Woe Subha Kab ayayge? Is that too much to ask?
by Majid Maqbool
‘The siege is a waiting period
Waiting on the tilted ladder in the middle of the storm.’
– Mahmoud Darwish
Afternoon, August 23. I’ve to reach a downtown Srinagar city area to drop an elderly relative from a hospital to his home before another strict, night curfew is imposed. An ailing man, he gets anxious every time a CRPF trooper comes up to ask: where are you going? Apparently an ‘undeclared curfew’ is in place while some private vehicles move around in city outskirts. CRPF troops, blocking several entry and exit points of downtown areas, are ready to enforce another night curfew. They threateningly ask me to move back.
Some troops would reluctantly let us go past the the blockades, only after questioning and looking at my press card, checking it on both sides to see if it’s genuine and if the passport size photograph is indeed mine. At other points, seeing the vehicle approach, they would just wave their batons from a distance and blow a few whistles, asking us to drive back from that point. Without actually saying anything, they would convey that we’re not allowed to move ahead, that they’re here, and everywhere else, to control our movements, and whatever remains of our besieged lives.
At one point, when I was again asked to turn back, frustrated and unable to think of the next unblocked route, I felt like coming out of my car and shouting my lungs out. But then expressing your anger on the streets in Kashmir can get you killed, or blinded by pellets. At another roadblock a police personnel came up to the car window to calmly explain the siege: ‘We can let you go from here, but ahead of us are CRPF troops blocking the road, and they can fire at you there. So you can go ahead or go back…’ As I began to drive back from that point, he smiled. It was a strange smile, a smile of helplessness despite the apparent sense of authority and power.
Finally, after much struggle and many detours, I was able to drop my relative in the darkness at some inner lane closer to his home. From there he had no option than to walk back to his home in discomfort. I felt sad for not being able to help him. While driving back to my home, after again taking many diversions to avoid blocked roads, I felt cornered, frustrated and humiliated. This is how the already besieged population is treated after more than a month of curfews and restrictions and killings, injuries and blinding by pellets: keep the military siege intact, bring in more troops, forever cage people till they are exhausted and beg for lifting of the siege.
What is the value of your life when it can be snuffed out anytime with a single bullet? And the knowledge that the perpetrator can get away, and shoot people again with impunity. What is left of life when your bodies are riddled with bullets, teargas shells, and eyes blinded with pellets? Imagine a young man, a teenager, forced to live the rest of his life in unending darkness. Can you look into his blinded eyes?
What is left to live when all your basic human rights are denied, all freedoms choked? Or maybe that’s how it has always been and will ever be in Kashmir…You can’t call it ‘living’ when there’s no dignity, when you’re treated worse than animals, over and over again, surrounded by bunkers and checkpoints and endless spools of concertina wires that come so close to you, surrounding you, as if to crawl into your skin. How does one make of sense of more and more troops who have never left us alone for decades, who keep coming back to take our streets, our kids, and whose presence instills a sense of homelessness at home, depriving us of the only home we can ever have.
I don’t know for how long people can keep their humanity intact in the face of such unrelenting brutality, this unending siege, and so much of grief and so many tragedies and so many loved ones consumed in this unjust, unequal war thrust on people. How can one even focus on work, on family, and be sane and act normal when everything around you is falling apart. Maybe it’s better to be dead and buried in Kashmir than alive, than thinking, than waking up to suffer, and seeing others suffering more, for years together, in unbearable pain, in perpetual mourning, every single day, year after year after year… Why are we condemned to live forever with this aching longing — this unmet desire, this unrealized dream — of a home not yet freed, its keys not yet returned by the troops who don’t leave us alone, never to return.
I look at my two-year and a few months old daughter and ask myself if she has already been deprived of her childhood before she could begin to live it. It fills me with sadness to see her caught up in the siege, and this thought of immense possibilities of her life that lies ahead of her but can also be suppressed, again, for a lifetime. I keep thinking of Insha, 14, who was blinded by pellets in both her eyes. If only she could see again, what would she not achieve and see in her life. I just wish and hope and pray my kid and all other kids in Kashmir could experience, unlike us, a happier childhood, and live, just live their life, freed from the suffocating siege of occupation.
Woe Subha Kab ayayge? Is that too much to ask?
Woe Subha Kabhe to ayay ge!
Majid Maqbool is a writer and editor based out of Srinagar, Kashmir. His writing has appeared in Al Jazeera English, Al Jazeera America, Warscapes, Griffith Review, and several Indian publications.