Smoked Peace

Shaad Salim is a doctor, who runs a practice in Srinagar. He also makes a 40 km journey sometimes, between Srinagar and Sopore, where he’s trying to establish a rural cancer centre. Driving to work, it’s usual for him to be held up in traffic, as it stops to let an army convoy pass, hundreds of soldiers atop their vehicles, toting guns, rods, blowing whistles, amid shouts. Even ambulances don’t have right of way. "Thanks to these convoys, I often miss my morning class," says Dr Salim’s son Usman, studying medicine at the SKIMS medical college, on Srinagar’s outskirts.

More hurdles come their way at the checkpoints: you can be stopped anytime, anywhere, frisked, and asked to prove your identity. It’s worse in the villages, where life grinds to a dead halt as darkness falls. "Recently, we could not drop an assisting nurse home after a surgery extended late into the night in my Sopore clinic," recalls Dr Salim. "My colleague returned from Wagoora village saying it was impossible to enter the area at night." The nurse had to be dropped off at her aunt’s home nearby.

For Dr Salim’s wife Khalida, life is a perpetual postponement of simple pleasures. She worries constantly about her husband and son’s safety. Usman barely visits his friends, it’s too stressful for his family. A family holiday in the Valley? "I wouldn’t think of staying overnight anywhere...the army is everywhere," says Khalida. She is not even comfortable taking a long walk. "All we do is visit our relatives," she says. The cinema? Apart from one decrepit hall, there have been no cinema theatres to go to in Kashmir for the last 17 years. The only source of entertainment, if you can call it that, is the cellphone, but only for those who can afford it. You can keep in touch with each other through the day—as long as cellphone networks allow it.

Long queues at Srinagar airport is another ordeal the Salims prefer to avoid. Checks, including baggage X-rays, begin long before they enter the airport. "As you wait, an army guy comes along, bypasses you. Then a vip or a bureaucrat does the same," says Dr Salim. "Each time I travel out from Srinagar airport, I tell myself, never again," adds his wife.

Normalcy? The Kashmiri laughs. He’s a trapped being, a mute spectator in the face-off between hundreds of thousands of army and paramilitary troops and a few hundred, mostly unseen, anti-India armed rebels. He’s caught dead in the middle—sometimes literally so—drained and exhausted in the warfare of day-to-day survival. "You have no energy left to do anything else after you come home," says Salim. "All you want to do is to close your eyes and hope tomorrow is a better day." The epilogue comes from son Usman: "The only freedom I have is within the four walls of my home, when I shut the door."