I felt I must be missing
something.
I knew that Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night was somehow different
from the many other books on Kashmir, yet I couldn’t pinpoint exactly
what it was that set it apart. Upon its publication in India in 2008,
with a brilliant marketing campaign from Random House India, the book
garnered a bagful of glowing reviews and praise from Indian readers.
It won the prestigious Vodafone Crossword Award for English Nonfiction.
It even seemed to be held in high regard in the author’s homeland
of Kashmir, and that’s no small feat. But what was it that gave this
account credibility and why was the simply told story so profoundly
moving and affecting? I was overlooking something elemental;
foundational.
Then I stumbled upon the key
to the story that I felt was closet to the author’s heart. I suddenly
realized that I had been approaching it from the wrong angle. I had
been reading the book either as the biography of a place, or as a
coming-of-age
story and autobiography, or the tale of an exile’s departures and
return. And all these are true descriptions, but this difficult to
classify
work finally yielded its secret, not in the text itself, but in the
author’s dedication.
This book, set within the
larger
canvas of the story of modern Kashmir is – at least as I had come
to believe – a biography: It’s the story of the author’s father,
Ghulam Ahmad Peer. It’s the story of a son’s relationship with a
man who, like thousands of other ordinary Kashmiris, rose to the status
of hero by the quiet desperate act of acquiescence and acceptance of
the extraordinary events that swirled around him and threatened to
destroy
his homeland, his faith and his family. By extension, it then becomes
the larger story of a whole generation of Kashmiris who, by choice or
by circumstance, stayed to witness and endure the horror of their
country
as it became consumed by violence and armed rebellion; a country
compromised
and forever changed. It’s this quality of forbearance that gives the
story such power and immediacy.
From the opening pages, Peer
sets the tone with one of the finest passages in the book; a poignant
reminiscence of his father arriving home on Saturday evening: “A
not-so-tall
man in his early thirties, almost always wearing a suit, a matching
tie, and brown Bata shoes...” describes a modern, educated and respected
man. A self-taught man who faces the deepening crisis with a calm
courage
and dignity, who teaches his son tolerance and respect for other
religions,
and who values rationality and honesty. A man who remains determined
in his quiet defiance of the unstoppable ruination of his beloved
homeland.
Determined to resist the forces of fanaticism and extremism and embrace
modernity and secularism, he is also a father who ultimately intervenes
against violence with painful foresight: when confronted with the
inevitability
of Kashmir’s long night, he sees the solution being education. He
sends his son away from the village to attend school, and later to
schools
in India.
Through the son’s relationship
with his father (and grandfather), we as readers come to feel, by
extension,
a broader connection and concern not only for this single family, but
for the Kashmiri people as a whole. Within the framework of this
personal
narrative, we begin to see the larger human subject of Kashmir treated
with equal warmth, devotion, and sympathy. Curfewed Night has
made us care and compels us to compassion and understanding; the author
has made us all a part of his family. And as we encounter the father
throughout the book, we begin to get a deepening emotional sense of
what has been threatened, lost, encountered and disappeared.
The tales of loss from other
conflict zones are eerily similar, but when Kashmiris talk about what
has been stolen, it’s more than a loss of security, but a helplessness
against a sense of impending and sudden peril. It’s the blaze in the
countryside, the empty village, newly dug graves and gardens of ghosts.
It’s an ever-present fear that the next phone call may be the one
that delivers the bad news about a next door neighbor, a friend, a
schoolmate
– or even a family member.
The most harrowing story is
that of the author’s parents near-miss with a land mine planted by
militants along a stretch of highway. We share in his frustration, fear
and concern: “I obsessed about the attack on my parents in the months
following it. What would have happened if my parents had died in that
mine blast?... Most families accepted the killings with frustrated
resignation
and continued and struggled to continue with their lives.” Here we
finally begin to understand the trauma of a people, of a son, through
a lens focused on alternate endings, of what might have been.
We realize that these must
have been painful words to write, and painful events to relive. As his
father moves through the mine field, literal and metaphorical, of
Kashmir
and across the pages of Curfewed Night, we come to share the
fear and uncertainty experienced by the son. You are never sure if the
father (or anyone) will return home “to sit in his usual corner in
our drawing room, facing the road, a few books and a boiling samovar
of tea by his side.” We can then extend and multiply this sentiment
by the population of Kashmir; a people unwillingly caught between
paranoid
imperialism and a brutal militancy, existing in a surreal realm of those
dead and disappeared, between the buried past and the bleak future.
One day, the father speaks
to his son directly about death: “ ‘I had somehow come to believe
that my family would always be safe. I too had this faith that we will
be fine and survive it all. Maybe people don’t really believe that
they can be killed or come close to death,’ father said. I knew he
was scared and living with a great degree of fear. He hardly travelled
anywhere.” The survivors carry with them a heavy burden of
inevitability,
that no one is safe, that people can be killed and can
come close to death: This is Kashmir: it is the end of everything; it
is still night.
Peer’s intentionally fractured
narrative reflects glimmers of a people afflicted with survivor’s
guilt. The author tells us early on that if not for his family, he may
well have been the young awestruck student who crossed the LoC into
Pakistan, only to be returned bullet-torn, buried and forgotten as a
martyr to the cause. Yet, he remained untouched by the blood flowing
from the wounded valley. This feeling of guilt takes nothing away from
the story; it’s these psychological scars that emphasize the struggle
the ordinary citizenry has repeatedly been forced to face. It’s in
the unending stories of those affected by the turmoil, in the sheer
effort of living day to day with a shared feeling of helplessness,
within
the borders of real and perceived subjugation. This is Kashmir: a siege
mentality.
It’s the conscious worry
of which fated keyword will finally be attached to the story of you
or your family: beaten, intimidated, tortured, disappeared, raped, gang
raped, recruited, or merely wearied and exhausted. You can move away,
but the words travel with you as baggage. Because you can’t outrun
it, it follows, it silently stalks; you can’t ignore it, you can’t
avoid it. You can depart and return like the ubiquitous bus that
crisscrosses
the scarred landscape, but the trip is destined to end at some
existential
checkpoint. Kashmir’s sad history will find you and these stories
that Peer has gathered remind us that this is the psychological cost
of living in a conflict zone. That death may come as suddenly as a knock
on the door in the middle of the night. This is Kashmir: “Till the
soldiers return the keys.”
It’s this cycle of uncertainty
and fear, of nervous calm followed by sudden loss that desperately
needed
to be told. It’s simply too important that Kashmir has a voice, and
even with its faults, Curfewed Night deserves to be the voice
that finds a larger Western audience. Yes, it does approach the
questions
of identity and exile through a lens narrowed only on the largely
Islamic
Kashmir Valley. Yes, it leaves out Kargil and Siachen and POK (about
which little is known to the outside world), and other equally important
stories and regions (such as Ladakh), as well as failing to account
for the deeply plural nature of Jammu and Kashmir society. But the
overall
concept does not suffer from these omissions.
Yes, the ambiguous ending with
the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus line and its suggestion that the symbolic
gestures of soft borders along the LoC, or empty political rhetoric
about conflict management vs. conflict resolution, offer the best hope
for the future, is surely a misstep. Kashmir’s best chance will come
from those beneficiaries of the father’s cultural legacy, the
intellectual
heirs of his embrace of modernity that allows them to make sense of
the world in ways others cannot or have not had the opportunity to.
We discover that the father’s answer of education, tolerance and
rejection
of extremism will be the best hope at a new beginning for Kashmir.
And yes, the story does lose
some narrative drive in the last section, as the father’s story begins
to recede and the other survivor’s tales are recounted. But as we
come to realize, a new beginning is necessary. Both the author and his
people are ready – and need – to move forward. And even though the
father may be fading from view, we discover he has left an object lesson
in how to survive a conflict with your sanity and your family intact.
That the best personal strategy for ordinary Kashmiris living within
the borders of a conflict zone that suffers under the heaviest military
presence of any place in the world – that to break the cycle of abuse
and human rights violations – would be to follow in the footsteps
of the author and heed the father’s words: “If you want to do something
for Kashmir, I would say you should read.”
Perhaps with education and
foresight this younger generation will craft a future where it becomes
possible for Peer’s father to once again journey safely across the
glorious Kashmir countryside in a car or bus, or even a blue Willys
jeep. That they will write a better future, one where we are not left
with an image of the father barricaded behind his books against the
fear and burnt-down and bombed out hollowness, peering out the window
at a Srinagar bunkered, powerless, and forever lost. That this new
generation
will find the tools and patience and intellectual backbone to finally
break the curfew of Kashmir’s long night.
The lessons learned in Curfewed
Night suggest it’s possible. The book itself has provided us a
long view of how all these events – all the history of India, Pakistan
and Kashmir – have filtered down from grandfather to father to son
to produce this touching and heartbreaking work that encompasses all
the tragic aggregations deftly woven into the author’s own personal
narrative. We have become aware of all the people that violence has
touched, we share their pain and perplexity and hope. That’s
the genius of Curfewed Night, what sets it apart and why this
humanistic and honest narrative deserves the praise and awards it’s
won. Within its pages, you will find Kashmir.
In the end, Basharat Peer
relates
the two words that had always made their presence felt: militants and
soldiers. But we have become emotionally invested and now see this story
on another level: home and family. It’s also, at its most personal
level, the entwined tale of a father and son as they move through the
story of modern Kashmir: “In my part of the world, you are always
your father’s son, your grandfather’s grandson.” It may comfort
the author to think that, perhaps, somewhere in Srinagar on the
bookshelves
of Ghulam Ahmad Peer, proudly sits a well-read copy of Curfewed Night.
