Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir

CURFEWED NIGHT

A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love

and War in Kashmir

BASHARAT PEER

Harper

Press

In the memory of the boys who couldn’t return home

For Baba and for my parents, Hameeda Parveen and G. A. Peer

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One - Memory

1 - Fragile Fairyland

2 - Freedom Songs

3 - Very Long Miles

4 - Bunkeristan

5 - Shalimar Express

6 - A Close Call

7 - Situation

8 - The Trial

Part Two - Journeys

9 - I See You Again

10 - City of No Joy

11 - Papa-2

12 - Heroes

13 - Price of Life

14 - In the Courtyards of Faith

15 - The Missing Shiva

16 - The Black Blanket

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in people.

—Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin

The city from where no news can come is now so visible in its curfewed night that the worst is precise:

From Zero Bridge a shadow chased by searchlights is running away to find its body.

—The Country Without a Post Office, Agha Shahid Ali

1 Fragile Fairyland

I was born in winter in Kashmir. My village in the southern district of Anantnag sat on the wedge of a mountain range. Paddy fields, green in early summer and golden by autumn, surrounded the cluster of mud-and-brick houses. In winter, snow slid slowly from our roof and fell on our lawns with a thud. My younger brother and I made snowmen using pieces of charcoal for their eyes. And when our mother was busy with some household chore and Grandfather was away, we rushed to the roof, broke icicles off it, mixed them with a concoction of milk and sugar stolen from the kitchen, and ate our homemade ice creams. We would often slide down the slope of the hill overlooking our neighborhood or play cricket on the frozen waters of a pond. We risked being scolded or beaten by Grandfather, the school headmaster. And if he passed by our winter cricket pitch, he expressed his preference of textbooks over cricket through his dreaded shout: “You good-for-nothings!” At his familiar bark, the cricket players would scatter in all directions and disappear. School headmasters were feared like military and paramilitary men are, not just by their grandchildren but by every single child in the village.

On winter afternoons, Grandfather joined the men of our neighborhood sitting at the storefronts warming themselves with kangris, our mobile fire pots, gossiping or talking about how that year’s snowfall would affect the mustard crop in the spring. After the muezzin gave the call for afternoon prayers, they left the shop fronts, fed the cattle at home, prayed at the neighborhood mosque, and returned to the storefronts to talk.

Spring was the season of green mountains and meadows, blushing snow and the expanse of yellow mustard flowers in the fields around our village. On Radio Kashmir, they played songs in Kashmiri celebrating the flowers in the meadows and the nightingales on willow branches. My favorite song ended with the refrain: “And the nightingale sings to the flowers: Our land is a garden!” When we had to harvest a crop, our neighbors and friends would send someone to help; when it was their turn, we would reciprocate. You never needed to make a formal request weeks in advance. Somebody always turned up.

During the farming season, Akhoon, the mullah who refused to believe that Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon, complained about the thinning attendance at our neighborhood mosque. I struggled to hold back my laughter when the villagers eager to get back to farming coughed during the prayers to make him finish faster. He compromised by reading shorter chapters from the Quran. Later in the day he would turn up at the fields to collect a seasonal donation—his fee for leading the prayers at the mosque.

In summer, after the mustard was reaped, we planted rice seedlings. On weekdays before we left for school, my brother and I took samovars of kahwa, the sweet brew of saffron, almonds, and cinnamon, to the laborers working in our fields. On weekends, I would help carry sacks of seedlings from the nurseries; Mother, my aunts, and other neighborhood women bent in rows in the well-watered fields, planted, and sang.

Grandfather kept an eye on a farmer whose holdings bordered our farms. We would see him walking toward the fields, and Grandfather would turn to me: “So, whom do you see?” “I see Mongoose,” I would reply. And we would laugh. A short, wiry man with a wrinkled face, Mongoose specialized in things that led to arguments—diverting water to his fields or scraping the sides of our fields with a shovel to increase his holdings by a few inches.

Mongoose, Grandfather, and all the other villagers worried about the clouds and the rainfall. Untimely rain could spoil the crop. If there were clouds on the northern horizon, they said, there would be rain. And around sunset, if they saw streaks of scarlet in the sky, they said, “There has been a murder somewhere. When a man is killed, the sky turns red.”

Over more cups of kahwa, the rice stalks were threshed in autumn. Grains were stored in wooden barns, and haystacks rose like mini-mountains in the threshing fields, around which the children played hide-and-seek. The apples in our orchards would be ready to be plucked, graded, packed into boxes of thin willow planks, and sold to a merchant. Village children stole apples; my brother and I would alternate as lookouts after school. Few stole from our orchard; they were too scared of my grandfather. “If they steal apples today, tomorrow they will rob a bank. These boys will grow up to be like Janak Singh,” Grandfather would say. Many years ago, Janak Singh, a man from a neighboring village, had killed a guard while robbing a bank. He had been arrested and sent to prison for fourteen years. Nobody had killed a man in our area before or since.

On the way home from school on those mid-eighties afternoons, I would often stare from the bus window at Janak Singh’s thatch-roofed house as if seeing it once again would reveal some secret. My house, a three-floor rectangle of red bricks and varnished wood covered by a cone of tin sheets, was just a mile up the road. I would stand on the steps and watch the tourist buses passing by. The multicolored buses carried visitors from distant cities like Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi; and also many angrez—the word for the British and our only word for Westerners. The angrez were interesting; some had very long hair, and some shaved their heads. They rode big motorbikes and at times were half naked. We waved at them; they waved back. I had asked a neighbor who worked in a hotel, “Why do the angrez travel and we do not?” “Because they are angrez and we are not,” he said. But I worked it out. They had to travel to see Kashmir.

Father had bought me an American comic book dictionary, which taught words using stories of Superman, Batman and Robin, and Flash. I would often read it by the jaundiced light of our kerosene lantern and think that if Flash lived in Kashmir, we could have asked him to fix our errant power supply. I preferred reading the comics to the sums my grandfather wanted me to master. They added new stories to the collection of Persian and Kashmiri legends I heard from my grandmother and our servant Akram—legends such as the tale of Farhad’s love for Shirin. Akram always began the story by saying, “It is said that once upon a time in Iran, there was a most beautiful queen called Shirin …” The young sculptor Farhad was enamored of her and loitered around, seeking a glance of Shirin. Over time Shirin began to develop a liking for him. Her husband, King Khusro, was furious, and his advisers suggested a plan to be rid of Farhad: They told Farhad that Shirin would be his if he could dig a canal from a distant Behistun mountain to the palace. Shirin told Farhad about his impossible task and the artist-lover set off for the mountains with his spade. Farhad toiled alone for years, molding the mountains, crying out the name of his beloved, sculpting Shirin’s face on the rocks along the canal.

Farhad had survived the impossible task, and the canal was nearing completion. King Khusro was worried by the thought of keeping his promise and letting his wife marry another man, a commoner. His advisers had a plan: An old woman should be sent to the mountains to tell Farhad that Shirin was dead. It would break Farhad’s resolve and make him leave the canal unfinished. Farhad was toiling away when an old woman arrived, crying, choking on her words. “Mother, why do you cry?” he asked. “I cry for a dead beauty,” she said. “And I cry for you, brave man!” “For me?” a surprised Farhad asked. “You have cut the mountains, brave man! But your beloved, the beautiful Shirin, is dead!” Farhad struck himself with his spade and fell, his last cry resounding through the mountains: Shirin!

My family ate dinner together in our kitchen-cum-drawing room, sitting around a long yellow sheet laid out on the floor, verses of Urdu and Farsi poetry extolling the beauty of hospitality painted in black along its borders. Dinner often began with Grandfather leaning against a cushion in the center of the room and turning to my mother: “Hama, looks like your mother will starve us today.” Grandmother would stop puffing her hookah and say, “I was thinking of evening prayers. But anyway, let me feed you first.” And she would amble toward her wooden seat near the earthen hearth above which our tin-plated copper plates and bowls sat on various shelves. Mother would leave aside her knitting kit or the papers of her students and briskly move to arrange the plates and bowls near Grandmother’s throne. I would fill a jar with water and get the bowl for washing hands. “Call the girls,” mother would say, and I would go upstairs to announce to my aunts that dinner was ready.

Two of my younger aunts—Tasleema and Rubeena—lived with us; the others were married but visited often with their kids and husbands. Tasleema, the geek, was always poring over thick chemistry and zoology texts or preparing some speech for her college debating society and practicing her hand gestures in front of a mirror. Rubeena didn’t care much about textbooks but had great interest in women’s magazines, detective fiction, and Bollywood songs, which always played at a low volume on her transistor, strategically placed by her side, to be switched off quickly if she heard someone climbing the stairs.

We would form a circle with Grandfather at its center and eat. Almost every time we cooked meat or chicken, he would cut a portion of his share and place it on my plate and tell Tasleema to bring a glass of milk for Akram, who would be visibly tired after a long day of work at the orchards or the fields.

In the morning, we would gather around a samovar of pink salty milk tea, and then Grandfather and Mother would leave to teach, and my aunts, my brother, and I would leave for our colleges and schools. My school, a crumbling wooden building in the neighboring small town of Mattan, was named Lyceum after Plato’s academy. Saturdays meant quizzes, debates, and essay competitions. Once I got the first prize—three carbon pencils and two notebooks wrapped in pink paper—for writing about the hazards of a nuclear war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just names to memorize for a quiz, as were the strange names of those bombs—Little Boy and Fat Man. I concerned myself with learning to ride a bicycle, playing cricket for my school team, grabbing my share of fireen (a sweet pudding of almonds, raisins, milk, and semolina topped by poppy seeds and served during a break in the nightlong prayers at our mosque before Eid), or trying to stretch the predawn eating limit during Ramadan.

We woke up long before dawn during Ramadan. Grandmother and Mother heated the food and the traditional salty tea. Grandfather read the Quran; my younger brother, Wajahat, and I yawned till we ate. We ate quickly because you had to stop eating after you heard the call for prayers. Often we would take a few more bites after the azaan, the call for prayer, peeping out of the kitchen window and turning back to say, “You still can’t see the hair on your forearm without artificial light.” The expression dated back to the times when there were no watches. People determined daybreak by looking at their arms. If they could see the hair on their forearms, they decided it was dawn and stopped eating. Despite Japanese electronic watches, the tradition came in handy when you were trying to gulp down some more tea or eat another morsel. Grandfather, who ate little, would remind us of the purpose of fasting: “To understand what hunger means and to learn to be kind to the poor.”

Toward the end of Ramadan, the talk about the meanings of fasting would lessen, and my brother and I would grow excited about the festival of Eid. On the twenty-ninth evening, everyone searched the sky with great hope for the silver sliver of a new crescent announcing the end of fasting. But the orange sun seemed to slide behind the jagged mountain peaks with great reluctance, as if it were being imprisoned for the night. All the neighborhood children would stand in the courtyard of our house staring at the horizon as it changed from shades of red and orange to a dark blue. We looked and shouted at each other, “You saw it?” “Not yet.” Soon we would run up the stairs of our houses, continuing our search from the windows; our shouts grew louder as we moved from the first floor to the second to the third. If the crescent remained evasive, my brother and I would scuttle back to the kitchen, where Grandfather would be jumping from one radio station to the other, hoping for reports of crescent spotting.

Every morning on Eid, Mother would prepare kahwa. My brother and I followed Father and Grandfather to a clearing on the slope of the mountain overlooking the village shaded by walnut trees, which served as Eidgah, the ceremonial village ground for Eid prayers twice a year, and marked as such by an arched pulpit in a western corner from where the imam led the prayers and read his sermon. We met relatives and friends on the way. Everybody dressed in new clothes and smiled broadly. We sat in long rows on jute mats brought from our mosque. The prayers lasted only a few minutes, but a very long sermon followed. The preacher gave the same sermon every year, and my friends and I would look for ways of slipping away. Our parents, relatives, and neighbors gave us Eidyaneh, or pocket money, to spend on toys and crackers.

Young men and adolescents from our village would hire a bus and go to the Heaven cinema in the neighboring town, Anantnag, and watch the latest Bollywood film. I wasn’t allowed to join them, but after they returned, I was riveted by their detailed retelling of the movie. I would populate their stories with the faces from movie posters. The canvases, covered in bright reds, yellows, greens, and browns, hung from electric poles by the roadside or were ferried around the village once a week on a tonga, a horse carriage, while an announcer standing beside the tonga wallah, the carriage driver, dramatically proclaimed the release of a new movie from a megaphone. Every poster was a collage of hypertheatrical expressions: an angry hero in a green shirt and blue trousers, with a pistol in hand and a rivulet of blood dripping from his face; a woman in a red sari tied to a pole with thick ropes, her locks falling over her agonized face; the luxuriously mustached villain in a golden suit, smoking a pipe or smiling a treacherous smile.

I would spend most evenings doing my homework. One evening I was distracted by the strains of a Bollywood song coming from our neighbor’s house. I hunched over my notebooks, but the music made my body restless, eager to break away. I tried to focus on the sums, but the answers kept going wrong. Grandfather slapped me and left the room. Every schoolboy got a few canings and slaps for not doing the homework properly. Grandfather tried to ensure that no music was played in our house; anything that he considered un-Islamic was forbidden. Strict interpretations of Islam do consider music—except at a wedding—un-Islamic. Mohammed Iqbal, the great Urdu poet and philosopher of Kashmiri ancestry who had studied philosophy in Munich, was influenced by Nietzsche, and propagated the ideal of superman-like Muslim youth, was welcome. Bollywood actresses dancing around trees, singing songs of love and longing, could lead to bad grades and worse: a weakened faith. Once I did not come first in class and hid under my father’s bed to escape a beating. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” Grandfather loved to say. He spent about two hours every evening giving me lessons, checking my notebooks, smiling if I lived up to his expectations, scolding me if I failed. He wanted me to be like his best student: my father.

In the late-196os, Grandfather was teaching in a high school in a neighboring village when he noticed an eighth-grade student. Ahmad was the brightest in the school and also one of the poorest—an orphan being raised by his cousins, who wore ill-fitting hand-me-downs and wore torn bathroom slippers instead of shoes. Grandfather felt that with a good education and family support, Ahmad could go far, and he would often mention him to my grandmother. “Go, talk to his family. We can support him,” she told her young husband. And thus my grandfather became a mentor and a de facto father to young Ahmad.

Ahmad taught at a private school while in college; after graduation he got a high school teacher’s job, like my grandfather. Then some of my grandfather’s friends suggested that he should marry Ahmad to his eldest daughter, Hameeda, who also had graduated from college and become a teacher. Ahmad and Hameeda had known each other since school. They agreed to the proposal and were married. A year later, Ahmad qualified for the competitive selection test for the Kashmir civil service and was appointed a magistrate. And then I was born, their first son, in the winter of 1977. Father’s postings in various towns across Kashmir kept him away most of the time.

On most Saturday evenings throughout my childhood in the mid-eighties, a blue Willys jeep would drive to my village in southern Kashmir. It would follow the black ribbonlike road dividing vast expanses of paddy and mustard fields in a small valley guarded by the mighty Himalayas. Two- and three-floor mud-and-brick houses with tin and thatch roofs faced the road. Most were naked brick, and though a few were brightly painted, dust and time had colored their rough timber windows and doors a deep brown. A ground-level room in every third house had been converted into a shop. Villagers sat in the wooden storefronts gossiping, talking politics and cricket, waving at the jeep. A not-so-tall man in his early thirties, almost always wearing a suit, a matching tie, and brown Bata shoes, would raise his right hand in greeting. He had deep brown eyes, a straight nose, plump pink cheeks, and the beginnings of a belly. The Willys would slowly come to a halt in a village square, not far from a blue-and-green milestone that gave the name of our village: SEER, O KILOMETERS.

Father would step out of the jeep and walk toward us, past a grocery store and a pharmacy. People at the storefronts would say, “Peer Sahib is here.” They would rise from their seats, and a chorus of greetings and hands would welcome him home. The first hand Father shook was that of my grandfather, who would blush with pride. I would run toward Father and grab the piles of books, newspapers, and office files he carried. He would sit in his usual corner in our drawing room, facing the road. I would run to the baker next to the pharmacy and get fresh bread. Mother would bring a boiling samovar of noon chai, the salty pinkish Kashmiri tea.

Father would tell me stories from the papers and encourage me to read the newsmagazines, answering my questions over more cups of tea. In one of those sessions, he told me that he wanted me to join the Indian civil service when I grew up. It had a professional exam tougher than that of the provincial Kashmir civil service, which led to higher positions in the bureaucracy than my father’s. “He didn’t have the resources and time that you will have,” Mother said. Father began preparing me, bringing me children’s books about politics, history, and English literature, books such as Tales from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Shakespeare or One Hundred Great Lives. We would read them together every time Father came home. One of his heroes was Abraham Lincoln, and he talked a lot about how Lincoln read by candlelight and, through his hard work and honesty, became the president of America. In a few years we had made the transition to spending Sundays reading Othello, Hamlet, and The Merchant of Venice.

Despite the apparent tranquillity of our lives, I was beginning to get a vague sense of the troubled politics of Kashmir. In 1986 India and Pakistan were playing each other in the finals of a cricket tournament in the United Arab Emirates. On the day of the match, the atmosphere on the bus I took home from school was charged. Men, women, and children—some standing in the aisle and others on seats—huddled around radios, straining to catch every word of the commentary. Pakistan was chasing a difficult score set by India, and the number of balls they could play was running out fast. I stood in a corner behind the driver’s seat and watched the driver push harder on the accelerator and continually take a hand off the wheel to raise the volume of the transistor on the dashboard. Everybody wanted to get home for the final phase of the match. Every time Javed Miandad, the Pakistani batsman, missed a ball, the bus erupted in a chorus of swearing. Every time he hit the ball and scored a run, we let out loud exclamations of joy.

The bus stopped in the tiny market near my house. Excited crowds had gathered at the pharmacy and the butcher’s shop. The match was about to end. Abu, the old butcher, was biting his lips. I rushed to drop my school bag at home. In our drawing room, my grandfather, my aunts, and my mother sat in a circle around the radio. Grandmother faced Mecca on a prayer mat, seeking divine help for the Pakistani team. I dashed outside and heard the radio commentator say, “Pakistan needs three runs on one ball to win this match. Chetan Sharma will be bowling to Javed Miandad from the pavilion end of the stadium.” The crowd was silent, tense. Abu’s hands fell at his sides. “There is no chance. Just no chance!” He seized his radio and smashed it on the road. We watched the pieces scatter, and then we gathered around the pharmacist’s radio. Chetan Sharma, the Indian bowler, was about to bowl the last deciding ball of the match to the Pakistani batsman, Miandad. The commentator told us that Miandad was scanning the field, deciding where to hit the ball when it reached him. Then he bowed west toward Mecca in prayer. He rose from the ground and faced Sharma, who was running toward the wickets. Sharma was close to the wickets, and a tense Miandad faced him. The stadium was silent. Sharma threw the ball. It was a full toss. Miandad swung his bat. Almost everyone stepped back and waited. Silence. Amin pushed his shirtsleeves up to the elbows; Abu continued biting his lips; and I boxed my left palm with my right fist. The commentator shouted, “It is a six! Pakistan has won the match. They have scored three more runs than required.” People hugged, jumped around, and shouted over the din of the celebratory firecrackers.