Farah Bashir
I remember the early days of Covid and the curfew, when we ran to shops to stock up on food and essentials. I also remember the fear and the uncertainty that came from having no idea when it would end. This was a foe we didn’t understand, which didn’t even have an intent. Now imagine doing this intentionally to an entire population. That’s the 90s Kashmir Farah Bashir writes about through the lens of her teen self. A war with no end.
The upheaval and transition of Kashmir runs parallel to the changes in Farah’s own life. The chapter names too are sometimes revealing – “I would grow up to be collateral damage”, “Curfew as poison”. Practically every incident is heartbreaking in its own way. Even joyous occasions clouded by a looming disaster. I’ll probably take longer to even process this fully.
Old people and babies unable to breathe because of the tear gas, migraines and stress being a part of daily life, newspapers becoming ‘mortuaries laid out in broadsheets’, moving about one’s own home in fear, houses getting ransacked by the army, people disappearing and then appearing as dead bodies laid out on the streets, normally calm women panicking when men didn’t return home on time because kidnappings were common, a young man covering walls with the letters QK (read to find out what it stands for), children enacting encounters between troops and militants, and all of this getting normalised in time. The one that affected me most were the lives of Naseer and Nasreen. The troops and politicians remind me of Clay Shirky’s line – “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
There are many reasons why I liked this book beyond the obvious one that it is an important perspective, and a voice that needs to be heard. Farah’s relationship with her grandmother is something I could very easily relate to. The poignancy even in routine events and experiences is palpable.
This excerpt says it all – “The newsprint smiles on the faces of the models in the advertisements made me wonder if I would be a different person altogether had I grown up away from a conflict zone, outside of a disputed territory. To wake up to the rays of the sun without having the previous night’s sleep interrupted by screams of the neighbourhood women who’d run after the armed personnel in convoys that took away their husbands and teenage sons in nocturnal raids. To only care about using the right colognes and worry about the right detergent, to not to have to constantly think about the availability of vegetables, milk and medicine during erratic but long periods of curfew …I wondered what life would be like if there was some certainty in our day-to-day affairs. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Felt more like a dream…”
It reminded me of the several things we take for granted, and it is impossible not to feel for those whose entire lives have been disrupted in the name of a notional line. Says a lot about humanity, and our lack of it.
