Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir. Basharat Peer
I run?”
Tonga held his hands. “You are like my father, and I am like your son. But I can’t stop it today. Please, close the shops and leave! Please, we don’t have much time.”
The villagers gave up. The shopkeepers pulled their shutters. I ran home. “Mummy, KLF people are outside. They are going to attack a convoy,” I shouted. “Tonga is there, too, but he can’t stop his commander. We have to run.” Everybody panicked. Mother folded the sleeves of her pheran and asked everyone to shut up. She was in schoolteacher mode, and everyone listened to her. She hid the jewelry of her sisters that was kept in our house. Grandfather got a bag of the family’s academic degrees, professional documents, cash, and passbooks. We were ready to leave through the door opening onto the vegetable garden behind the house. Then Mother said, “What about the books?” We looked at one another.
Father had built his library over the years. Each book had his name and a book number on the first page in either his scrawly handwriting or in Mother’s neater letters. I had spent long hours in his library. There were the great Russian writers in thick People’s Publishing House hardbacks that were sold in the mobile bookshops run by the Communist Party of India; there were the American and European novelists in slim paperbacks; there were the great Urdu writers Premchand, Manto, Ghalib, Iqbal, and Faiz. And there were histories, law books, commentaries on religion and politics in South Asia. The most beautiful of my father’s books was The Complete Works of William Shakespeare—a thick edition, leather-bound, with gold-tinted pages. His books were those of a self-taught man, books that had shaped him, helped him build his life; they made him stand out when he talked about worlds and ideas that few men in our world could talk about. Touching their spines, running my fingers along their fonts, feeling the smoothness of their paper, and being mesmerized by their stories made me feel closer to Father and that I shared his connection to a magical world.
But there was nothing to be done; we had to leave the books in the house. We stepped into the backyard. Grandmother kept looking toward the house. “Sahib must be here anytime,” she repeated. The sun was sinking in the sky, and we expected Father to arrive at any moment. “God will keep him safe. There is nothing you can do by staring,” Mother shouted at her, and bolted the locks.
Our neighbors were standing on their lawns with a few bags. Yusuf and his sons, Manzoor, Khalid, and Asif, were there. “Now what are we staring at!” Grandfather roared, and we began walking away. Amin, the chemist, was walking with his family; Abu, the butcher, was there with his wife and sons. A little ahead, I saw Kaisar, the ribald tailor, helping his father to safety. And Gul Khan, the old farmer who gave the call for prayers, was carrying his tiny granddaughter on his shoulders. Soon our walk turned into a run. I hoped that Father would hear about the attack and stay away; I hoped that nobody would be killed in the attack and the soldiers would not set our house on fire. I thought of some of my most beloved things: books, the black-and-white television, the Sony radio, the Polaroid camera.
Our village was emptying fast, almost everyone running toward Numbul, the adjacent village. It lay across some paddy fields and the Lidder, our local stream. The blue-green waters of the Lidder rushing through the fields bubbled over the stones. The wild grass grew by the stream, the willows swayed, and the paddies were ripening. The mountains stood witness. In the open sky, crows and eagles wandered and whirled. Indifferent. They continue with their own seasons.
We were half a kilometer from the Lidder when the first bullet was fired. Yusuf tried running faster, Grandfather stopped, and Gul Khan lay on his stomach in the fields, holding his granddaughter. I had an urge to laugh when I saw that Yusuf was running with his left hand covering his left cheek as if it could stop a bullet. Every few seconds, we heard the crackle of bullets. Kalashnikovs used by the militants sounded different from the machine guns and other rifles used by the soldiers. Yusuf’s son Manzoor tried to tell from the sounds who was shooting. “Now the military is firing back. The militants seem to have stopped firing.” His normally calm father slapped him.
The guns were still booming when we reached Numbul. Every door there was open to us. I do not know whose house we rushed into. We were ushered into a room. People from our village were already there, sitting silently along the wall, with half-empty cups of tea. As my family followed Grandfather into the room, two young men stood up and offered him and Grandmother their places; another took the cushion he was leaning against and placed it against the wall for Grandfather. “This is not a time for formality,” Grandfather protested. Tea followed. Nobody said much. We listened to the faint sound of gunfire.
After a while, Grandfather and a few other men stepped outside. I followed. We stood looking toward our village; all I could see were distant treetops, a few minarets, and the village mountain. Nobody said it, but each of us was searching the horizon for flames and smoke. Gunpowder doesn’t take long to burn a village. But I saw no smoke, only a slowly darkening sky.
I imagined people stopping a local bus in a neighboring village, telling the driver about the attack and turning it back. I imagined Father holding his newspapers and office files, getting off the bus, and staying with an acquaintance. But I could not ignore thoughts of the bus driving toward our village or getting caught in cross fire. I fully understood for the first time that he was making dangerous journeys week after week to see us.
The guns fell silent some time later. We stayed in Numbul that night. The next morning we headed back, anxious and edgy. Our walk home was brisk, punctuated only by short greetings to acquaintances and curious looks at village houses, searching for signs of the last evening’s battle. We came to a sudden stop when we reached our backyard. My grandparents, Mother, my brother, my aunts, and I were transfixed for a moment, staring at our untouched home, as if we had sighted a new moon. I rushed into our courtyard. Father was standing on the veranda. “I heard about it on the way and stayed in Islamabad at Mohammad Amin’s.” He spoke casually.
I shook his hand. “Were you all right?”
Father smiled. “Yes! We were fine.”
Grandfather repeated the details of our flight and our stay at Numbul. I joined in and gave the account of seeing the militants on the road and the conversations villagers had with Tonga. My younger brother couldn’t be silent either. “Daddy, Basharat was crying when we were in Numbul.” Father looked away, pretending not to hear him. “Let’s go inside!” he said.
We went around checking each room facing the road for signs of damage. A few bullets were stuck in the ceiling in Father’s room, and a few more had pierced the walls in the drawing room and the guest room facing the road. Grandfather pulled out the cartridges with pliers. We looked at them for a few moments and then threw them away.
By late afternoon, Father was sitting in his usual corner in our drawing room, a few books and a boiling samovar of tea by his side. My brother and I sat facing him. Every now and then, a friend or a relative would drop by, and tales of the previous night were recounted. In between these tellings, Father would recite a verse or two of Urdu poetry or a passage from Shakespeare and then turn to my brother and me: “Whoever explains this verse will get five rupees.”
Over the next few months, there were various crackdowns in my village and the neighboring villages. More Indian military camps were being set up in Kashmir. Military vehicles, armed soldiers, machine guns poking out of sandbag bunkers were everywhere; death and fear became routine, like going to school or playing cricket and football. At times we forgot about the war around us; at times we could not.
In the summer of 1992, my aunt was pregnant, and Mother constantly worried about a militant attack or a crackdown in our village. “What will we do if something happens?” she often mumbled. One June afternoon, my aunt’s labor pains began. Her husband, Bashir (the uncle with the mysterious English accent), Grandfather, and Mother talked about moving her to the hospital in Anantnag. But there was a general strike, or hartal, that day to protest something—a very frequent occurrence those days. The shops were closed,