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

I had nothing to say and stared at the carpet. I imagined myself lying dead on a wooden board on our lawn, surrounded by our neighbors and relatives. My mother had fainted, and someone was throwing water on her face. Father was holding the board, his head was buried in his arms, and his shoulders were shaking.

“You don’t live long in a war, son.” Grandfather’s words brought me back. He had tears in his eyes.

A muezzin’s voice came from the mosque loudspeaker, calling the faithful to afternoon prayers. Mother adjusted her casually worn head scarf, and Grandfather rose to leave for the prayers. “Think about your father! He is coming all the way from Srinagar only because he is worried about you. God knows what will happen on the way,” Mother said.

“I will keep an eye on the buses,” I said, and walked out.

I had been talking to a few neighborhood men for an hour when Father got off a bus, wearing one of his blue suits and carrying a bundle of books. We all stood up; I reflexively rushed to get his books and files. A chorus of greetings followed. “How are you?” “How are things in the city?” “Hope the journey was fine. The highway has become very dangerous.” Father seemed tired but calm.

At home, we took our usual places, and another round of tea followed. Father sorted the books and picked up a commentary on the Quran in English. “You must read it. You will understand religion and improve your English. You must also read the Bible, which is very good for your language skills.” Father went around in circles, talking about the story of Ishmael and Isaac. “You need the permission of your parents even if you want to be a KLF commander,” he said in a half-serious voice. He made it easy somehow.

“I know,” I replied.

“Especially if you are fourteen.” He smiled. “That is four years short of the voting age.” I said nothing.

He looked directly at me and said, “I won’t stop you.” I couldn’t hide my astonishment.

“I won’t stop you,” he repeated. “But maybe you should read and think about it for a few years and then decide for yourself. At that point I will not say that you should or should not join any group.”

I found myself nodding in agreement. “From what I have read, I can tell you that any movement that seeks a separate country takes a very long time. It took India many decades to get freedom from the British. The Tibetans have been asking for independence from China for over thirty years. Czechoslovakia won its freedom from dictatorship; even that took a long time.”

Father continued to argue that rebellions were long affairs led by educated men. “Nehru and Gandhi studied law in England and were both very good writers. You have seen their books in our library. Václav Havel is a very big writer. The Dalai Lama has read a lot and can teach people many things. None of them used guns but they changed history. If you want to do something for Kashmir, I would say you should read.”

I stayed in the classroom. But the conflict had intensified. Fear and chaos ruled Kashmir. Almost every person knew someone who had joined the militants or was arrested, tortured, or beaten by the troops. Fathers wished they had daughters instead of sons. Sons were killed every day. Mothers prayed for the safety of their daughters. People dreaded knocks on their doors at night. Men and women who left home for the day’s work were not sure they would return; thousands did not. Graveyards began to spring up everywhere, and marketplaces were scarred with charred buildings. People seemed to always be talking about the border and crossing the border; it had become an obsession, an invisible presence.

School was quiet, mundane. Breakfast. Classes. Lunch. Classes. Football. Cricket. Homework. The guerrillas occasionally took shelter in my dorm and occasionally joined us for a game of football. Familiarity had shorn off their glamour somewhat.

Shabnam, my cousin, was one of the finest volleyball players on the school team. I began taking volleyball lessons from him and spent more time on the field trying to perfect a serve and a smash. Shabnam had learned his cricket and volleyball from his older brother, Tariq, who had recently finished college. Every time I visited them and my uncle Rahman, I would see Tariq playing cricket on the enormous field near their house, with Shabnam hanging out on the sidelines.

My father was very attached to Uncle Rahman, his oldest cousin, who had raised him after his parents died. Uncle Rahman was a police officer, a tall, dark man with big black eyes who often talked about his long stint as a bodyguard of Sheikh Abdullah. He ironed his uniform immaculately and polished his brown police boots till they shone. He had recently retired and, in his civilian days, donned the seventies double-breasted suits and fezzes that Sheikh Abdullah wore. “You should be an all-rounder. Be the best in the classroom, and be the best on the playground,” he would tell me.

He would walk to the field occasionally to see Tariq play. “Tariq would look good as a police officer,” he often said. Tariq had graduated in mathematics and chemistry, but he was more of a sportsman. He saw me as a bookworm and entertained himself by asking me random questions: How many astronauts were onboard Apollo 13? What is an F-16? What is the symbol for sulfuric acid? I knew all the answers. Shabnam didn’t care much about such things, but he would try to teach me a few things about cricket and volleyball.

With Shabnam’s help, I was swaggering a bit on the school volleyball field. One late autumn day just before a game, I saw Shabnam walking out of the dorm with his bags. He was quiet, and there was a darkness in his eyes. “What is wrong?” I asked.

He dropped his bag on the lawn; his face was pale. “Tariq has gone across the border!”

I knew that crossing the border to be a guerrilla meant being killed. Shabnam went home. A few days later I visited my aunt and uncle. Tariq had left suddenly without telling anyone; Uncle Rahman was chain-smoking his hookah. He seemed to have aged in a few days. My aunt was in shock and trying to deal with it by busying herself with unnecessary chores such as arranging and rearranging the plates and bowls on the kitchen shelves, flitting out to fix the clothes drying on the line in the courtyard, and then disappearing again to buy sugar when there was already sugar in the house. Uncle Rahman watched her in silence and then laughed a little laugh that seemed to scream all his love and all his pain. I fought my tears; he puffed on his hookah again. “When I was in the police, nobody in my jurisdiction dared disobey me. My son has crossed the border without even telling me.” A rivulet of tears escaped his eye and rolled down his rough, wrinkled face. I had never seen him cry.

Soon somebody connected to the group that Tariq had joined sent a message to the family that he had crossed the border and was in Muzaffarabad, the Pakistan-controlled capital of Kashmir, where most arms-training camps for Kashmiris were run. But one could not be sure, and there was no way to confirm that Tariq had indeed safely crossed the border.

Back at school, Shabnam hoped that Tariq was safe and eagerly awaited his return. In his hostel room, Shabnam listened to the Muzaffarabad-based Sada-e-Hurriyat (Voice of Freedom) radio. Every evening the separatist radio station ran a popular show of songs interspersed with propaganda and messages from listeners. When a militant in training wanted to let his family know how he was, he requested a song, and a message was played along with it. The messages said things like: “Tahir Mir from Soura, Srinagar, likes the program and requests this song be played.” His family and relatives heard the message and knew he was safe.

Shabnam and I were sitting on a bench outside our dorm. He had brought out his black Phillips radio, and we listened to the songs and messages. The show’s hosts were notorious for over-the-top rhetoric and propaganda. One of the hosts, who called himself Malik, would prophesize about Kashmir getting independence in a week and how he would travel across the border from Pakistan-controlled Kashmir to the Indian-ruled Kashmir and drink kahwa at the Jehangir Hotel, a prominent hotel in Srinagar, the next Friday.

But Shabnam and I were tense when we listened to the program. We heard the messages and waited for familiar names. For months there was no message from Tariq. Every day Shabnam listened for a message from his older brother; every day he hoped for news and fended off rumors: “Tariq was arrested on the border.” “Someone said he was killed on his way back.” “A boy from Pulwama who returned met him in a training camp.” Every time someone from a neighboring village returned after completing his training, Shabnam or one of my other cousins visited his family seeking news of Tariq. Word of mouth was the only source of news.

One day after dinner, Shabnam was lying on his bed, holding the radio like a pillow, and listening to the show. I was talking to his roommate. The usual songs played: “The Daughters of Srinagar! The Brave Daughters of Srinagar!” A few minutes of messages and another song: “Wake up! The morning is here! Martyrs’ blood has bloomed! The flags of victory are flying! Wake up! The morning is here!” The hosts’ voices droned a litany of names and addresses; I continued talking. And then a sudden loud thump startled Shabnam’s roommate and me; Shabnam had jumped off the bed and stood a few feet away, holding the radio in his left hand. “It is Tariq! It is Tariq! Basharat, he really is alive! It said, ‘Tariq Peer from Salia, Islamabad, likes the show and requests this song.’”

Around a year after he had crossed the border, Tariq returned home. Friends, relatives, and neighbors had descended on Uncle Rahman’s old, decrepit house. I couldn’t even find a place to take off my shoes. The veranda 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. “MubarakChuv!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 in favor of Pakistan and raised separatist slogans. We stared at the militants in their green uniforms, holding their rifles. They performed military stunts and sang battle songs to a clapping audience. A militant leader raised the Pakistani flag after the songs. His men fired into the air. Then someone said that an army patrol was approaching the village, and the gathering vaporized.

A year after I saw Tariq in the parade, soldiers stopped knocking on his parents’ door. They had killed him in a raid on his hideout.

3 (#uad3dd8f2-8799-56d4-a0e4-3d9a7fd6aa99)Very Long Miles (#uad3dd8f2-8799-56d4-a0e4-3d9a7fd6aa99)

The fighting had changed the meaning of distance. I came home almost every weekend from school. The black sliver of the road made its way through an expanse of rice and mustard fields, willow groves, grand Iranian maple or chinar trees alongside a flamboyant stream, and the huddled houses of a few small villages. But the six-mile ride on a local bus was dangerous. Military and paramilitary trucks drove on the same road, carrying supplies between various camps or going on raids in the villages. Guerrillas hiding in the fields by the road would often fire at the military convoys or detonate mines planted in the road. Soldiers would retaliate after such attacks, firing in all directions and beating anyone they could lay their hands on.

One weekend on my way home, I was standing in the bus aisle near the driver. Kashmiri buses are like noisy cafés; almost everyone knows everyone else, and voices of varying pitches fill the vehicle. The driver played a Bollywood song, its melancholy lyrics floating over the din. A mile into the journey, a paramilitary convoy overtook our bus and hovered just ahead of us. The voices in the bus lowered, and the driver turned off the music. Soldiers had realized that driving close to a civilian bus would keep guerrillas from attacking them. Anxiety filled the bus. Our driver began praying feverishly: “God, I have three small children, please don’t make them orphans today. Please get us safely to our homes today.” We drove in silence, waiting. The minutes passed, and the paramilitary convoy gathered speed. Our driver slowed, and the distance between us grew. We were in a village called Siligam, midway between my school and my house, when I heard a loud explosion. The driver slammed on the brakes, and in the distance, we saw a paramilitary truck skid off the road and land in the fields. I heard a barrage of bullets—the lighter sounds Kalashnikovs; the heavier, retaliatory bursts, light machine guns. The driver swung the bus around and sped back as fast as he could. Everyone crouched under the seats.

I sat on the floor, gripping a seat. The roar of the engine rose above the sound of bullets being fired. I was thinking where a bullet might hit me; I desperately hoped it would not be my face, my head, or my right hand. I became intensely aware of my body. I felt the tension in my spinal cord, the nakedness of my neck, the stiffening of my legs. Where would a bullet hurt the most? I buried my head in my knees and closed my eyes.

We were driving away from the battle. I began listing the guns that could still hit us. We seemed out of the killing range of an AK-47 and a carbine submachine gun, but a self-loading rifle, a light or heavy machine gun, and a 51 mm mortar gun could easily hit us. A little while later, the driver stopped the bus. I stood up in a quick, involuntary motion. Two men hugged the driver. “You saved our life,” another man said, and shook his hand. An old man began to cry. A woman patted his back and consoled him. I smiled at everyone. We got off the bus and drank from a roadside stream. The driver and a few other men smoked cigarettes.

We had just gotten back on and begun to drive back to the bus yard in the village of Aishmuqam, near my school, when a convoy of paramilitary trucks hurtled toward us. The convoy stopped, and so did we. Armed soldiers circled the bus, and an angry paramilitary officer ordered us out. We stood in a queue on the road. I was close to the door and the first one to get down. I was in my school uniform and carried a school bag. The officer raised his gun like a baton. I waited to be hit by the weapon. I could not remove my eyes from his. He lowered the gun and pushed me with his other hand. I knew he was going to shoot me. But then he grabbed my arm and shouted, “You are from the school near our camp. I see you pass by every day. Now get out of here.” He let the bus and everyone on it go. As we arrived at the bus yard, a crowd gathered.

Two hours later, another bus arrived, and its driver told me, “You are lucky that no soldier was killed by the land mine. The road is open now, but they have begun a crackdown in the surrounding villages.” Fifteen minutes later, we passed the spot where the mine had gone off. I saw no soldiers, no military trucks. There were only the willow trees lining the road, the paddy fields, the tin roofs of a village beyond the fields, and a large crater on the right corner of the road, carved out by the explosion. We drove past a few villages where the shops had been closed and the streets were empty except for patrolling paramilitary soldiers. Fortunately, they let our bus pass.

A few weeks later, I was home again. That weekend we expected Father to visit from his office in Srinagar, which was wracked with violence. Each day on BBC World Service, we heard reports of scores of deaths there. The solemn voice of Yusuf Jameel, the BBC’s Srinagar correspondent, rang through our radios each evening: “I am hearing the sound of gunfire.” The fatal sound of bullets would play on the radio for a few seconds, and Jameel’s stoic voice would follow: “Yet another unidentified body has been found in the river Jhelum in Srinagar.”

Late in the afternoon Mother sent me to buy lamb chops for the dinner she was making for Father. I stepped out of the house and saw Mother’s grand-uncle, the white-haired Saifuddin, sitting by his grocery counter and scanning the market. He didn’t do much business but knew everything that happened in the neighborhood, as he spent most of his time watching who went where, and asking relentless questions. He waved at me and asked, “Today is a Saturday! Is Peer Sahib coming home?”

“Yes, he should be here soon,” I replied.

“I only asked because I haven’t seen Masterji [my grandfather] at the butcher’s shop yet. He usually buys meat by this time on a Saturday. I was wondering if everything is fine. God knows this is a dangerous time.”

I assured him that Grandfather was busy with some chore, and I was buying the meat. I walked toward the butcher, and the few neighborhood men hanging about the pharmacy and the tailor’s shop called out, “How was the interview?”