BY AFSHAN NABI (MBG/III)
afshan.nabi@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
On Rage and Helplessness: Lessons From an Unusual Summer, Part 2
This is the second part of a three-part column on my summer trip to my homeland Kashmir, which remains under curfew for the fourth consecutive month.
Before we arrived, we had planned to travel all over Kashmir, but being here, where stones block the highways, we are forced to stay home. We are lucky in a way—most of our relatives live close by. One evening, at 6 p.m.—the time when the roads open—we go to see my grandmother. She has been sick, but today she is better: not lying under blankets, talking more, eating more and laughing.
However, before we go to my grandmother’s house, my parents take me to our vegetable garden, half an hour’s drive outside town. It is my first time here, and I am delighted by the variety in the garden: red and green peppers, two types of zucchini, small tomatoes, eggplants, beans, kidney beans, corn, potatoes, radishes, mint, cucumbers and apple trees. Unfortunately, wild grass and weeds grow everywhere, threatening all the vegetables. The man who used to tend the garden has not been able to come for months now because of the prevailing situation. My mother is very sad. She wants to come again, at the very least to collect the vegetables that are ripe.
But we will not go….
We have a tense ride when we decide to return home around 8:30 p.m. It is dark; no streetlights light up these tiny back roads. Suddenly we see a long line of headlights racing toward us, led by boys on a motorcycle. They scream, “Hey, turn back!” as they pass us. A car slows down slightly and the driver says, “They’re throwing stones.” No one stops to answer our question: How far ahead? We stop at a gas pump; my father talks with the group of men gathered there and decides we can go on. We turn left on the same road; the stone throwing is happening half a kilometer straight ahead. On the road we take, there are boys shouting at us and other cars passing. Near home, another group of boys stops us. My mother talks with them, saying we want to go home, and then they let us go.
My father does not want to be caught between the young protestors and the military. He does not even want to risk leaving early in the morning.
So, the weeds will grow and choke the vegetables a little more.
I feel very glad to reach home safely.
I sleep in the very room I was born in. I can see the moon through the curtains across the window. My parents sleep in the room across the hall. Usually, night comes here with an impact like ripples in still water: slowly spreading, forcing people indoors and into their beds. Even military drones flying somewhere far above make a peaceful sound. And when the drone noise disappears, there is a silence that torments my ears, but calms my soul. But tonight is a night of terror.
In this valley, dogs barking continuously at night means the military is close. Tonight, the dogs are in a frenzy; barking and howling, drawing closer and shrinking away from God knows what. I find my thoughts turning in dreadful directions—the soldiers are infamous for raiding homes at night, beating people in front of their families, and destroying property. I will, most probably, be safe, but still the dread lurks in my mind. This fear is like the fear of ghosts—childish and yet justified.
It is a troubling sensation, not feeling safe in your own home, among your own people.
In the morning, I find out why there was stone throwing last evening: two more men have been killed. When will this horror end?
Young people of this land are dying, pellets—hundreds of small lead balls fired from air guns—are making sieves of bodies, bodies are being thrown in rivers, and people are jumping into rivers—to their deaths. Local news channels have been disabled or have come under government control, and national channels are spewing untruths or keeping ominously silent, as if these people and their struggles did not exist. Telephones do not work; the Internet has been dead so long that even its memory feels like a dream; schools and colleges are closed; roads are deserted, except where rocks fly against the pellets that have blinded hundreds. Hordes of boys arrested in broad daylight or in the middle of the night are put in prison for two years without trial. These children, locked away for years. Our children. Is this the sacrifice we must make? To give our children, our lives, our future, our very identity: all of ourselves?
And yet, all I can truly worry about is my future, my family, my home, and myself. I feel like an ant put on a leaf by a child and thrown into a rushing river: completely helpless, clueless. How can I blame anyone else for thinking as they think and acting as they act?
Are we all hypocrites?
While reading “Crime and Punishment,” I come across this:
“‘And now they’ve grown used to it. They’ve shed a few tears, and are used to it. Man can get used to anything, the villain!’
“He began to reflect.
“‘Well, and what if I’m mistaken?’ he suddenly found himself exclaiming. ‘What if man—the whole human race in general, I mean—isn’t really a villain at all? If that’s true, it means that all the rest is just a load of superstition, just a lot of fears that have been put into people’s heads, and there are no limits, and that’s how it’s meant to be!’”
What if there really are no limits and that’s how it’s meant to be?
Imagine living like this: you are a student who has been unable to go to school/college for more than three months; you have been at home all this time; a curfew prevails; the Internet is a distant, unreachable dream; prepaid phones are dead; there is nowhere to go, nothing to do but listen to stories of young boys blinded, wounded, traumatized or even killed, every single day. Worse, imagine your brother/friend has been hit, blinded or even killed by pellets. What would you do? How would you live?
The world does not work in white and black; neither side is blameless. However, young men here continue to die.
What should the priority be?