The doctor who treated a sixteen year old boy
Recently released from an interrogation centre
asked,
‘Why didn’t the fortune tellers predict
The lines in his palms would be cut by a knife?’
-Agha Shahid Ali
Basharat Peer’s Curfewed
Night (Random House India,2009) had been lying on my book shelf for some time but I kept postponing reading it. Then came Vishal Bhardwaj’s
‘Haider’ (an adaptation of Hamlet,set in Kashmir)followed by all the controversy about the depiction of armed forces in
the film. After watching the movie (which has been co-scripted by Basharat
Peer) I just could not resist reading the book any further. And I am glad I
finally decided to pick it up. It was a pleasure to read it. As expected those
who have seen ‘Haider’ will find a lot of scenes from the book reflecting in
the movie including the infamous torture scenes in the curiously named interrogation
centre Papa-2.The author was born and brought up in a village in the district
of Anantnag in Kashmir. When militancy tore apart normal life in Kashmir, he
was sent off to Aligarh where he completed his graduation and then moved to
Delhi enrolling himself in the law faculty of Delhi University with the plan to
prepare for civil services as his parents had wanted him to. However, he was
more inclined to be a writer and soon found himself working as a journalist for
a leading magazine. Well I guess the government’s loss was literature’s gain.
After spending a few years in Delhi he felt the need to write about conflict in his state ( accentuated by the
fact that there was absence of any good literature on the same) and decided to
return to his parent’s house (who had moved to Srinagar after narrowly escaping
a bomb blast) and started putting pen to paper. He travelled extensively in the
state meeting old friends, acquaintances and through them interviewed a whole
cross-section of the society including survivors from the notorious Papa-2 Detention
Centre, surrendered militants, half-widows, relatives of ‘disappeared’ boys and
many others who bore the brunt of the atrocities of the armed forces as the
battled the home grown and Pakistan sponsored militants with the backing of the
draconian AFSPA. As the author slowly peels the layers off the society, we are
exposed to more and more of the debilitating effects the years of militancy has
had on the people of the valley. Perhaps the most moving encounter is the one
with the couple Rashid and Mubeena. The bus in which they were returning after
their wedding was stopped by BSF men and before they could realize the bus came
under heavy firing. Five bullets hit Rashid and three hit Mubeena. She, along
with her bridesmaid was dragged to the mustard field beside the road and raped
by an unknown number of BSF men (‘I
could not even remember how many they were. I had lost my senses’). An enquiry
was ordered and some soldiers suspended. However worst was to follow. For Rashid’s
family and his village, Mubeena was a bad omen for she had brought them
misfortune. It is then amazing that the couple survived this horrible incident,
thanks mainly to Mubeena’s parents and friends.
In a conflict of this nature, where it is difficult
to distinguish between an innocent bystander and a militant (as we saw earlier
in the case of militancy in Punjab ) the
worst sufferers are the innocent citizens as they are caught in the cross-fire
between the armed forces and the militants. What adds more poignancy to the
Kashmir conflicts is that it has taken place in the background of a beautiful
landscape and the author’s poetic prose adds weight to the narration of the
tragedy. The reasons behind the conflict are many and complex and the author briefly touches upon
them in the beginning. But in end there can be no denying of excesses committed
by the armed forces and a sense of alienation which pervades the population of
the state. The militancy has come down in recent times and the state witnessed
a record turnout in the ongoing assembly elections but as recent attacks by the
militants show, Kashmir will always be on the edge. If at one end of the
Kashmir conflict are the innocent residents, at the other end are the Kashmiri
pandits who were forced to leave their homes in the valley at the peak of the
militancy and many of whom live in pitiful conditions in Jammu and Delhi. The
author has an emotional reunion with his school principal, Chaman Lal Kantroo, who
now stays in his one room home in Jammu with his family , a far cry from his
multiple rooms house in Kashmir. However if you want to read in detail about the
displaced Kashmiri Pandits then this may not be the book for you. I wish that if the author had met a few people
from the armed forces, it would have given us a more rounded view. But what I most
disliked about the book are the somewhat derogatory and sweeping statements he makes about
Muslims habitats in Delhi. Maybe he did not spend enough time in the
capital or did not engage enough with Muslims in the city. Maybe since then (the
book was published in 2009) his views may have changed. But then this book is
not about Muslims in Delhi so we can overlook such minor lapses in an otherwise
excellent book.
