Under Siege: Mirza Waheed on Kashmir

A nightmare returns.

Your parents, sisters, their kids are under a curfew, a military siege, with all contact to the outside world banned. Like everyone else in Kashmir, like all eight million of them, they’re living under a punishing crackdown imposed by the Indian government, as it unilaterally erased the region’s autonomy. Then you realize the nightmare never really ended. Many years ago, you were under a similar siege, along with your parents, grandparents, siblings, aunts, cousins… All together, huddled, bored, frightened, but by one another’s side, as the soldiers patrolled the street outside.

The crunch of the military wheel, the callous thud of jackboots, and the impudent knock on the door continue to ring somewhere inside your head.

But this season’s siege is more crushing than ever, possibly the worst since that first one nearly 30 years ago, a stratagem designed carefully to humiliate an entire people. The parents are older, frailer, having picked up a few ailments over the last quarter-century, some to do with age and some with the daily stress of living a conflict-torn life.

You want to ask if they’ve got enough medicines, if they’ve been allowed to go for their weekly or fortnightly consult with the good doctor—if they’re alright, damn it. But you can’t pick up the phone and ask. You simply can’t call anyone. The world is made soundless when you can’t hear your beloveds.

*

Oh, but first, you must give some background to all this. People don’t really know much about Kashmir, where you were born and raised, and where your parents, siblings continue to live. It’s a disputed and therefore blighted land. India and Pakistan, neighbors to each other and to Kashmir, “have fought three wars over it,” every news dispatch reminds you. Many decades ago, although not too long ago, when the British hurriedly left their vast South Asian colony in 1947, because people wanted freedom from the imperial yoke, they, along with the newfound states of India and Pakistan, left idyllic Kashmir, a free state at the time, undecided, unresolved.

You want to hear your mother’s voice like you’ve never wanted to hear it before.

The fledgling nation-states had just fought their first war over the prize, and it was therefore agreed to sort out Kashmir later—via a UN-supervised referendum. Your parents were born around the time, citizens of a land whose future was uncertain but there was the promise of rai-shumari (a plebiscite). You, decades later, as a citizen of a disputed paradise where collaborator fat-cats nurtured by the capitol took turns to rule and beat us, the plebeian natives. And years later, you became one of the many boys and girls who’d be called the “generation of the uprising.” Because you were teens when Kashmiris decided enough was enough and took to arms and to the streets in that epochal year 1989, to scream injustice, azadi, freedom.

*

You live in a Western metropolis now, the great British capital, having had children of your own. You look at them each morning, grateful that they aren’t the children of your parents—you don’t have to see them grow up with curfews, massacres, rape, torture, assassinations, and explosions as part of their five-a-day. But your parents saw it all. As their child, you saw it all, too, but then not anymore, or just sometimes, because you left to study elsewhere, but returned home often. Were they happy to see you go away, to send you away? Of course, they were, but perhaps happiness is not the appropriate word. Unworried? Relieved? At least one child less to worry about. But what about your nieces and nephews and all the other children who remain, who must grow, and try not to die, under the heel of the kindly empire?

It’s 2019 and home is, once again, turned into a pretty prison from where no word escapes, your parents like corralled cattle. You became a writer at some point, after having seen, lived, and borne your share of it all. In your mind, the dead friends and neighbors, imprisoned cousins, and tortured relatives never really left. They took permanent residence inside your head, rising wraithlike at night to remind you, to torment you: you left.

Sleep is extinguished, perhaps in solidarity with the people at “home,” who’ve now almost entirely occupied your brain—except for the times your little girl and the boy want your attention. Each night, you say to yourself you might hear or see mother the next morning. Each morning, the phone says, “this service is not available on this number,” or worse still, “this number doesn’t exist.” How can they not exist? In brain-freeze moments, you send messages to friends everywhere (except Kashmir, of course), in case someone’s digital missive slipped through the signal-watcher’s claws. Have you heard anything from your folks? Not a peep, not a peep, it’s been 24 days since I heard my mother’s voice last, says a fellow traveler and sufferer.

Where did life go after 16, 17… when you saw and lived through your first siege, then another, and another? There was also one year, 1996 probably, when you landed straight back into the siege, as home was once again under a military shutdown because democracy wanted to hold elections to tell itself it was alive. Most people were bound indoors, as Indian soldiers with light-machine guns knocked on the door: “please come out to vote.” Well-rehearsed over the years, your young body knew exactly how to behave. You had carried it with you, that knowledge, having found ways to negotiate a path around it, internalize it somehow, put it in a cerebral sleeve… Until it suddenly rears its PTSD critters, fangs hissing, hovering around your head at night.

Only the tortured know what it is to be tortured. The rest is heartless bullshit.

Assi kyah korukh? What the hell did they do to us all?

Each night you think, nay, hope, tomorrow might be the day when mother—one of the millions of cattle in the pen that a rising imperial force, intoxicated with hate and self-willed hubris, wants your home to look like—asks me how I’ve been? And that she, she, has been worried about us all. Lajje sayi balaye! May my life add to yours, son.

This season’s siege is more crushing than ever, possibly the worst since that first one nearly 30 years ago, a stratagem designed carefully to humiliate an entire people.

The 30-year war, the 30-year corral, in Kashmir has led to a hardwiring of that impulse among your parents, among all parents. To fret about their children even as they themselves are incarcerated, denied the very basic human liberties—such as talking.

*

Parallels tug at you. Like sticky creatures lapping at your feet.

Waiting for the Barbarians hangs heavy in the air in the evenings. Coetzee dealt with all this so long ago, and so masterfully, painfully, well. It’s the book that comes closest to this moment, isn’t it? The tortured, crippled and blinded nomadic girl—who is she? Kashmir? Nah, too easy, too facile. Who is the pathetic unnamed magistrate whose soul is, at last, awakened into one act of rebellion against “the Empire,” against the torture-specialist Colonel Joll and his ravaging horde of special forces, The Third Bureau, who arrest the indigenous “barbarians” only to torture and kill them? (Someone in Kashmir once told me that conscience is something you always think of a fraction late.)

Is the self-loathing, broken magistrate a stand-in for the people of the imperial power? Who may or may not feel terrible, may or may not speak of what their powerful state is doing to a sovereign people at the frontier? In their name?

Or is he, in fact, the bureaucrat who signs detention slips by the dozen, so that rebellious little boys can be thrown into dungeons?

What of Coetzee’s Colonel, he of the foreboding spectacles and whose style of torture is legend? Who does he represent?

And what about the townsfolk who come to watch the public spectacle when the captives are tortured and degraded?

*

Days turn into weeks. Still no word from the void except that two-minute chat, one each with mother and father, as they chanced upon someone with a working phone at a gathering of relatives. That was 13, 14, 15 days ago, now there’s silence again, because perhaps that lone phone with a pulse has been killed off too. How are the sisters, their children, nieces and the nephews doing? They haven’t appeared on WhatsApp or FaceTime for such a long time now. Do they ask “why can’t we have the Internet, mum? Why can’t we go to school?”

In the news, they say no government in the world has blocked Internet access as frequently as India.

You look at yourself, sort of living well, innit? Just the other week, you were wondering which 5G network to sign up to—EE or Vodafone, which might be nimbler? You go to sleep at some point and the mind excavates an ancient image: it was shining black, solid, with a presence of its own, as it sat cat-like on the walnut-wood stool. The landline phone with an expansive dial and a ring that could wake up even Kumbhakarna if needed. It was the only phone in the house, a precious, near-scared contraption with which you could call anywhere in the world. Anywhere! Its number, its address, is still there, although on a different device but you can’t call on it, as India decided that Kashmiris must be deprived of old-fashioned landlines too.

Now and then, you feel a kind of primal rage at the bullshit excuses given. How can a state decree that you can’t speak with your mum, %$£*? A very large and diverse country that likes to call itself the largest democracy, one day decides that from tomorrow you all can’t have a voice. All the answers are discomfiting, all the explanations an out of work sophist’s excuses for tyranny. But you must not give in to anger; there’s dignity in restraint.

Parallels tug at you. Like…

Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, echoes with chilling closeness. People at home must negotiate check-posts and sharp-toothed concertina hurdles to get anywhere—when they’re allowed to, that is, the New York Times said.

Will my people be forced to go through similar, Israel-style wire and thorn tunnels to get to work or to the hospital? Really?

In the news, they say no government in the world has blocked Internet access as frequently as India. An incredible 159 times in just three years, which is far more than Syria, Iran, Turkey, Egypt… And more than half of those shutdowns have been enforced on Kashmir—is that because of the special (autonomous) status Kashmir “enjoyed” in the larger Indian union? Will they also ban clean air, now that the special status has been erased?

*

Word arrives in that old fashioned, “he said, she said,” manner. One week a neighbor sees your father in the neighborhood, next week a friend spots him on the street, and messages are relayed via kind people in Delhi two days later. Spotted, like endangered species, then the sighting reported by word of mouth. Less than a month ago, you were exchanging messages, pictures, videos, gossip… with your people who, too, had multiple phones and handheld Internet, and now this.

You want to hear your mother’s voice. No. You want to hear your mother’s voice like you’ve never wanted to hear it before. You want to comfort your father who had a procedure done just days before the curfew rule began.

In the end, you cling to your little daughter for solace. Bae’ log sayyi balaye! May my life add to yours, honey.