The Making Of Hell

For a long time, a gap between two curtains was a major issue in our home. My late mother used to get upset and scolded us for not drawing the curtains properly. It didn’t matter to her that all the windows and doors were shut. Every evening, she would take a round of the house to ensure everything was firmly closed—her measure to keep her children safe from the searching eyes of forces patrolling on the road nearby. Over the years, we all built all kinds of walls around ourselves to protect our walled existence.

Reading Farah Bashir’s Rumours of Spring brought back memories of growing up in Kashmir in the 1990s--memories I hated. A friend would tell us that ours is a fight against forgetfulness. But it seems we exist because of our habit to drown ourselves in the sea of forgetfulness. Rumours of Spring recalls that searing Kashmiri memory. Bashir reminds us how 1990 changed everything--the way we talk and sit; decisions like when to open a window or not; how and when to walk on the road. A mere walk became a cause of anxiety. People started following ‘rules’ without even realising their existence. You were not supposed to look at a soldier; you are supposed to look down and walk on. Scarves made women feel protected; pherans made men vulnerable. And a whole set of protocols involving burials and funerals.

In the ’90s, when troops came across large rice bags found in homes they would poke their bayonets into them to make sure no one was hiding during those long, frightening crackdowns. Our addresses also changed--the house was ‘next to the small bunker’, the lane ‘before the larger bunker’. Those hideous structures were everywhere.

Mothers would get immersed in the Koran and tie knots at the corner of their dupatta if their sons came home late. They still do it, says Bashir. Two years after the killing of her friend’s father, when Bashir met her, she wanted to share her grief. “But I couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t have the courage or the words to rake up the past. At the age, the silence was the biggest and the only condolence I could offer.”

If you get beaten over not having an identity card, it shouldn’t matter in a place like Kashmir, where these things happen all the time. Yet a ‘small’ thing like this can scar you for life. It reminds you how your sister or mother placed her dupatta at the feet of troops so that they let you go. Some aunts and mothers did it to seek the release of their loved ones, aged fathers or young sons. We can all identify with stories that Bashir relates here.

Yet you often tend to forget what you’ve gone through, because all this becomes normalised with time. You often believe it didn’t happen; you never talk about it. After the incident, you hesitate to step outside, like Bashir’s own help. Or you know someone like her cousin  Naseer Doonkallah, who became violent after being subjected to violence for not having his identity card with him.

To cope, men took refuge in silence. Women had yakeen (faith) in pirs (saints) that those ‘disappeared’ would return—if they go to Baba Reshi’s shrine and pray their sons would turn up. Bashir recounts how a neighbour would tie votive threads, praying for the removal of the bunker below her house. We still make such prayers. Had there been no pirs, the number of patients outside psychiatric clinics would have been higher.

It seems as if there’s a consensus on being silent about what happened to us. It prevails in our homes and in our hearts. People have brought closure to their tragedies by locking the doors of memories and throwing the keys away. Bashir has opened the floodgates of those very memories. Those who have lived through, and survived, the turbulent Kashmir of the 1990s will find their own stories in it.