inam ul rehman
Book: Rumours of spring: A girlhood in Kashmir
Author: Farah Bashir
Publisher: HarperCollins
“On the deserted streets of my neighbourhood, in the presence of so many military bunkers and the gaze of the unknown men inside them,” writes Farah Bashir, in her refreshing memoir, ‘Rumours of Spring’ “I suddenly became aware of my body and its contours. (I) felt naked. I tried to fold into the school bag clutched in front of me.” It resulted a perennial hunch in her back, the author says.
“Rumours of spring” is an intriguing title, already a novel of the same name has been published in the late 80s. It is a title that does justice because there is no spring ahead only the rumour of it.
Bobeh epitomises Kashmir of yore
Farah crafts her memoir around Bobeh, her grandmother epitomises the Kashmir that stood for syncretism until 1994, that is where she ends her book. The year 1994 marked the secular, independence seeking the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front giving up of armed resistance as both Indo-Pak, and pro-Pakistan Islamist militants tried to exterminate it. Unable to counter both the state and non-state actors, the JKLF resorted to peaceful means to achieve its objective of independent Kashmir from both the nuclear states. The year in which the author ends her memoir also marks the hegemony of pro-Pakistan Islamist armed parties in Kashmir.
She begins her memoir with a sombre dead scene of Bobeh. And until she is buried, Farah goes back and forth to narrate her 18-year-old journey. She has intelligently narrated anecdotes in which she takes readers to intricate details of her growing up in a small city where everyone knows each other. It is a Kashmir of the late 80s where girls going to saloon, wearing skirts is not a taboo, it is a Kashmir where pilgrims upon returning from Makkah brought video and audio players as a souvenir, a Kashmir in which special screening of movie is held for all the relatives including women, where a father takes her 9-year-old daughter to watch an English movie. It is the Kashmir of her Bobeh where whenever there is a function in their neighbour’s house, who happened to be from Pandit community, the two houses would be merged by a wooden plank. They would keep their windows open to have a chat even in the freezing winters of Kashmir. It is Bobeh who imparts the author with local myths, traditions, fables with a broth of religion.
The armed Tehreek
All this changed when the Tehreek erupted in Kashmir, and selectively some Pandits were targeted, and a couple of their women were raped, which created fear psychosis among the minority community. And how does the author narrate this ordeal?
She notes their absence even in dreams, and questions herself, “Why was it that the ones ‘present’ included only my Sikh and Christian friends and teachers, but hardly any of the Pandits?” Through Bobeh she tells readers how hardworking and well-mannered Pandits were when the former mentions that her neighbour, a doctor, “was always up before I wake up for Tahhjudd” (a prayer performed at the last leg of the night) “and she never forgets to say adab arz to me.”
The Tehreek also unleashed a new thing: women must veil themselves, there were sporadic incidents of acid being used to threaten women to comply with the new diktats. And here the author expresses a dilemma that women face in a militarised area. “With troopers stationed everywhere walking on the streets made me feel uneasy. It felt like I was inviting their lecherous gaze. To an extent the scarf made me feel protected, and yet, that feeling of unease never quite left me, completely.”
There are snippets of militants harassing families for money. She also mentions the murder of Mirwaiz Farooq, who was the father of one of her friends Rabia Farooq, and the dread of asking her how she coped with the death of her father.
The militarised conflict
As Kashmir became a military fortress its people were subjected to humiliation. People developed strange idiosyncrasies to ward off potential terror at the hands of troopers. One day she sees her Pophtaeth in the middle of the night, who had come to stay in their house as she had lost her house in a fire that had engulfed their neighbourhood in an encounter, saluting repeatedly to a patrol party of troopers, “I thought,” explains her aunt, “next time there is a search operation or an encounter in the neighbourhood the troops would show some mercy. Maybe they will remember that some from this house saluted them.”
The author herself starts to pluck strands of hair whenever in tension, and her mother ties knots to her dupatta for the safety of family members.
When her mother hears about the alleged mass rape in twin villages of Kunan and Poshpora, she mutters along herself that they are lucky not to have any bunkers below their house and that they only have to “put up with the patrolling party a few times in a day”!
She compares the bunkers initially with weed and later as landmarks and addresses, ‘the house next to the small bunker’, the land before the large bunker’!
The author also writes of persons who became “collateral damage”. The rise of mental cases in Kashmir, the suicide of a neighbour whose husband was beaten by the troopers who in retaliation unleashed his violence on his hapless wife, a father “who mistook a window in the corridor for a door fell to his death” because he was engrossed in his son’s custodial death, a woman who lost her senses because she couldn’t understand why Kashmiris are killed.
Disappointments
I understand that the author is the god of the book. It is her prerogative what to write, and what to skip. But there are some things that need to be mentioned.
The old city of Srinagar popularly known as Downtown has always been the contrarian. The people of Downtown firmly opposed Sheikh Abdullah when every other party was trying to woo him, they were the ones who revolted against the Dogra rulers. This contrarian attitude goes back to many centuries. Be it Mir Khalid’s Jaffna Street or this book both have not delved into this important history.
As a growing-up teenager the author strangely skips road Romeos and vagabonds who would frequent the city schools to harass girls.
There is never a mention of what the girls of elite schools thought about militants, troops, daily killings, protestors gunned down, the response of the state; did they ever discuss the extraordinary situations, the author is silent on it. Or perhaps the elite schools were immune to the situation around them?
The author never mentions what was Bobeh’s reaction on acid throwing, forced veil, militants, et al. The author also skips any romanticised feeling toward militants at the early stage of the Tehreek. It was common those days to look upto the JKLF militants as fashion trend setters. Romance between girls and militants was a known thing, and so were teenagers eager to dress, walk, and even to hold guns for the sake of romance.
There is no mention of fratricide killing between the JKLF and pro-Pakistan Islamist militant groups.
Verdict
It is an important book (perhaps the first memoir written by a Kashmiri woman) as it offers fresh perspective, grippingly tells the ordeals that women face in militarised conflict, their daily chores amid the bombs and guns outside.
All the chapters are short, some are insightful, sharp, and there are stories within a story making it interesting for the readers. The book is light read, and as such will find a good number of readers. And the second part of it may prove a runaway success.
