has a burnt smell. But.
Flipping through these pages I begin to feel very cold. I am trying to find the precise page, the one I had discovered in the General’s residence, the one which had given me a hint as to why Chef had tried to kill himself:
The soldiers take care of their clothes and bodies. How obedient and patient they are. When they die on duty they bring to their lips the name of their wife or simply ‘O my mother’. I have heard from other soldiers. There are always some who do not return. I cook thinking they will all return. There is always someone who does not. It is hard to throw away the food. At night I hear the missing soldiers’ cries: I am hungry, feed me. There is always a soldier who does not return. Sometimes to forget this hell I recite the comical names of our border posts: Khalsa 1, Khalsa 2, Romeo 1, Romeo 2. I close my eyes and recall all the street names and areas in Srinagar, where our base camp is. Habakadal. Brazulla. Jawahar Nagar. Pantha Chowk. Ganderbal. Raina Wari. Raj Bagh. Badami Bagh. The moment I do so I see the faces of real people, and I am able to endure this hell. Sometimes I hear the whistle of a train approaching. It stops at a platform on the mountains. Kirpal is headed to the Badami Bagh camp. I touch the face of Kip, the boy is standing outside the General’s residence. There is a tenderness in his look. Sometimes I walk by the tents at night and I feel as if we are a wrecked ship, and feel the glacier moving under my feet. Mocking me. My God, where am I?