Love, The Sullen Country

Basharat Peer’s book is a searingly honest memoir about Kashmir, says SHOBHANA BHATTACHARJI

THERE ARE NO good stories in Kashmir, only the difficult, ambiguous, unresolved ones that make up Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night. Ashamed to find books from many conflict zones but none by a Kashmiri on Kashmir — this in spite of Humra Qureshi’s excellent Kashmir: The Untold Story — Peer left his job as a journalist and returned to Kashmir to write this book. He interviewed a bride who was shot at, then gangraped by BSF men, and ostracised by her in-laws for bringing them bad luck; a mother who had watched her son walk to his death carrying a landmine handed to him by Indian soldiers who would say he died because of militants’ landmines; people who lost family members to militancy but didn’t have money for bribes to get the compensation due to them; families betrayed; and survivors of massacres.

Peer begins with a sharp, clean sketch of his family before the terrible winter of 1989-90. He lived in Seer Hamdan village, south of Anantnag, with his maternal grandfather, the village school teacher, and his schoolteacher mother, aunts and cousins who worked in the rice fields and apple orchards when needed. Later, he studied in Mattan’s Lyceum, named after Aristotle’s school. Its legendary headmaster, Chaman Lal Kantroo, ended up in a small barsati in Jammu when militancy reduced him to a single identity — Kashmiri Pandit. In one of the saddest moments of this searingly truthful book, Peer interviewed him, too. Although in cricket matches Muslims supported Pakistan and Pandits India, until 1989 religion hadn’t divided them. They were Kashmiris first. I don’t know if people in any other part of our subcontinent speak of the beauty of their land in the way Kashmiris do. Thus Peer worked out why the “angrez travel and we do not. . . .They had to travel to see Kashmir; we lived there and did not need to travel”. Kashmir’s unique Islam was like an outcrop of Buddhism, but zealous reformers ‘purified’ it in line with other Islamic traditions, driving wedges between Kashmir and its history.

The first chapter describes the end of an idyll. The Indian Government rigged the 1987 election and arrested the opposition, including JKLF’s Yasin Malik. Kashmir protested. The Indian government responded ruthlessly, killing or arresting hundreds. The war of Peer’s adolescence started on the long, sad night of 20 January, 1990, when the CRPF fired on protestors crossing the rickety Gawkadal bridge. Some were killed outright; others when the officer turning over the bodies shot dead anyone still alive. Kashmiris wept all night. The morning was unusually silent. Buses didn’t run; shops didn’t open; people were sullen and angry. Slogans for freedom gathered momentum. Peer’s father worked in Srinagar. His family didn’t know if he was safe. Fear and anxiety became constant, replacing the slow rhythms of peace.

Young Basharat too was angry; he wanted to join the militants who often spent nights in his school hostel. It took his awe-inspiring grandfather’s tears to wean him away from the idea. Sent to Aligarh to escape the militants’ influence, he later visited Kashmir as a journalist, always fearing he would hear of relatives killed, yet aware how fortunate he was to leave the Valley at the most vulnerable time of his life. Thousands of less fortunate boys crossed the LoC for training as militants in Pakistan’s Muzzarafabad. Kashmiris began to marry late because of disrupted academic years and lack of jobs. In war, young men become scarce. Young Kashmiri men were killed, or became impotent due to torture (electric shocks to their testicles) in the infamous Papa-2 on Gupkar Road, where the powerful reside.

Eventually, resignation replaced anger. Kashmiris know that courts will not punish the soldiers who killed Peer’s 15-year-old cousin Gulzar. “Those things happen elsewhere, in countries where the law is implemented; in Kashmir you try to save the living from further trouble.”