Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War in Kashmir. Basharat Peer
and the corridor had turned into a multicolored jumble of sandals, loafers, and sneakers. I walked into the large room with green walls. A new floral rug had been laid out; men, women, and children sat against cushions along the walls. Shabnam carried a gleaming tin-plated copper samovar, pouring kahwa into the porcelain cups placed in front of every guest; another boy carrying a wicker basket served chochevaer. A hundred eyes were focused on a single face: Tariq’s. He was sitting on a velvet-covered cushion, the one used for Kashmiri grooms. “Mubarak Chuv!Mubarak Chuv!” (Congratulations! Congratulations!) every new guest shouted from the gate. “Shukr Khodayus, Sahee Salamat Vot!” (Thank God! You made it back safe.) Men shook his hand and hugged him. Women embraced him and smothered his forehead with kisses. “Miyon Nabi Thay-inay Vaarey!” (May my Prophet protect you!)
Uncle Rahman sat next to Tariq; he seemed to have accepted the difficult truth that Tariq had become a militant and was on a path of great danger. I walked up to Tariq and hugged him. “You have grown taller!” he said. I smiled. “You have grown thinner,” I replied. His round face seemed sunken; he had cut his long curly hair short, like a soldier’s, but his big black eyes had retained their familiar spark. He looked neat in white kurta pajamas, almost like a groom. My eyes wandered to his fatal bride, the Kalashnikov hidden under a thick green sport coat by his side. Outside, neighborhood boys strained their eyes and ears for signs of military vehicles; the family was afraid that the military might raid if they got word of Tariq’s homecoming from an informer.
The militant son talked. The retired-police-officer father listened, as did the roomful of people. They listened as if Tariq were Marco Polo bringing tidings of a new world. He told us about his journey to Pakistan and back. He and his friends had taken a bus for Srinagar. A point man from the militant group waited for them at the crowded Batamaloo bus station in southern Srinagar. There they boarded a bus for the north Kashmir town of Baramulla. The bus was full of employees returning home after work. The driver played Bollywood songs, and the passengers talked about the militant movement. Some passengers seemed to recognize Tariq and his friends as boys out to cross the border and smiled at them. There were neither checkpoints nor military patrols. The boys spent the night in Baramulla at a stranger’s house with two more groups of young men wanting to cross the border. The next morning the three groups boarded a bus to Kupwara, the town closest to the LoC. The ticket collector refused to accept a fare from them. Kupwara teemed with young men from every part of Kashmir, waiting to cross the border.
Tariq and his friends were introduced to a man who was to take them across the mountains. Men like him were referred to as guides. They were often natives of the border villages who knew the terrain well. Wearing Duck Back rubber shoes, carrying rucksacks full of clothes and food, they left Kupwara in a truck. By evening, they had reached the village of Trehgam, a few miles from the LoC. They waited in a hideout till night fell. In the darkness, they followed their guide. They climbed ridges, crawled past the bunkers of the Indian troops, climbed again throughout the night. The guide had instructed them not to light a cigarette or litter. Cigarettes could invite fire if noticed by a soldier’s binoculars; biscuit wrappers in the jungle could expose their route. They held hands and walked in silence. Dawn came, and they hid in the brush, behind the fir and pine trees growing on the mountains forming the border. They passed the day, apprehensive of being spotted by Indian troops. Night fell. They trekked again till the last Indian check post. It was still dark when they crawled beneath the Indian post overlooking them and reached the Pakistani post on the other side. The next day Tariq was in Muzaffarabad. He was taken to an arms-training camp run by the Pakistani military. For six months he trained in using small arms, land mines, and rocket-propelled grenades.
Tariq wandered around in Pakistan for a few months, waiting for his turn before returning home a year later. “They have Indian movies there,” he said. “I watched some. And you can buy the cassettes for all new songs.” “Really, in Pakistan!” someone said. “Did you watch any?” another person asked. Shabnam and I looked at each other and smiled. A few minutes later, someone asked about the journey back across the mountainous border. Tariq said, “The snow was melting, but still there was a lot of it.” He was bolder on his way back; every guerrilla in his group carried a bagful of ammunition and a Kalashnikov. The trek took three days. The ammunition bags were heavy. “Whoever was tired would lighten the bags. We buried food packages and some bullet magazines in the snow.” Thousands of boys like Tariq had passed through the snows since his journey to Pakistan a year before. He saw the evidence of their encounters with the Indian border troops on the way: skeletons lying under the fir trees; a pair of shoes lying by a rock. They almost got killed when they came face-to-face with a group of boys crossing from Srinagar. They were dressed in military fatigues, as was the fashion among the militants those days. Tariq and his group thought they were Indian soldiers. Their guides whistled, a code signaling they were on the same side. The Srinagar guide responded; the boys shook hands and moved on. Tariq and his friends had an encounter with Indian paramilitaries near the border town of Kupwara. “Three in our group were killed,” he said. “One of them was from Kupwara. He would have been home in half an hour.” The mood changed, and the room was filled with exhortations: “Life and death are in the hands of Almighty God.” “Those who die for the truth always live.” “Thank God! You got home safe.” “My Prophet will protect you!” A bullet had grazed Tariq’s leg, tearing a hole in his trousers. Later, Shabnam showed me the trousers.
Visitors kept arriving, among them an emaciated woman in a loose floral pheran. She stood a few feet from Tariq, staring at his face for a long time. He rose from his seat and hugged her. She was from a neighboring village. Her son had crossed the border for arms training. She had been told he was killed while crossing back. Families whose sons had died while crossing the LoC, where the bodies could not be recovered, held funerals in absentia. People offered funeral prayers with an empty coffin or without a coffin. This woman had had such a funeral for her son, but she had not reconciled herself to the news of his death. She sat in front of Tariq and held his hands. “Tariq, my dear, my son, they told me he was martyred on the border!” The room fell silent; every eye stopped on her sad, grieving face. “My heart doesn’t agree. Tariq, my dear, tell me they are lying. Tell me you saw my rose! You were there, too. You must have seen my rose!”
Tariq embraced her. “Yes, I saw him. He is waiting to cross back. He is waiting for his turn.”
I am unsure whether he told her the truth, but she kissed his forehead again and again and broke down. “My son will come home.”
Homecomings for militants were short-lived. Tariq would visit his parents once or twice a month, but his visits were always hurried and stealthy. He lived in unknown hideouts with other guerrillas, planning attacks on Indian military camps and convoys. Though I had seen guerrillas his age walking around or even preparing to attack a military convoy near my house, I failed to imagine Tariq in battle, firing a gun, hurling a grenade, exploding a land mine, killing. But that was the life he had chosen. And Indian soldiers were looking for him. They often knocked at Uncle Rahman’s door, looking for Tariq, beating Uncle Rahman and Tariq’s two older brothers, seeking information about his whereabouts and telling Uncle Rahman to ask Tariq to surrender or be ready to die the day the soldiers found him.
I saw Tariq for the last time in August 1992, a few hundred meters from my uncle’s house on a plateau that served twice a year as the venue for ceremonial Eid prayers, and the rest of the time as a cricket field.
August 14 and 15 are the Pakistani and Indian independence days. Pro-Pakistan militants hold celebratory parades on August 14, and a day later, the Indian Independence Day is declared a Black Day. On August 15 traffic stops, shops close, schools shut down, identity checks by Indian troops increase, and life freezes. In Srinagar, however, pro-India politicians who form the local state government herd groups of their supporters and force government schools to gather contingents of schoolchildren on a cricket field guarded by hundreds of Indian paramilitaries. Then the politicians hoist the Indian flag. Outside the stadium, the streets remain empty.
On August 14, 1992, Shabnam and I watched Tariq and other guerrillas celebrate Pakistani Independence Day on the cricket field. Thousands had gathered for the spectacle. We sneaked through the crowd to the front row for a better view. Militant leaders made fiery speeches