The garlands of flowers were kept ready and were woven into the holy necklace. The Gods were bathed with milk and coconut oil. The bells of mandir kept ringing at the continuous intervals and when the heads were to shift their work hours they stopped. This was not midnight when India had got its independence but it was daylight. They had victoriously shifted the time from night to day. The tradition of the midnight celebrations was called off. It wasn’t second Independence but a renaissance for a lot of people on the street that day. On the streets flags were waved, round orange sweet balls were distributed. Their streets roared from extreme happiness to just excitement. The crowd was playing with crackers, it looked like a festival. At a distance in the smoldering heat a rickshaw puller whose skin and beard was mixed together in such a manner that there was not even a Sikh line to differentiate between the two on his face. Wearing tattered shorts which were labeled as AMUP, which looked familiar to the mirror image of the famous brand Puma of which the local manufacturers were not shameful. They manufactured more of these and sell these on the price which would enable both their families and their ustad’s family enough for survival and give the aam admi a piece of linen to hide his sweating machine. With the red coloured universe in his mouth, parallel to the blue oceanic Krishna world,the latter which comprised of the conspiracies and undemaded nationalism and the one which had the big bang theory reversed the rickshaw guy finally asked in the broken accent of a new pidgin that their community called paan pidgin, originating from the lanes of the houses of the rickshaw wallahs, “Bhai kya horaha hai”?As if the other member was a news reporter or knew what actually was happening, though in a joyous voice replied ” Ustad mia, Jannat humari huwi hai. Modi, ne kar dikhaya hai, gus kay maariengay Pakistaniyo ko… Kashmir ki kaliyan bhi ab humari” and the conversation ended in a deadly, suffocating and dubious laugh.
Even our independence had come with a warning, a warning like it would be for the day of judgment. There was a partition and the beloveds were separated into the Indian lovers and Pakistanis beloveds. The trains carrying the dead bodies were also labeled amongst the country name, fifty Indian dead lovers, hundred Pakistani dead beloveds. The numbers were infinte. None could trace the finger with blood to the roots it carried with itself. Who knew who was Ashfaq mia when the signs where just the leftovers of the body, the corpse. The fingers so demolished, that even any nationality would not have been discovered through the dead civilizations of the partition. Partition was successful, and the lovers with the rose scent declared 15-08-1947 the day of their freedom, of their re-birth of their existence. The dead civilization of the partition was to be remembered on this day least the ones who were able to survive. This said, what had they done now? Why were the people so happy. Why were the dargah sharif’s blanketed with the black purdah and the mandir with the orange fluorescent flags. What was this divide in the country which was in itself independent? The streets were stranded; people went in queues to phone a friend, a relative, son, daughter, pregnant wife, deceased husband. All of them lingered on one side of Dal lake. Haven’t they done this all the time. Be it the lines of frisking, be it summoning in the curfew or the lines that they would have made in their dreams. Mothers who were educated and not the mid-wives were so reluctant even to teach their kids, about geometry. Once, Shafeeqa a local school teacher sat down with her sixteen-year-old Harun to teach him his homework, the next chapter was “lines” and Harun abruptly in the voice of the all knower said , Ammi lines are those which we make when army keeps the gun on our Abu, on Imtiyaz’s Abu, on Shaista’s Ammi because her father is already with them. At this Shafeeqa would hold and twist his ear so much that it would make Kashmir normal again as if nothing had happened ever. Then, Harun would continue, a line is a straight kind of an image which joins a point A to point B without any curve or any design sort of. The lessons were called off because they could hear the regime coming closer to their house. What had they done in the daylight? Murders, killings or rape? Harun looked from the hall’s window like a skyscraper view to Hitler’s land, they had done it, said Harun ,death to the occupation and at that moment he realized that he had a correction to make. He went downstairs, climbing the stairs of his descent, climbing down to the shelved books of Malcolm X, Rousseau and Napolean dived in his unmanaged study table, picked out a book, opened page number 370, unmarked the option(c), startled at the present answer his heart sank into the time and read it out loud
Question containing two marks:
Q1. What is the status of Jammu and Kashmir?
A1. A) State
B) Union territory
C) Both
D) none of the above, just a month ago his teacher had helped him tick mark the (a)option as the correct answer but he freed himself from the Rousseau’s chains, marked B. He repeated it thrice, because the myth said that revising anything three times would lead straight to the paradise of the memory, just like he thought that they had thought the thought of revoking article 370 would make Kashmir the integral of the country.
It is Independence Day today. Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti wrapped in her Muslim attire came all prepared to hoist the tricolor flag in Bakshi Stadium Kashmir. Not many but few accompanied her as the audience sitting in the shade and sipping the cultural kehwa from the Taj. She with her glares on; half masked came to the aisle and pulled down the rope and the audience hooted. It wasn’t the successful hoisting of the flag but one of the failed ones. She had failed herself to be the patriot. The audience whistled as well as clasped in the astonishment of grief which offered the media the news “A blunder by CM of J&K”, “Deliberate attempt or folly by CM”? However, the event concluded successfully but with a price. A lot of red light cars roamed around the famous boulevard that day. Dal Lake the most serene of the places looked mild and escapable through the frontiers. It was an exhausting day for Miss Mufti but she resigned at her desk wondering what would she answer the media about her misfortune. Media busted, shot words of fire on every Kashmiri whom they even didn’t know. And as the curfew was imposed on the Independence Day many children sat on their grandmother’s lap or anyone whom they found comfort with, rescued themselves with the stories of many more curfews that had quilted the valley.
I was reading my grandfather’s novel which was written in Urdu and titled as “Hijaz -safarnama.” When I was told about it from the elders that my grandfather who was a general secretary to the Indian national congress of his time was a staunch leader of the Indianess. I remember as a child my house was filled with the Indian flag work on the cushions or the table covers/sheets which my mother had nicely ironed and cleaned since the time she had got into my father’s family. My grandfather who was a close friend to Late Mufti Muhammad Syed, father of the CM Mehbooba Mufti chronicled his journey of friendship with Mufti sahib from his tryst in politics as well as with the tryst of him being his friend. He also recalled along with his narratives the despise of the revolutions that were the daily affairs of the society and how time collapsed in front of him. He clearly remarked in his autobiography, that whatever the nation goes through is culturally in the domain of the powerful ministers as well as the normal powerful people. I understood the cultural relations that he tried to weave in his narration. It was clear through his insight that the only one who suffers were the proletariats in the vocabulary of those times the aam Janta of Kashmir. Seasons went by and I remember reading Marx in one of my classes held at Delhi University. Our professor briefed over the matrix along with which Marx worked his society. The wages, the ideologies as well as the most articulate of his understanding of the classes all went into me as a living experience. Revolution was going on. It always had been like this in India. One of the tough times to deal with the conscience of the people. It was the twentieth-first century of pop-culture, media influences across the globe. What twentieth-first century I cried in one of my classes. The culture of the mall, globalization threatened those who were deprived of this human rights conscience. Jawahar Lal Nehru university one of the prestigious universities went on fire the day India was radicalized of the Hindutva. The banners were fired, the posters were held high in the sky and the campus roared to the very sight of the end of secularism. The Great Wall of China as is famous all over the globe found its synonym in this university but unfortunately, it was falling apart like Achebe’s Africa. Jnu in itself was Kashmir or was a mask to its problem one didn’t know but it was a melting pot for the youth who were caged, who were plucked out from their innovations and what was the significant fall of the great university parallel to which Kashmir was still a question and the who’s who of the revolution never took any interest in the curfewed lanes of the valley.
Takbeer Salati 