FIRST PERSON---(1)

Fai’s arrest a setback for Kashmiri separatist movement

Irony: Anti-Indians are secure in India, insecure in America

Ahmed Ali Fayyaz

SRINAGAR, Jul 20: As we returned from the day one of our busy schedules in Washington D.C and wanted a siesta for a while in our rooms at Hotel Topaz, close to DuPont Circle, I found the telephone in the room continuously blinking red. It contained a recorded message in Kashmiri: “Assalamu Alaikum. I am your neighbour in Budgam, Ghulam Nabi Fai. As I learned that five journalists from Jammu and Kashmir, including you, are here on the State Department’s International Leadership Programme, I came all the way running to see you. Due to my bad luck, you were all away till I waited for over an hour. Whenever you get this message, please call on my numbers……”

That was the voice of someone whose write-ups in Urdu I regularly read in Daily Aftab when I was a student of 6^th or 7^th standard. His articles published in the name of Fay Budgami or Ghulam Nabi Fay Budgami. Years later, I heard all of my Jamaat-e-Islami friends and teachers call him Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai. He lived five miles from my village but the people in the countryside would love to call it “neighbourhood”. Fai permanently disappeared around 1980.

One of his brothers-in-law, working in Crime Branch of J&K Police, later revealed to me how he and his elderly mother-in-law had gone to meet Fai in Delhi, escaping the hawkish eyes of then DGP Manmohan Khajuria. Fai, who had secretly landed in Delhi, arranged his relatives’ Hajj pilgrimage but refused to return and live with his wife. I failed to understand all. Twenty-one years later, in August 2005, Fai wanted to see me and my colleagues in Washington D.C where he has settled with his second wife, Chang, a Chinese national.

The meeting with Fai did not materialize for next three or four days as our schedules taxed our nerves. He didn’t give up. “We have a Gulmarg here. Let us enjoy your first holiday there”, he said on telephone and extorted our confirmation.

During our 100-mile drive to the word-famous caves of Luray Caverns, we discovered in Fai someone none of us had imagined. He had got around a dozen of CDs which, we thought, would contain Maulana Masood Azhar’s fiery sermons on Jihad. When he played, it was none other than our own displaced singer, Deepali Watal. None of us had listened to her full repertoire of romantic songs in Kashmir.

Dr Fai spent around a thousand dollars on our picnic---lunch, coffee, and later that night a dinner. All through the day, he did not utter a single word of politics on the Kashmir conflict.

On our return in D.C, Fai showed us how hundreds of homeless Americans had been putting up by night in a spacious park outside the White House. He revealed that George W Bush Jr failed to get them evicted even after invoking ‘security reasons’. At the end, Fai carried us all to his plush office, just one block from the White House. Cigarette smoking, he said, was completely banned in Federal Buildings---structures in close vicinity of White House. Ambassador Yousuf Buch, an octogenarian Kashmiri who served with Pakistani President and later in the UN, according to our host, was the only individual who had violated the ban---at Fai’s office---without being penalized by the authorities.

(To be continued……)