It is supposedly a college day; however I find myself tucked away from sunlight, probably because the sun, while benign, feels deceptive and false here; while as the spring is approaching on its hooves rather soon. I’m home and I’m looking at the world through a wooden frame: a window and a room full of disquiet and chaos. Kashmir has an image of beauty, it is beautiful in pictures and advertisements, and nobody can take that from us.
But I wish someone did, someone would commit the sin to unveil what really lurks in the lives of those that live here. Loss, it isn’t only when we lose someone, loss is far more than a perception of losing loved ones, or just people in general. Loss is an awfully broad term and is wholesome in a sense that everything you see, if you look through the prism of loss, we’re losing more than just lives.
I woke up early; it takes me a while to break the shell of sleep, it’s pretty thick with me and I have to snooze my alarm couple times before I get out of bed. Anyway, I started prepping to leave when my mother, while breakfast, informed me that all schools and colleges have been closed because there was an encounter in Anantnag. In the strangest of coincidences, I share my surname with one of the martyr and well; it felt like I had lost my kin even if I don’t know him personally. It’s such a warped context, I know but all of us belong to a same ancestor and therefore it is not so crazy. In terms of loss, he lost his right to live; I lost my right to go to college and to learn— even if the college doesn’t seem to take interest in us. I was going to meet my friends after two long weeks, or less but I suppose I can exaggerate, one can hardly bargain with the loss or the passage of time oneself feels with respect to a particular point in time. I guess it’s pretty much every day when loss of certain things seems like an umbilical cord that you can’t cut because you don’t see it like I do.
After breakfast, I came back and snuck into the bed and gambled my time over virtual world, admittedly as much as I try to get away from it, it spreads ten times quickly and I cannot resist several temptations until I quench them. I’m that weak if you must know. A while later, I took up the book I’m currently reading and for an hour or more I was living as someone else; away from the gusto of my life, away from its irony until my man-of-the-house duty hour came. My mother sent me to buy groceries; it was the loss of reading time apparently, my uncle is stubborn as a stone, one can’t get past without getting a task and it always takes an hour to finish with him. I mean, I had to buy my own supplies but instead I was counting his cash that he wanted me to deposit in the bank. I think he has trust issues; he counts his money thrice before he lets me have it.
Being at home is an invite enough for people to think of me as if I have nothing to do of my own even if I just sit and read, or do nothing— it’s none of their business.
It is an icing to the cake when you’re going to a college that doesn’t seem to care about their students and when you are studying humanities; you’re pretty much wafting in the wind like an aimless kite.
Also, it gets lonely here, my sister is in Srinagar and my brother is a field engineer and he finds it rather easy to go Srinagar than come home; it is far actually and given the things that keep happening, there’s no guarantee what will happen.
I was born in 1996 and turmoil was sky high and I’ve seen my fair share of things that I was too young to understand. Where I live nowadays used to be a hotspot of fanatics, but with time their waves receded and the town was left to its sand. But it seems to be coming back, for a decade now; South Kashmir has been a site of numerous encounters however the current seems to be shifting towards our side— north. The fear of turmoil is an implant of decades of trauma and it lingers in us like any normal fear does. There are permanent scars and there are permanent scars.
Its thirty minutes past eight in the evening and my brother has talked to my mother an hour before, he’s on his way home from Sopore. He has two numbers, one is out of reach and he’s not picking up other one. I’m scared shitless; I want him home safe but there are things that keep happening, inconclusive disappearances amidst travel being the most prevalent, my mother and I have a vivid imagination. At this point of time, I sincerely think of God and I am guilty as an alcoholic who pledged not to drink, when I want him to exchange all the good deeds for his safety in a verbal disposition.
He came home just fine, either my good deeds or gone or it was my fearful mother on a prayer rug, snug in tears whose dime-store incensed battle cry shook God out of his throne. I’m betting on my mother.