Curfewed Night

Mothers wash the bloodstained apparel of grooms On stream banks, Bridal wear burns to ash, Bridesmaids cry And the Jhelum flows.

Newspapers routinely refer to the missing men as ‘disappeared persons’, and their waiting wives are the ‘half-widows’.

Srinagar is a medieval city dying in a modern war. It is empty streets, locked shops, angry soldiers and boys with stones. It is several thousand military bunkers, four golf courses, and three book-shops. It is wily politicians repeating their lies about war and peace to television cameras and small crowds gathered by the promise of an elusive job or a daily fee of a few hundred rupees. It is stopping at sidewalks and traffic lights when the convoys of rulers and their patrons in armored cars, secured by machine guns, rumble on broken roads. It is staring back or looking away, resigned. Srinagar is never winning and never being defeated.

The Kashmiri militants who died fighting the Indian troops were carried like heroes in funeral processions and their comrades-in-arms saluted them with guns. Some of them even became mythical figures. But they were dead. And so were the men they had killed. And that was the only absolute truth. People went home after the funerals and the slogans and continued their lives till the next funeral and the next round of slogans.

Despite their insecurity and despair in an India witnessing the rise of Hindu nationalism, most of my Indian Muslim friends were Indian nationalists. They disagreed with me and other Kashmiri students about our ideas of an independent Kashmir. They were afraid that the secession of a Muslim-majority Kashmir from India would make life worse for India's Muslims. Whenever a cricket match was screened on the television room of our hostel, my Indian Muslim friends cheered, sang and rooted for the Indian cricket team. Kashmiris cheered for Sri Lanka or Pakistan, or whichever team played against India.

Bright lights provoked the soldiers to barge in and check the house for militants. Bright lights led the militants to chose your house as their shelter for the night. You lived with the dread of a fatal gun battle.

The Salafi teacher and his cohorts didn’t seem to understand that a shrine wasn’t merely a spiritual centre, but a club, a space for social gatherings and festivities, and a site of business as well.

People hoped not to hear a knock at their door in the evening. The drone of a passing vehicle or the sound of footsteps outside your home was enough to make you and your family shiver. How many deep breaths had we taken after seemingly threatening sounds died into the night and nobody knocked? Hundreds of homes were destroyed in encounters between soldiers and militants; hundreds of people were arrested, tortured, and jailed by soldiers for housing militants.

His books were the books of a self-taught man, books that had shaped him, helped him build his life, that made him stand out when he talked about worlds and ideas that few men in our world could talk about.

Srinagar is a city of bunkers. Of the world’s cities, it has the highest military presence. But Srinagar is also a city of absences. It has lost its nights to a decade and a half of curfews, and de facto curfews. It has lost its theatres. Regal, Shiraz, Neelam, Broadway — magical names I longed for throughout my childhood. They were closed before I had grown up enough to walk to a ticket counter on my own, to watch a bad Hindi movie. Srinagar has also lost its multi- religious character, with the migration of the Kashmiri Pandits in the early nineties.

In old pictures, Srinagar is elegant; latticed houses, mosques, and temples admiring each other from the banks of theriver Jhelum; people strolling on the seven wooden bridges spanning it, wandering into old bazaars selling spices, lovingly embroidered shawls and carpets, and samovars with intricate engravings, or stepping with a prayer and an expectation into a medieval shrine flaunting verses from the Quran and poems of mystics on windows and facades, and the gende greens and blues of papier mache interiors. But elegance is granted little space in an age of wars. Those wooden bridges have either collapsed or were murdered. Their skeletons remain, in the shadow of new arcs of concrete.

Along with killing hundreds of pro-India Muslims ranging from political activists to suspected informers for Indian intelligence, the militants killed hundreds of Pandits on similar grounds, or without a reason.