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