31.07.2012

To view the full post go to the one-hundred and seventeenth, and one-hundred and eighteenth cups of nun chai.

31.07.2012

Umar had been a class mate of Tufail’s. They played together after their tenth class exams. He said he was a timid boy. Tufail wasn’t a stone thrower. The day he died he was going to his maternal home, carrying his school bag, when he was caught up in the tear gas, in the firing and the shelling. Umar said, ‘They shot at him.’

Boys grow so much between the ages of 17 and 19. Sitting beside me, Umar was almost a man. It was hard to imagine him in the same class as Tufail, whose own boyhood had been frozen in time by the small passport sized photograph that circulated in the media after his death.

Farooq, who was almost old enough to be Umar’s father, spoke about their work as caretakers of the Martyrs Graveyard in Srinagar, known in Urdu as the Mazaar-e-Shohdaa and in Kashmiri as the Shaheed Malguzaar. It was a service both to the nation and to Islam, carrying fourth a Sunnah, as the Prophet Mohammad used to deliver the burial rights for his own companions. Farooq and Umar’s vocation brought them to a world in Kashmir where loss was most visible and pain most raw. This is their everyday. Umar buries his friends.

Farooq said the Mazaar-e-Shohdaa in Srinagar, was formed just 22 years ago when the armed conflict began in earnest. It was the will of the people, and when people came together in their thousands, he said, there was little the government could do to oppose them. Emerging from this will the Mazaar-e-Shohdaa was envisioned as a place where martyrs from all over Kashmir would be laid to rest. But once the government recognised the historic importance this place would engender every effort was made to thwart that process of memorialisation. Each martyr’s grave is a piece of historical evidence – ever accumulating as the conflict continues – that the state does not want around. It is estimated that 70,000 people have died in the last two decades though only around 1,000 have been laid to rest in graves here. Not all who try manage to reach.

Both Farooq and Umar spoke of how the armed forces would cordon off the area with barbed concertina wire – especially during the uprising of 2010. They would beat people who had come to bury their loved ones. Refusing them entry to the graveyard. The government forces would fire on people demonstrating at the funerals of the martyrs. As a result, in the process of attempting to bury the dead, more people would die. Because of this many burials now take place in the dark of night, without a proper funeral.

Due to the violent repression the government has employed over the past two decades, it is no longer just Srinagar, but now almost every town across Kashmir has a Mazaar-e-Shohdaa of their own. As Farooq said, the peoples’ will would find a way. But before the 1990’s Kashmir did not have the culture of maintaining martyrs’ graveyards as it does today. Historically, there are the 13 July martyrs who in 1931 rose against Dogra rule, but for Farooq this was something very different. He said that it was only in the 1990s, when death and struggle became a part of Kashmir’s everyday life, that the Mazaar-e-Shohdaa became a part of their cultural fabric.

Another young man briefly joined the conversation. He said we are disconnected today from the repression that is still taking place around us. He said, ‘We feel things are fine, as if peace is in the air, but in reality boys are taken away in the night and we have no idea in what conditions they are detained.’ Farooq said confrontation and violence would not achieve anything – conversation was what we needed.

Umar took us to the grave of his friend Tufail. Then he took us to the grave of another friend who died in 2010. In three days it would be the two year anniversary of this boy’s death. His name was Aanas Khursheed. Like Tufail, he was 17 years old when he died. Aanas was known as a fierce stone pelter, who had been under the eyes of the authorities. In 2010 on August 3rd Aanas decided to throw some stones at the CRPF vehicle that was stationed in his locality. There was nothing happening on the streets that day, so no one expected much response. But a senior officer signaled for one of his men to take aim. Aanas received a bullet in the abdomen. The CRPF placed a heavy drainage pipe over his bleeding body and left him there. They refused to let anyone recover his injured body. Hours later, Aanas was finally taken to the hospital, and declared dead on arrival.

Imagine the fury that pushes a young boy to throw a stone at a man with a gun and the legal immunity to shoot to kill. Now imagine the fury in that boy, as he lies there with the knowledge that he has been shot.

This conversation was made possible with the assistance of Nawaz Gul Qanungo as translator.

29.07.2012

To view the full post go to the one-hundred and fifteenth, and one-hundred and sixteenth cups of nun chai, otherwise skip to the one hundred and seventeenth cup of nun chai.

29.07.2012

Majid and I met with Showkat at his home on a hot afternoon during Ramadan in Srinagar. Due to the fast we did not drink nun chai, but instead spoke of it.

Showkat told me about fatheha-chai, a Kashmiri tradition that takes place at the end of a period of mourning. In Kashmir when there is a death it is the neighbours’ responsibility to feed the mourning family for three continuous days. In reciprocity, on the fourth day, the mourning family serve the neighbours nun chai as a way to mark the end of their mourning. This is fatheha-chai. However, as Kashmiri culture has become more Islamicized in recent years, Showkat explained that this tradition, which was very relevant to the meaning I was giving to nun chai, had begun to wane.

Showkat had been teaching international law and human rights at the University of Kashmir for many years and Majid was a young journalist from Srinagar. Both agreed that it was the strength of familial bonds in Kashmir that lay at the core of the movement’s continuing resilience and vigour. Showkat reasoned that if it were not for our ability to share and to take care of each other, how else would a society survive what Kashmir has?

One of Showkat’s students had been preparing a document in Urdu about those who died in the Summer of 2010. He was apologetic that I would not be able to read it, but he also emphasised the importance of making this information available in Urdu for non-English speaking people in Kashmir. As Showkat handed me a book in English about the Summer of 2010 he distinctly said that it was a publication produced by the Indian establishment and that it had to be read in light of this. As we spoke Showkat progressively pulled more and more books from the shelf, including Facets of Resurgent Kashmir, a collection of his own writing that had been published in local newspapers between 1999 and 2008.

Some years back the Chief Minister phoned the editor of the daily newspaper Greater Kashmir, and gave them a list of names the state did not want to see in print. Showkat was on that list and he was told that it was no longer a matter of what one wrote, but the mere presence of his name.

Majid and I looked over three photocopied documents from the State Government of Jammu and Kashmir, which, in 2010 led to the complete shutdown of local television networks in the valley. Ironically these documents accused local news networks of broadcasting content that had “the potential of creating a breach of peace and tranquillity”, while on the streets outside the armed forces shot at, beat and killed unarmed and stone throwing protestors, those in mourning and those simply passing by. Two years later local television has still not returned to air in Kashmir and Showkat has a difficult time getting his writing published. Though people don’t forget easily, and this absence has its own kind of presence.

I asked Majid and Showkat when freedom would come. For Showkat it was a geopolitical issue. He explained that it was the weakening of the British Empire after WWII, which led to their withdrawal from South Asia. Kashmir needed something similar to happen – something that either weakened India or brought about international intervention.

Majid speculated that maybe someday freedom would come by default. Something would happen somewhere in the world and someday he’d simply wake up in the morning to find, in the newspaper headlines, that Kashmir was free.

In Shopian Majid once met a small boy who was renowned as a fervent stone thrower. He was not yet 12 years old but had lost three of his family members in the conflict. Often seen at the head of a protest people started calling this boy Jazba, which literally translates into Sentiment in Urdu. Majid asked when Kashmir would get freedom and someone had replied ‘When Jazba (Sentiment) grows up!’

Showkat had once been on a panel discussion with an official from the Indian army, when he had said “As of yet, there have been no weapons invented that are capable of killing peoples’ sentiment.”

Sentiment is the most enduring weapon anyone can have.

27.07.12

As I was explaining Cups of nun chai to Ahmed, I mentioned that there was next to nothing in the Australian media about the mass uprising of 2010 when he suddenly intervened and said, ‘Yes, that has always been our problem here in Kashmir’…. Whether it be in history books, literature or the media people in Kashmir are conscious of the misrepresentation and under-representation of their story.

Ahmed had an interest in academics which made him particularly conscious of words and their use. He said, ‘2010 had been terrible. Our boys were killed.’ Ahmed made a point to emphasise his use of the term boys. ‘I call them boys because they were all so young.’ He repeated, ‘they were nothing more than unarmed boys.’ But, like Ahmed, the state is also conscious of the power of words. And so those whom Ahmed describes as boys, have been termed ‘agitational terrorists’ by the state. Ahmed supposed it was probably the army who invented this phrase. Perhaps one could begin a linguistic study of its origins? Agitational terrorist. It is a phrase that weakens and evaporates once you begin to break down it’s use and meaning, but still, it circulates. Wars are also fought with words, through tiresome games that seek to misrepresent. In a piece called The Storytellers Suvaid Yaseen writes:

You feel frustrated. Mad. Going mad. Mad. You write.

You think about the changing categories. Terrorist. Terrorist sympathiser. Then came more creative names. With an irony attached. ‘Agitational terrorist’. That was when people took to peaceful agitations. With no guns, the term then advanced to ‘Gunless violence’. You think about these things. You laugh. You tell them to people. Laughingly. Some laugh, some fall silent.

You hear the news of a sixteen year old child, hit with a teargas shell on the head, who later breathed his last.…Friday evening one more young boy is shot dead because a group of them had looked at a military convoy which passed them by.

Ahmed was from a locality in Srinagar that he said – for better or worse – had been a hub of militancy and state oppression since the early 1990’s. When the armed resistance broke out in Kashmir Ahmed had been a teenager, and he described those years as something unimaginable. The anxiety that filled each night, sitting at home in the dark, never knowing when the army or BSF troops would come. Ahmed said he had seen a lot and this came through most in his eyes and less in his words. Sometimes it is what someone does not, or cannot, say that carries the greatest weight. Here there is something that moves beyond language.

Formally Ahmed had been appointed to a senior position in the state’s administration, but he had decided to leave the post because of the endless ethical compromises such a position entailed. Increasingly in Kashmir the state administration, and especially the police, are being pitched against their own people. In the uprisings of 2008 and 2010 it was not the Rashtriya Rifles or the Border Security Force or the Central Reserve Police Force but it was the Jammu and Kashmir State Police who were placed at the front line. That old maxim “divide and rule” rings as true as ever here. Corruption is rife. People often told me that former militants turned government informers were given positions in the police force. Ahmed said he knew the dual ways in which the police operated, with one face to the public and another behind closed doors, and it was that which he had walked away from.

Now Ahmed held a government position in education, which he was far more content with. Yet this position still prohibited him from writing and expressing his personal opinions in the media. Though whenever there is a need, a compulsion of sorts, people always seem to find their own routes through which to do what they must. Ahmed was no different.

It was Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, and when I took a photograph Ahmed cupped his hand as if imagining the cup of nun chai in memory for those who were no more than ‘boys’.

24.07.12

Ahmad has one of the most characteristic giggles I have ever heard. We sat together under the cool shade of a Chinar tree on a hot Summer day in Kashmir. As I spoke about Cups of nun chai Ahmad, busy as ever, looked at the website on his laptop and wrote an email accepting the invitation which kindly read:

I appreciate this endeavour that is an investment in the memory of those who lost their lives during the mass uprising of 2010 in Kashmir.

Ahmad wanted to know what people in Australia knew of Kashmir. What did they feel after sharing a cup of nun chai and hearing its story? He was really interested and I tried to explain that it was a difficult thing to generalise because each nun chai had itself been so unique. Whenever Ahmad watched the Australian cricket team playing against India or Pakistan, he often wondered what those players, what people like Simons or Ponting, knew of the people and places who watched their matches from a far. Did the Australian team know there were countless viewers in Kashmir rooting for their win over India because of the Indian state’s occupation of Kashmir? He wondered if they read newspapers or followed the international news. In 2010 would they have played harder against India if they knew their government had just killed more than 100 unarmed people it claimed as its own citizens in Kashmir?

Ahmad was from Sopore, a town in North Kashmir renowned for its anti-India sentiments and militancy. Growing up, he had seen a lot. He explained with pride that when something happened in Kashmir there was always a response from Sopore. The Muzzafarabad Chalo of 2008 and the Ragda Ragda of 2010, had been formative events for people of Ahmad’s generation who were under 30 years of age, marking a significant shift in the nature of the movement.

I asked Ahmad if he protested. He explained gently that sometimes when one’s emotions become so intense you’re actually pulled from your home onto the streets, and your hand moves before you and picks up a stone. When the situation became so urgent, there were times when one didn’t have a choice. Ahmad explained the horrifying nature of pellet guns, which dispersed thousands of tiny pin size injuries deep into the body. Despite popular perception, pellet wounds had the capacity to be more fatal than a bullet. This moment when one’s emotions were pushed across a threshold was central to so many peoples’ experiences in Kashmir – moments when the occupation simply became too much.

Ahmad read a story he had published on Eid in a local newspaper towards the end of the uprising in 2010. This too was full of the same emotions that pulled him onto the streets, but here these emotions had been channelled into words:

The sunlit streets are devoid of any life and the pungent smell of death and destruction is nauseating. The stains of blood are staring at our faces demanding justice. The innocent dead are a history now, reminding the conscious living souls of their sacrifices. Hush has fallen all over the valley with only ambulances wailing round the clock.

Ahmad spoke of the endless seminars, conferences, enquiries and commissions that sought to resolve the conflict in Kashmir. The fact that they never achieved any significant outcome only worked to alienate society further. But as Ahmad explained, contrary to Marxist philosophy, here in Kashmir such feelings of alienation simply added a greater sense of urgency to the struggle.

As we got up to leave, Ahmad and I stepped over a role of barbed concertina wire that enclosed the park we sat in. He looked at me, smiled and with his characteristic laugh, said ‘I don’t see this as a bad thing. The barbed wire that alters the direction of our paths, the army convoys that leave us waiting endlessly in the traffic – these things polish our memories. And it is our memories that are our strength.’ It was this ability to turn what was dark into something light that enabled Ahmad’s laugh to bloom with such persistent and lighthearted defiance in the midst of conflict.

24.07.12

I met Naseem at his office in the Department of Islamic Studies at the University of Kashmir. After we were introduced I began to explain how Cups of nun chai came into being and Naseem said he was happy to share his opinion, which was informed by Islam.

In 2005 Naseem’s own approach to politics and religion had changed. As a student Naseem had been at the fore, leading protests against the occupation both in Kashmir and outside in New Delhi while studying at Jamia Islamia University. But in 2005 Naseem embarked upon a deeper engagement with Islam, which ultimately shifted his own approach to politics. At this time Naseem had stopped struggling against the occupation directly and inturn shifted his focus towards correcting the ills he believed lay at the heart of his own people. Naseem believed that Kashmir would attain freedom only when its own people embraced Islam wholly.

There was no doubt that the Kashmir Valley was a Muslim majority, but according to Naseem 97% of these people were Muslim in name only. Muslims that he defined by culture not by study. Despite disagreements with his own family regarding this, Naseem continued to follow the path he believed in. From direct political action Naseem had now embarked upon a much slower, long term route of religious reform. But Naseem emphasised that change of this sort could not come about through force, but through free will as it did during the time of Prophet Mohammed (Peace Be Upon Him).

While there were Muslim countries around the world, Naseem told me that there had not been a true Islamic state, a Caliphate, since the time Prophet Mohammed’s (PBUH) companions, Hazrat Abu Bakr, Hazrat Umar, Hazrat Usman and Hazrat Ali, led the Caliphate for 30 years after Mohammed passed away in the year 632CE. It is this kind of governance that Naseem believed would bring about a free Kashmir. But if his own people did not respond to the study of Islam, he said he would leave and go some place where they would. Naseem happened to mention that he had received offers to teach in America, and it became clear that he was not so much tied to Kashmir but to Islam.

In contrast to the privacy that western secularism accords to religion, according to Naseem, under Islamic secularism each individual would be judged in the public sphere by the laws of their own religion. He spoke of this in relation to how Kashmir’s religious minorities would be treated within a future Islamic state. He added that western forms of democracy would never work in the East – the state of affairs in the world today was proof enough of that.

But there were moments, Naseem explained, when one’s emotions took precedence. He spoke about the day his brother died in 2007. Against what Naseem believed to be Islamically correct, he had joined the streets in protest, fuelled by emotion. The very next day, when his emotions cooled Naseem returned to what he described as ‘his senses’. He asked, When it is your own brother taking bribes, what is the freedom we are fighting for?

Naseem spoke about the burning of Chota Bazaar (small market) in Sopore in 1996. Shopkeepers, who had gone inside their own shops seeking safety, were burnt to death by the army in their attempt to stake out militants. The whole market had been burnt to the ground. One hundred people dead in one day. Naseem lost some of his family in that fire. He said it was a common tale across Kashmir, every town had their own Chota Bazaar. Yet Naseem refused to place blame on India and instead turned in reflection towards his own people.

It was an interesting, and controversial, way of dealing with and responding to the situation. For Naseem the most urgent battle lay with the ills of the self. Once people followed Islam through study and not simply culture, he believed that Kashmir’s freedom would follow, without fuss.

But this idea of religious perfection seems to run incongruously with the imperfections of this world, and the human life within it. And so I find myself sitting with the urgencies of the immediate moment and the shape of my own hands.

23.07.12

Nida was washing dishes in the kitchen with her back to me when she asked, ‘Alana, do you think Kashmir will ever get freedom?’ Before I could really answer, she said ‘I don’t believe we will. We are ourselves not an honest people.’

This was the beginning of Nida’s kitchen diatribe, flavoured with disillusionment and bitterness. Growing up in the maze like bilanes of Sopore, a bastion for anti-Indian sentiment, protest and armed resistance, Nida had seen a lot, but it never seemed to end and she wondered what it all achieved.

She said her father wouldn’t like her saying this, but she told me to look at Kashmir’s leaders. She said they had one face to the public, with which they spoke of ideals, and behind closed doors they had another face they wore to make deals that were driven by self-interest and greed. She said Walter Lawrence, the colonial observer and much critiqued author of The Valley of Kashmir (1895), was right to describe Kashmiri people as a dishonest lot. Nida asked, ‘How can we expect freedom until we free ourselves from the ills of our own society?’

With frustrated emotion Nida spoke on while I listened. Reflecting her own situation more than any one else’s, she lamented, ‘In Kashmir people are willing to raise their voices against India within the four walls of their home, but not beyond.’ Standing at the kitchen sink, Nida said Kashmir is lacking courage and clarity. ‘Ask a common stone pelter on the street why they are throwing stones. They are boys simply following a trend.’ I asked her about the martyrs, how she made sense of the young boys who died on those streets, and she said, ‘They were all innocents. When the angels come for them, it is those boys who will be the first to ask, What did I die for?’

Nida’s voice was soft and beautiful yet full of a fierce exasperation. Usually we spoke about love or our families and friends while we hung out in the kitchen, cooking together, laughing and sharing recipes between Kashmir and Australia, but here the politics came out – confused, intensely compressed and human all the same. Nida had grown up since childhood seeing dead bodies. ‘I saw Sopore burning. I saw bodies carried past my house to the martyrs graveyard. I’ve seen so many. Once I saw a head pass by without a body.’ For Kashmir to be free she believed we needed 100% dedication from 100% of the people. But this never happened. ‘Look at who our martyrs are’, Nida deplored, ‘they are all middle and lower class people. Why do we die and not the rich?’

While in 2009 the double rape and murder of two young women by security forces in South Kashmir’s Shopian brought about an immense 47 day strike led by the local consultative committee Majlis-e-Mashawarat, with support coming from across the valley, Nida felt frustrated that after 47 days it seemed people had forgotten. She asked, What are we doing today to take care of all the women, young and old, raped by the army in Kunan-Poshpora and the injustice of Neelofar and Asiya’s death in Shopian? If we really cared for others as we care for ourselves we would never have given up.

She referred to the uprising of 2010 as the Ragda, Ragda, a Kashmiri phrase, particularly popular in Sopore, that related to the act of removing stains from a piece of clothing and was used in this context to talk of removing or erasing the stains of India from Kashmir. Nida complained that, ‘The Ragda Ragda came to an end because our stomachs were hungry. We ran out of rice and food and gas and we gave up, we said enough is enough – give us our rice, give us our food and give us our gas. Freedom can wait till next time.’

Nida said other countries in the world attained freedom by sacrificing endlessly. ‘If we really want freedom we have to leave everything Indian, just like India left everything that was British under Gandhi. But no. No one has the courage to leave their government jobs, or to go without sales, trade and supplies. We do want freedom. That is true. But we become tired.’ Nida herself had a government job that she could not leave; it was secure, but it wasn’t free. And so her opinions came to reflect the contradictions and incongruence that she herself felt in the confines of her own society.

In Nida and in so many others I kept hearing again and again how the struggle was exhausting. It was not that Nida did not want Kashmir to be free, but that she had lost hope in the possibility that Kashmir could be free.

As the kitchen diatribe came to an end Nida added, Today there is not peace in Kashmir, as the media likes to pretend. We do not live in peace but in silence.

22.07.12

Bilal was from the town of Sopore in North Kashmir, but in 2010 he had been living and working in Saudi Arabia. He described a kind of gap he felt at this time. He knew what was happening back home in Kashmir and he knew what the international media was not saying. But in his immediate surroundings, in Saudi Arabia, in the world he existed in daily and the people he met, all of this world knew nothing of Kashmir. It was as though he existed in two disparate realities simultaneously. Bilal said, at that time, he wanted people in Saudi to feel for Kashmir, and from that feeling, he thought perhaps things would change. But the state was tight in Saudi and there was little room to talk of Kashmir, even socially. The gap that Bilal spoke of was similar to what I experienced upon returning from Kashmir to Australia in 2010. Cups of nun chai emerged as a small attempt to fill that gap.

At that same time, while Bilal was in Saudi and while people were being killed on a daily basis at his home in Kashmir, the Arab Spring unfolded and a number of revolutionary social movements took off in the Arab world. Bilal was careful with language, and he spoke of the way that ideas and actions have the potential to move from ‘solitude into a multitude’ – from a whisper into an echo, that goes on and on and on.

The Arab Spring began in Tunisia with the actions of just one man and Bilal relayed to me the story of that man, who started it all. He was a university graduate but made his living selling fruit from a roadside cart. One day, some government bureaucrats hassled him about a licensing procedure. A short time after, fed up with the hopeless injustice that surrounded him, this man set himself on fire. And that fire, spreading from ‘solitude into a multitude’, as Bilal said, moved across many of the old dictatorships of the Arab world.

I asked Bilal why he felt that same fire didn’t catch on to make permanent change in Kashmir. He spoke of the centuries of struggle the people of Kashmir had undergone. He described a bug, captured in a small container. At first the bug will fight hard to get out of the box, but as his struggle weakens him so too does his determination to escape. Kashmir had it’s own fire that had been burning for centuries, but today it was not so much characterised by burning flames, but by persistent slow burning coals. Kashmir was full of embers waiting to catch alight, but Kashmir was also getting tired.

Bilal spoke of the Kashmiri diaspora who travelled to Saudi and other parts of the world for employment. He said they lived in a ‘created’ exile, and was very specific about the use of the term ‘created’. Bilal explained that people moved because they could not make a sufficient living at home, but the reason they could not make a sufficient living at home was part of the occupation’s strategy to destabilise life in Kashmir. Bilal reasoned that when people had to put all their energy into dealing with the struggles of day to day life they had no time or energy left to bring the dream of Azadi (freedom) into a reality.

But he said something else that was interesting. Like the man from Tunisia, Bilal also had a postgraduate education and after teaching at university in Saudi Arabia he was now making a living through private business in Sopore as he found it impossible to get a government position in education. Though Bilal said universities had a tendency to place one’s thinking in a box. Now, outside of the university, he said his mind was free in a different way and he was open to where that freedom might lead him tomorrow.

It was Ramadan, the month of fasting for Muslims, so my nun chai with Bilal had been symbolic. When it came time to take the photograph he positioned his hands, holding an empty cup, above two books: Sanjay Kak’s edited volume on Kashmir Until My Freedom Comes and the Complete Works of Kahlil Gibran. Bilal explained that these books were important because they offered two alternate paths. One was about emotion and feeling and the other was about struggle. He wondered how they could be brought together.

I said Cups of nun chai was an attempt to bring those two together in that it was as much about personal feelings as it was about politics. He thought for a moment and paused. Then I asked Bilal how he thought the ideas contained in these books could be brought together. Some people entered the room where we were sitting and Bilal said he would tell me later, at some other time, over a cup of nun chai.

18.07.12

As I explained what Cups of nun chai was about, Mehran said that in 2010 he had himself written a poem about nun chai. In Kashmir it is common for older people to experience high blood pressure, to which Doctors advise them not to drink nun chai because of the high quantities of salt. In his poem Mehran referred to a mother, with high blood pressure, whose son had died in the conflict – a desolate mother, sipping heart attacks in her nun chai, trying in vain to accelerate the time.

Mehran and I sat by the banks of the Jehlum Bund looking down towards Zero Bridge and we spoke about memory, and what it means to remember. On my way from Australia to South Asia, some months back, I stopped in Thailand where I shared nun chai with a number of people and learnt that only two years ago more than 100 people had been killed in anti-government protests on the streets of Bangkok. The city itself felt devoid of such a history and I was told that in Thailand what enabled life to continue was a kind of cultural willingness to forget. In light of this idea of forgetting and the drive behind Cups of nun chai to remember, I asked Mehran if he felt memory was important. He would eventually answer my question by quoting Milan Kundera’s famous words, The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.

As a student of architecture Mehran had written his thesis on conflict, trauma and memory, exploring how these experiences were housed in the built environment of Srinagar. He had drawn from theoretical writings on the subject that emerged out of the Holocaust. There is important and very sensitive work here, but it is haunting, in light of Israel’s aggression towards Palestine today, just how quickly the oppressed can become the oppressor. Looking back over history, Mehran said he felt that something went wrong with modernity. It is here, with the onset of modernity, that we see the seeds of the systematised violence that continues to unfold in our world today.

As we looked towards Zero Bridge Mehran spoke of the poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, From Zero Bridge/a shadow chased by searchlights is running away to find its body. Shahid’s words haunt the landscape. Similarly the Ghanta Ghar (Clock Tower) at Lal Chowk had been at the centre of so much in the last few decades that, for Mehran, a future free Kashmir would feel incomplete without it. Places like Zero Bridge and Ghanta Ghar carried histories within them, but as Mehran went on to explain there were important memories embedded in even smaller, more personal and obscure places as well.

Some years ago, on a cold winter morning, Mehran was on his way to school when he came across a group of solemn looking people on the street. The body had already been taken away, but Mehran remembers a woman with a bucket and a broom who was trying to scrub the blood from the pavement. But the blood had congealed and stuck to the ground and the woman was struggling in the cold to make it go away. Mehran explained that his memories lay even in the pavements of this city.

Mehran shared a number of other memories similarly embedded in obscure corners of his world – but these memories were all too personal to write on this page.

The landscape of Srinagar, with its pavements and bedrooms and bridges, has become a home to small, everyday pieces of history that are central to the personal ‘struggle of memory against forgetting’. And it is often these small, obscure things that mark us the most. Four brief lines in Mehran’s poem read:

Inside a radio
tragedy and melody
embrace each other:
‘Moate chooro, karith khaeli‘……

Mehran had taken the last words from a Kashmiri song, Moate chooro, karith khaeli, kam khaane tai, which translates into, what lively dwellings, o angel of death, you render desolate!