(Part II)
Now, the Other Side of the Table
After the first part appeared, friends and critics alike said I had told only one side. So I went back, to the thekedar and to the journalist, and let each man speak in full. The reader will decide who was right and who was wrong.
I. Ahmad Wani
When the first part of this account appeared last Sunday, it did not pass quietly. Friends raised their eyebrows. So did a few people who are not my friends. The charge from both camps was the same: that I had written a one-sided story, that I had held the mirror up to a single face and left the other in shadow.
I have sat with that criticism, and I will not brush it away. A mirror that shows only half the room is not much of a mirror. If I am going to ask officers and contractors and my own colleagues to face hard questions, then I must be ready to sit for the same test myself. So I did what this work has always asked of me. I went back. I walked to both men in this story, the thekedar who is my friend and the fellow journalist, and I heard each of them out, fully, without cutting in.
I will not stand here as a judge. I have no wish to hand down a verdict on anyone. What I will do is place both versions in front of you, the reader, as plainly and honestly as I can, and then step aside and let you decide who was *sahi* and who was *galat*. That is the whole of my job in this. To keep the mirror steady, and to let you look.
So let me begin where the anger was hottest.
The thekedar’s black tea
I went straight to my friend, the thekedar. He was angry with me, and he did not try to hide it. “You could not help me,” he said, and the words carried the kind of edge only a hurt friend can put on them.
He called for his favorite black tea. We sat. And slowly, as the first heat of his temper cooled into something quieter, he began to tell me his side. This is how it came out, in his own telling.
One day, he said, the district officer rang him and asked, almost like an accusation, why he had not supplied the ordered goods. The order, the officer warned, would be cancelled. The call caught him completely off guard, because as far as he knew everything had already been settled, and settled cleanly.
A month or so earlier, the deal had gone through GeM, the Government e-Marketplace, the government’s own online portal where departments list what they wish to buy. When the goods were put up for purchase, he took part like any other bidder. He quoted the lowest competitive rate he could manage, and when the numbers were worked out, he stood as the lowest bidder. By the rules of the portal, the contract was his. Won in the open, by the book.
But it took much longer than such things usually take. As he tells it, someone in the elected government did not want the work to come to him. The trouble for them was that GeM runs on its own system, with its own checks, and there was no honest ground on which his contract could be cancelled. So, he believes, they simply sat on it. The bids were left unopened for a long stretch, quietly, without a reason anyone was willing to put in writing.
Unofficially, he says, he already had the figures days in advance. Then word came, spoken and never written down, that the whole matter was to be kept on hold. He reminded me, more than once, that he is not a regular dealer in these goods. To meet that exact specification he had gone and bought the stock himself, all the way from Delhi. It was material so particular that no other office and no other agency would ever have a use for it. It was bought for this one order and nothing else.
And so he waited. More than three months went by. Then, at last, came the call from the district officer. He asked for the purchase order, and it was forwarded to him. The goods were already sitting in his godown, so he wasted no time. The very next day he loaded them and carried them to the office himself.
Here his luck ran thin. The district officer was not there to receive the consignment. Rather than haul everything back again, he stacked the goods carefully in the corridor of the office. The chowkidar gave him his word that they would be safe. He went home.
The next morning, the same officer called and told him to take the goods back. The higher-ups, he was told, had cancelled the order by mistake. At this point in the story my friend laughed. It was a short laugh, and in it I heard far more pain than humor.
He was not finished. The money he had put into all of this, he reminded me, was his own, borrowed from the bank, with the interest clock ticking every single day. And on the other side stood his friend, meaning me, who would not lift a hand for him. “It was only a matter of a story,” he said. He had expected me to go on his behalf into the corridors of that red tape, to lend my name and my voice to his cause. He had not, for a single moment, imagined that I would say no. And when I did, it was through our common friend that he turned, instead, to that journalist.
That is his version. Told over cooling tea, with the raw honesty of a man who believes he was wronged.
And now, the journalist
Reaching the journalist was its own kind of difficulty, though not the kind I had braced for. He was a known face to me. We had never worked together, but in a profession where courage is rarer than talent, he was one of the few names who carried it, one of the few who could stand his ground where standing was hard. For a long time he had been in my good books. It was only after that KAS officer sat across from me in his closed office and spoke into the doubt that I began, quietly, to wonder.
We met over a cup of tea at Tao Café in Srinagar. I will admit it plainly: I did not know how to begin. You do not walk up to a colleague you respect and lay an accusation on the table between the sugar and the spoons. So I took the long way in. “Have you read my recent piece on journalism?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Yaar, I was out of station for a whole month,” he said. “I got back only yesterday. If you think it is any good, send it to me on WhatsApp and I will go through it.”
I forwarded it to him right there, and I asked him, gently but firmly, to read it then, before we spoke another word. He bent his head to the phone. I watched him read.
When he finished, he looked up, and his face had changed. “How come you wrote all this?” he said. “Do you even know who that journalist was? Do you know who gave him the money?” The anger was right there on his face, plain and hot.
I said nothing for a while. I have learned that anger, like tea, is easier to hold once it stops boiling. I let it sit. I let it cool. Then I told him the truth, all of it. “It is you,” I said. “And I came to know it only today, only after I sat with the thekedar, who, as it happens, is my friend too. Before this, I did not know at all. I did not chase it, I did not dig for a name, and that is exactly why there is no name in what I wrote. I have accused no one. I only held up the mirror. And today I have come to you for one reason. I want to hear everything, from you.”
Something in him settled. And then he began.
On that day, he said, before he ever sent those documents to the officer, he had received a call from an unknown number. The voice on the other end laid the whole thing out for him: the tender, the cancellation, the tangle of it, all of it. He believed what he was told, and he wanted me to understand why. The reference, the name that opened the door for that call, belonged to a person he had known and trusted for a very long time. When a good name vouches for a story, you listen.
So he took it forward. He went to the officer, first in a polite voice, and then, when politeness carried him nowhere, in a harder one. He pushed for a few days more. And then, he says, he did what a journalist is supposed to do when he wants the truth pinned down. He took the RTI route. He filed several applications to get the facts verified, and those applications, he told me, are still lying pending in that office to this day.
Then life did what life does. In the middle of all of it, his father, his Abu Ji, fell seriously ill, a medical emergency that pulled him to Delhi at short notice. He left. The story, the tender, the officer, all of it slipped out of his hands while he sat in a hospital far from home. He got disconnected from the whole affair, he said, and he means that as both fact and as defense: he was not even in the Valley when the thing came to its head.
Which leaves the one question that will not go away. Who gave the money, and into whose hands did it fall?
We went and asked the officer’s own Personal Assistant, the same man who, worn down by the siege of it, had once quietly handed over ten thousand rupees to make the pressure stop. This time the PA sent a screenshot of the transfer. And when I turned my phone around and showed that screenshot to the journalist, his face moved again, but not into guilt. It moved into accusation. At once, he began to name the man whose account had received that money.
It was his cameraman.
A freelancer, he explained, a man who sometimes came along on his shoots, who had stood beside him at enough assignments over the years that people had started to pin the journalist’s own name onto him like a title. Around town they called him the cameraman of that known name, as if the two were one. The money, the journalist insisted, had gone into that man’s account, and not his own. What that man did with the borrowed weight of another’s name, and whether he acted for himself or for someone standing just behind him, is the one knot I could not untie, not for him, and not for you.
The verdict is not mine
And so, dear reader, I have carried all of it to your door: the thekedar’s borrowed money and his cooling tea, the officer’s caught mistake and his worn down PA, the unknown caller and the trusted reference, the pending RTI files, the hospital in Delhi, the screenshot, and the cameraman who wears another man’s name. Three men have spoken. I have added nothing of my own and taken nothing away. I have set down no names, because it was never my place to brand a person, only to hold the glass steady so that you could see clearly. Now the mirror is full, and I step out of its light. It is you who must decide who was guilty and who was only at fault, whose hand was dirty and whose was merely careless, and who, if anyone at all, should be made to answer for it. I have kept my promise to truth and to fairness. This Sunday, the judgment is yours.
