Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir. Basharat Peer
the Indian emblem: a pillar with four lions on four sides, a wheel, and a pair of oxen on its base. I got my identity card signed and stamped by the local magistrate and promptly pulled it out whenever I was stopped by soldiers on the street or was walking past one of their numerous check posts. It became a part of me.
In our mosque, after prayers and before the recitation of darood—a song praising the Prophet Muhammad—people made spontaneous speeches and shouted slogans of aazadi. I specifically asked God to give us freedom by the next year. But there were also moments of frivolity. One day a young man from our village who worked in Srinagar gave a speech at the mosque. He grabbed the microphone and shouted in Arabic, “Kabiran kabira!” The slogan meant “Who is the greatest?” But no one understood. None of us spoke Arabic. He shouted again, and again there was silence—then the adolescents in the last row, the backbenchers of faith, began to laugh. Embarrassed, the young man explained that in reply to the slogan we were supposed to shout, “Allah-o-Akbar!” (God is great). He shouted again, “Kabiran kabira!” He was answered with a hesitant, awkward “Allah-o-Akbar.” For about a year after, we teased him.
The winter of 1989–90 was the longest, most eventful winter in Kashmir, a season of conflict and rebellion that still remains. January and February 1990 had changed Kashmir in profound ways. On the first day of school, I was struck by the number of empty chairs. Five of our Kashmiri Hindu or Pandit classmates were not there. I felt a little numb. “They have left,” someone said. The words exploded like a tracer, dazzling the whitewashed walls of the classroom, the bare blackboard, the varnished wooden surfaces of the desks where the ones who were absent and the ones who were present had scribbled their initials in a suggestive, romantic arithmetic. Our eyes were fixed on the empty chairs for a long time.
Along with killing hundreds of pro-India Muslims, ranging from political activists to suspected informers for Indian intelligence, the militants had killed hundreds of Pandits on similar grounds or without a reason. The deaths had scared the Pandits, and thousands, including my classmates and their families, had left the valley by March 1990 for Jammu, Delhi, and various other Indian cities and towns.
The talk was of war. During the lunch break, my friends and I shared stories of militancy. We began drawing maps of Kashmir on our school notebooks and painted slogans like WAR TILL VICTORY and SELF-DETERMINATION IS OUR BIRTHRIGHT on the school walls. One of my classmates, Asif, a boy with big black eyes and careless curly hair who was popular with the girls, talked about seeing a militant. “I saw one walking near the bus stop. He was wearing a green military uniform and had a badge on the chest that said: JKLF! And he had beautiful blue sports shoes.” “Force 10 shoes?” I asked Asif. Force 10 was a popular running shoe from an Indian company. “No! No! It was Warrior! Warrior is Chinese. It is much better than Force 10.” Asif began to smile and tell me how the guerrilla’s hairstyle was similar to his own: long curly locks. I hoped at least one guerrilla commander had short, straight, spiky, oiled hair like mine.
The best story was about the magical Kalashnikov. Made in Russia, a gift from Pakistan, it was known to have powers greater than Aladdin’s lamp. I remember standing outside our dining hall after lunch and getting into an impromptu discussion about Kalashnikovs. “It is as small as a hand and shoots two hundred bullets,” said Shabnam, my cousin, who was a year senior to us. “No! It is as long as a cricket bat and fires fifty bullets in a minute,” retorted Pervez, my roommate and an enthusiastic footballer whose village was a major stronghold of JKLF. “My brother touched a Kalashnikov,” said Showket, who was a few years younger. “He says it is very light. Yes, it is as long as a small cricket bat. He told Mother that he wanted to become a militant. She cried, and Father slapped him.”
Pervez told me there were many militants in his village who wore beautiful green uniforms. One afternoon we were on the football field when a militant passed by. Even our snooty games teacher went up to him, smiled, and shook hands. Encouraged, we gathered around. “Can we see your gun, please?” Pervez said. He was the center forward, beaming in his blue tracksuit. The militant took off his loose pheran, a cloaklike woolen garment, and showed us his gun. “We call it Kalashnikov, and Indians call it AK-47,” the militant said. We were enraptured and clapped in delight. From then on we all carried our cricket bats inside our pherans, in imitation and preparation.
The next morning before the school assembly, the seniors told us not to chant the Indian national anthem: “We are Kashmiris, and now we are fighting for independence. We cannot go on chanting the Indian songs, even if the principal might like us to.” At the assembly, the students refused to chant the Indian anthem. Our teachers, who would routinely answer disobedience with corporal punishment, remained silent. Nobody threatened to dismiss us from the school; they knew our world had changed, and so had the rules governing it. The school principal, a short, bald man from Rajasthan who promoted laughter therapy, was not laughing. “If you don’t want to sing it, we can’t force you to. Singing a song does not mean much if you don’t believe in the words you speak,” he said in a grave voice.
Outside our small world, there were endless gun battles between the soldiers and the rebels; grenades were lobbed, and mines were exploded—death, fear, and anger had taken over Kashmir. By the summer of 1990, thousands of young Kashmiri men had crossed the Line of Control for arms training in the Pakistan-controlled part of Kashmir. When they returned as militants, they were heroes—people wanted to talk to them, touch them, hear their stories, and invite them for a feast. Many more were trained in local apple orchards and meadows, earning them the nickname dragud, or meadow. Like almost every boy, I wanted to join them. Fighting and dying for freedom was as desired as the first kiss on adolescent lips.
In the autumn of 1991, when I was fourteen, I walked with four boys from my dorm to a nearby village, looking for guerrillas. We saw a group of young men dressed in fatigues, assault rifles slung on their shoulders, coming from the other side of the road. They were tall and seemed the most glamorous of men; we were awestruck. The white badges on their green military uniforms read JKLF. Standing there in our white-and-gray school uniforms, I blurted out, “We want to join you.” The commander, a lean youth with stubble, laughed. “Go home and grow up, kids!” I was furious. “If you do not take us with you, we will join HM.” Hizbul Mujahideen, a new militant group, was an ideological rival to JKLF and supported the merger of Kashmir with Pakistan. The guerrillas burst into laughter. We continued our meek protests as they left.
We returned to our dorm sulking, talking about a better way to join. We could talk to Students Liberation Front (SLF), the student wing of the JKLF. Some of the JKLF and SLF guerrillas had begun staying in our dorm. They would join us for a game of volleyball, leaving their guns lying casually on the grass by the volleyball court. Or they would be sitting on the dorm veranda, cleaning the Kalashnikovs as I left for classes. A small, curious crowd would grow around them. One of them, who was barely eighteen, did let me hold a Kalashnikov. I felt its cold steel barrel, ran my fingers along its banana-shaped magazine of bullets, posed with its aluminum butt pressed against my right shoulder. It felt fascinating! But then he took it back the next minute and asked me to move on.
One of the commanders was from my village. He was about six feet tall and had a broad forehead and wavy hair. He was a jovial man who had three daughters and used to work as a plumber in the hotels at a nearby tourist resort, Pahalgam. The villagers called him Tonga because he seemed as tall as a horse carriage. He was a lovable rogue and the stories of his adventures were often told at the village shop fronts. During the tourist season in Pahalgam, he was in great demand. He would fiddle with the supply pipes and insert blockages that stopped the water to hotel rooms. The desperate hoteliers would then pay him a desired price to fix things up. But the tourists stopped coming to Kashmir after the winter of 1990, the hotels shut down, and Tonga joined the JKLF. Every time I would see Tonga, he would ask about my family and tell me to study harder. “I will ask your teachers how you are doing.” And “Give my greetings to Peer Sahib and Masterji.”
But my friends and I were