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

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 still dreaming up ways to go for arms training. Groups of boys left for training camps in Pakistan every other day. We needed some money for the bus fare to the border towns, we needed winter clothes and good shoes for a potential trek through snowy mountains, but most of all, we needed a guerrilla commander who didn’t know our families and would let us join a group leaving for the border.

One day we were interrupted in geometry class by a knock. The teacher went out and returned to tell me that my uncle was here. A bank manager in his early thirties, Bashir was a fashion icon for my brother and me. I admired his baggy jeans and checked shirts and slicked-back hair, like John Travolta’s in Grease, and the mysterious accent of his English, which he had picked up from some German friends.

I shouted a loud greeting, and we hugged. He was carrying a bag, and I promptly volunteered to carry it. “That is our lunch! Your mother made chicken for us.” He threw an arm around my shoulder. “Let’s go to your room and eat.” The thought of home-cooked chicken after the bland lentils and rice that dominated our hostel menu filled me with great joy.

My room was small, bare except for two beds, two small bookshelves, and two closets for clothes. I laid out a cotton sheet on my bed, and we began eating. Uncle stopped between morsels to watch me devour the pieces of chicken.

I shrugged. “I am hungry.”

He laughed, but something seemed wrong.

“Everything fine at home?” I asked.

“Yes. All is well.”

We continued eating, and I asked, “Why didn’t you go to the bank today?”

“Nothing! I was talking to your father last night, and then I thought I should come and save you from the lentils.”

After lunch we walked about the campus and sat near a rose bed. We talked about my studies. He said my father dreamed of seeing me in the civil service. “Your father struggled very hard to get where he is. He has great hopes for you. I know you will do us proud,” he said. “I met your school principal and he had great things to say about you.” I shook my head.

Uncle stared at the school buildings for a long time. “You will be done here in two years.” “Yes, 1993.”

“You know what? You must go to Delhi.” He went on to paint a romantic picture of the colleges and universities in New Delhi. “You would have a great time there. Your father and I were talking about it last night.”

I shook my head. Yes. Maybe. “How is Baba?” I asked of Grandfather.

“He is getting older by the day. And he misses you a lot. You should come home for a few days. He will be happy.”

I quickly packed my bags, and soon we were walking to the nearest bus stop. A scrawl of graffiti on the wall of a nearby house read: WAR TILL VICTORY—JKLF. “So that is the group you want to join,” my uncle said, smiling.

“JKLF? Me?” I denied everything.

He shook his head slowly. “We know all about it,” and he told me about the meeting waiting for me at home.

The bus passed a few villages separated by empty paddies and conical haystacks, almost golden in the autumn sun. We crossed an old bridge over a stream rushing toward my village. I saw the familiar peaks of the village mountain and a medieval canal running alongside. Before moving to my school, I rarely left the village except for occasional visits to Anantnag or Srinagar. When I went away even for a day, on my return I would be impatient for the sighting of a landmark: an old shingle-roofed hut on the slope of the village mountain. I saw it again.

The bus stopped in the village square. Uncle continued his journey to the next village, where he lived. I grew a bit stiff, dreading the encounter at home. Standing by the bus stop, I took in my house—the one with the green windows stacked with five others in a row on the right side of the road. Abu, the cricket-obsessed butcher, was chopping pieces of lamb; Amin, the short and wiry chemist who always wore an Irish cap, stood outside his shop; Kaisar, the tailor who regaled the village boys with ribaldries, was bent over his sewing machine; Hasan, the baker famed for his wisecracks, sat behind a stack of sesame-seed bagel-like chochevaer; old Saifuddin, my grandmother’s cousin who noted every new presence and kept a severe eye on the goings-on in the neighborhood from his grocery, was watching people alight from the bus; a group of boys I used to play cricket with hung around the stationery store next to the grocery; and a few older men sat at an empty storefront next to Amin’s pharmacy, talking.

It felt like standing on a familiar stage, facing a familiar audience. I shouted greetings at people on the far side of the road and shook hands along the storefronts on our side. Anxious about the encounter at home, I made my greetings a little more elaborate at every stop: the baker, the pharmacy, the butcher, the tailor, and finally, a hop across the road to hug Saifuddin, and repeat the same litany:

“Assalamualikum! How are you?”

“Valikumsalam! I am happy. I am well. How are you?”

“I am happy. I am well.”

“You just arrived?”

“Yes, I just got off the bus.”

“How is school?”

“School is good.”

“Are you working hard?”

“Yes, very much.”

“You must work very hard. You are the future.”

“I will. Thanks.”

“How is business?”

“Thank God! It is all right.”

“How is everyone at home?”

“They are well. You should come for tea.”

When I arrived home, Grandfather made me sit beside him. Father was on his way back home from work in Srinagar. Uncle, Grandmother, and mother formed a semicircle around us. I was silent, unsure what to say. “May I have a cup of tea, please?” I tried. Mother had already poured me one from the samovar. I traced the pinkish flowers embossed on the white porcelain cup in between sips. Grandfather turned to Mother. “Hama, you remember his first day of school.”

She looked up with a forced smile. “Yes! I had dressed him in a white shirt and gray shorts and his red necktie. And then you took him along.”

Grandfather seemed to stare into a distant time for a long moment, and then he laughed a bit and said to me, “I dropped you at your school and went to teach at my school. You had cried and shouted so much that an hour later, your teacher brought you to my office.”

“Most children cry,” I said.

Then he repeated the oft-told story of how, inspired by my Superman comics, I once jumped from the first-floor window. My younger brother helped me tie my pheran like a cape. I broke my right arm. This buildup to the real question was irritating me. I was thinking of walking out. They could see it.

Mother looked at me and said nothing. Grandfather fixed his watery green eyes on me. “How do you think this old man can deal with your death?” he said. His words hit me like rain on a winter morning.