Twenty-six years after he was forced to leave Kashmir, the author
reflects on events that have shaped his life as an exiled writer
An abandoned house in Haal, Pulwama district. Photo: Muhabit-ul-Haq
A displaced Pandit family in Garhi, near Udhampur. Photo: Vijay Dhar
They were children of conflict. One 20-something boy
was from Sopore, which, even today, is a garrison town fortified by
several army and paramilitary units. His father was pro-separatist and
expected his son to be one too. The boy pointed to a scar near his eye
and said: “This was my identity. Not any more!” During the uprising in
2010 in Kashmir in which about a hundred protesting teenagers were
killed during clashes between the security forces and the protesters,
this boy had been singled out and shot at by a security person. Luckily,
the bullet had brushed his temple, leaving just an abrasion. His father
had been detained and tortured several times by the security forces.
“It’s all behind me now,” the boy told me. I listened stoically to his
account, which seemed straight out of a Boris Pasternak novel.
One
autumn day in 1989, making my way home from school in Srinagar,
Kashmir, as I reached Nawa Kadal, the bridge over the river Jhelum, I
heard slogans blaring from a loudspeaker: “Set the time in your watches
to Pakistan Standard Time.” I looked at my watch.
Moments later, I got caught in a crossfire between militants and
security forces. Smoke from teargas canisters engulfed the area. A
bullet hit a bystander. Some youths hurled stones at the policemen.
“Grab a stone and throw it at the police van. What are you waiting for?”
someone said to me. I picked up a brick off the road. Then I heard
gunshots and ran for cover towards a narrow lane. “Shoot the boy in the
red jacket,” someone shouted. In the midst of the frenzy, I saw a
policeman aiming his gun at me. I never wore that red jacket outside
ever again.
A few months
later, in March 1990, we woke up to the news of the death of Ashfaq
Majeed Wani, a commander of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front. He
was idolized by Muslim youths, who called him a warrior, a rebel and a
freedom fighter. “Ashfaq has attained martyrdom; our hero has been
martyred!” people shouted in the streets and from the rooftops of their
houses. Our neighbourhood exploded with slogans; stories of Wani’s last
encounter with the security forces were afloat. “Death to the enemy,”
women mourned. Wani was 23 when the paramilitary forces killed him in
downtown Srinagar. Later in the afternoon, thousands of people attended
his funeral procession and raised pro-freedom slogans. I went to our
rooftop and watched the procession moving towards the martyrs’ graveyard
in Eidgah. Militants fired in the air, as a mark of respect to their
slain commander.
At the onset of
spring, in 1990, my parents packed some clothes in a bag, took my
10-year-old sister and me to our neighbours, and requested them to take
us with them in a truck to Jammu. We reached Jammu in the evening and
took refuge in a dingy dormitory in a large decrepit building, part
cattle shed and part barn. The owner had cleaned the dormitory and
opened it up for the new arrivals.
Twenty families
occupied that small space. For weeks, I had no contact with my parents
and grandparents. In the dormitory, there wasn’t enough to eat. One
night, my sister woke up and asked me for water. She was thirsty. The
tap at the far end of the dormitory ran dry, and the vessels in the
makeshift kitchen were empty. All I had in my possession was a bag full
of clothes for the both of us.
Months later,
when my parents and grandparents crossed the
two-and-a-half-kilometre-long Jawahar tunnel in Banihal, the tunnel
separating Srinagar from Jammu, the entire landscape changed. Four years
after the exodus, my grandfather lost his memory. He lost the sense of
relationships, of time, of the nature of things. He dangled from one
hallucination to another. The journey through the Jawahar tunnel—the
tunnel of forgetfulness—had shattered him.
Jammu stood for
India, a safe place to be, while his homeland, Kashmir, had turned into a
mini-Pakistan. Like my grandparents, many other elderly people, who had
never till then stepped out of Kashmir, had crossed an imaginary border
that separated two lands. A new map was drawn on the hearts and minds
of the fleeing Pandits. Just the act of crossing over to Jammu, a
province in the same state, gave them respite from fear and persecution.
In the summer of
1996, I secretly visited Kashmir. I had grown a beard to pass off as a
Muslim. A stranger in my own land, I was in disguise. Going to my old
house in Khankah-i-Sokhta, Nawa Kadal, was impossible. “Downtown
Srinagar is a war zone,” people said. “Even we don’t go there.” Srinagar
mostly remained under curfew. One evening, when curfew was lifted for
people to stock up on groceries and essentials, I went to Lal Chowk, in
the heart of Srinagar city. Army bunkers fortified the place. A stony
silence prevailed. Gun nozzles were pointed at the pedestrians and
people peeping through the windows of their houses. After a few days, I
returned to New Delhi, knowing fully well that it was all over for us in
Kashmir.
As the years went by, I visited Kashmir again and, like any tourist, stayed in a hotel.
In August 2015, I
travelled from New Delhi to Jammu to conduct a story-writing workshop
for a bunch of Muslim, Pandit, Dogra and Ladakhi boys and girls from
Jammu, Kashmir and Ladakh. My brief was to teach them how to look for
stories much before writing them. It was a daunting assignment because I
was conscious of the conflicting political ideologies and nationalistic
affiliations of the three different ethnic and religious communities
these teenagers belonged to. But I realized that these youngsters were
evolved in terms of their outlook towards one another and their
immediate environment.
I wondered what
tips I could offer this boy when he was narrating one hell of a
story—that of violence, of resistance, of revenge and of transformation.
He said he wanted to become a writer and that his stories would seek to
unite and not to divide. He said he had made peace with India and that
the pro-separatist movement had become a sham in the hands of conniving
and greedy leaders. “First we must be human and learn to accept one
another, despite our differences. Then we must learn to comfort one
another for the predicament we’ve endured individually and
collectively,” he said. “All of us have suffered in different ways. To
hell with India and Pakistan and their petty politics.” I had neither
heard nor imagined a story like the one he narrated. I shared my own
story of growing up in Kashmir. I had nothing else to offer them.
To work towards
social reconciliation was one of the broader aims of the workshop. Would
this be possible? I gave each of them an assignment to tell a story in 5
minutes. A shy boy from a remote village near Kargil recited a poem
about his teacher, a Buddhist lama, who taught at a Gompa. In the poem,
the teacher talks about the philosophy of life. A girl from Ladakh
narrated a story about a girl who falls in love with a boy at a bus
stop. Another girl from Kashmir narrated a story about her grandmother’s
love for her husband. A boy from Srinagar’s Khankah-i-Sokhta read a
poem in Urdu about a flood that ravages a city. He and his family had
survived the floods which wreaked havoc in Kashmir in 2014. The boy
cried while reading the poem. A Rajput girl from Gurah Salathian, a
village near Jammu, narrated a story about a girl’s love of nature. A
Pandit girl recounted her experience of growing up in exile. In the
evening, we parted, promising to meet again the next year to share the
drafts and to explore innate connections between the stories.
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