That Kashmir earned for itself the title, ‘Rishi-waer’ or the garden of Rishis, is not a matter of chance or romantic speculation. If you were born in Kashmir as a Hindu, you would have to be exceedingly obtuse to miss this glaring everyday fact of life. The valley was indeed a powerhouse that seemed to attract high-voltage specimens of our species. They were called “maet” in plural, crazy literally or “mastanas”. They were too ecstatic to be coherent, too blissful to be sane, too evolved to be civilized.
One such madman by the name of Kashinath (Kashi mot) roamed around the streets of Srinagar and occasionally drifted too far from the city to end up in a nondescript village by the name of Nagam. It had a rather ordinary setting by the standards of natural beauty that Kashmir is known for. There was a small cluster of Hindu households close to a stream, with a common well, a handpump, a small temple and other assorted cultural paraphernalia.
Kashinath was not a nice saintly man to meet. In fact, he was just the opposite. He had a peculiar dressing sense and wore a ‘pheran’ directly over his stark naked frame. His attire helped him indulge in mooning, that is lifting his pheran to show off his bottom to indicate his displeasure with people who irritated him, which was unreasonably too often.(4) He had a remarkably short fuse and didn’t need much prodding to launch into a slew of choicest verbal abuse. Kashinath’s favourite haunt in Nagam was a house bang in the middle of the Hindu zone of the village.
In his characteristically eccentric style, on visiting this house he would line up the kids of the mohalla and instruct them to sing a popular Kashmiri devotional song, “Sahibo sath chham mye chaeni” (Master, I have trust in you only). The words of the bhajan carried by the unlikely voice of incorrigibly restless children would announce the arrival of Kashinath to the lady of the house, Prabhavati, who would hurriedly come out with a plate of rice and whatever else was cooked, to serve the divine nutcase.(5)
The two were so different that they seemed to belong to different planets. Kashinath was extraordinarily eccentric, Prabhavati was extraordinarily simple but for Kashinath, she was simply extraordinary. As soon as she came out of the house, he would fall at her feet and proclaim to everyone around but no one in particular, “Here is Mother Sharika incarnate. As long as she lives in this house, there will be happiness all around”, much to the embarrassment of Prabhavati, who would assume the expression of a deer caught in the spotlight and run back inside.
After a visit to her brothers’ house in Srinagar, Prabhavati started back for Nagam in late afternoon, after her cup of noon chai. She had barely walked twenty five steps from the main gate when there was a loud explosion and a huge door flew from nowhere and landed on her head. She collapsed instantaneously. She remained in a coma for a month. She was no more in April 1989. Nine months later, that part of Nagam where Kashinath made unruly children repeat the same boring bhajan was forlorn and deserted. Mother Sharika had abandoned the village.