A few days ago while I was searching the website of Columbia University for a Masters Course in journalism, I read about one of its alumni who has written a book called Curfewed Night. I got busy surfing the site for admission forms, fees and other necessary details and enrolled myself for an update from the university about the ‘deadlines, scholarships and FAQs’.
Last week there was something urgent for which I was required in Delhi for a very short duration so I boarded the flight to Delhi. Two days in India and flying back again was very hectic indeed. Sitting at the IGI airport, waiting for the flight is something which I rarely enjoy. So I got up and went to the duty free area where books are kept. Amidst a varied collection of books I found one on whose cover was a long nosed child staring out from what seemed like a broken window and it was called “Curfewed Night” by Basharat Peer.
Not judging the book by its cover, I instinctively picked up the book, paid about 10 USD and left.
This book brings alive the horrors of people in Kashmir, their never ending pain caused by the loss of the young and the old. I had heard first hand stories about the militant and army rule in Kashmir but this book went much farther than those accounts. I loved the way Peer narrates the stories interconnecting them with one another moving swiftly and immaculately from Tariq to Shafi to Bilal to Shameema to Asif to Hilal to Yusuf to Vikas to Shabnam to Shahid to Ahmed and countless others who suffered the wrath of either the militants or the army in someway or the other.
Peer painfully recounts his struggle to get a rented accommodation in Delhi made further difficult due to his ethnicity & religion. It was the same struggle which my friends in Delhi also faced except that Peer eventually found a place and my friends had to move to those ghettos which Peer refrained from.
Peer explains how it is that people don’t lead normal lives in Kashmir(as we do in India), why they thank God just for staying alive, why every child once dreamt of picking up a Kalashnikov and joining the armed struggle, why the ‘azadi’ is so much important to them, what it is to be looked with suspicion even in your own place with the so called outsiders, what is to fear the police and army(whom we in Delhi scornfully call as thullas) as they have the unrestrained power of putting the innocents behind bars in the name of interrogations and terror suspicion.
I now realize why Kashmiris feel insulted to be called as a part of India. I would have felt the same had I been in their place. I haven’t lived those fears, those tragedies, the loss of self esteem and dignity, yet my blood boils and my heart shrieks in pain. I wonder how would they feel, what impact would all this mass destruction have etched in their memories and their hearts?
Ironically not many in ‘India’ are actually aware of this. Neither the history of Kashmir, nor the tyranny on its people. All we know is, Kashmir belongs to us, it’s a part of our country and we will fight a million battles to keep it this way. We don’t care if in Kashmir the women are raped and abused every day, its youth is being oppressed every hour, the children are deprived of a peaceful and sane childhood every minute and the old are losing their dignity and once held self-esteem by each moment. We just don’t care.
This was the book I didn’t feel like writing a review on, not because it is the greatest of all but because it is not just a book. It is the blend of lives of people in the conflict ridden state and who am I to appraise on the miseries and trauma of people?
Pooja
P.S. - I wish I could say to the Indian media and central government that if they are interpreting the ‘supposedly’ high voter turn out in the valley during the last election as a symbol of its people’s ‘faith’ in Indian democratic system, they couldn’t be more wrong.