CURFEWED NIGHT.
By Basharat Peer
Random House India.
2008. 243 pages. Paperback. Rs. 295.
I’ve been a journalist since June 1976. Yes, that’s midway
through the hated Emergency in India, when I joined Indian Express, Madras/ Chennai, as a rookie. I’ve read reams of
reportage and editorials and other media output on Kashmir. But I have to
confess that I really did not understand what had happened in Kashmir since
1989 until I read this book by Basharat Peer.
I won’t even try to summarize ‘Curfewed Night.’ It’s an act of love, a splendid interweave of
history, reportage and memoir that moved me intensely the first time I read it in
2010. I can understand with clarity and empathy why a whole generation of
protesters has come into being in Kashmir.
Confessions first. I had never been to Kashmir until 2008,
on our way back from a trek in the Markha Valley in Ladakh. Six of us drove towards
Jammu in a SUV through the dark night past Kargil, Drass and other places that
created a mind buzz from past reportage. I couldn’t sleep. So, I kept my eyes
on the luminous moon overhead.
The jammed mountain roads teemed with army trucks, filled
with men in camouflage fatigues. En route, we were repeatedly stopped to ask if
we had seen an escapee from the army, a Sikh soldier. At one point, we had to
disembark, while army personnel frisked us and emptied out our luggage.
On the way to Srinagar, we didn’t go to Dal Lake. We stopped
at a roadside dhaba for aloo parathas and chai for breakfast. Our eyes took in soldiers
in uniform, their guns pointed at some invisible enemy, in idyllic wheat,
mustard and rice fields.
In Srinagar, armoured personnel carriers rambled through the
streets in daylight. Young men, supposedly on daily errands, were stopped and
searched on the streets. It was definitely a city in siege, mentally, physically
and emotionally.
I’ve been a
journalist, but never a reporter. So, I’ve never been in a minefield or a war
zone. The closest to that experience was probably during the Indo-Pakistan war
of 1965, while I was at school in Jaipur. Sirens went off from time to time. Our
windows were blacked out with paper and paint. During air raid drills, we had
to run out of class or our hostels, and jump into the closest trench. If we had
time, we were told to grab hold of a small bag each with our bare necessities.
It was both exciting and scary at 10 or 11.
Act 2. Then came the war to liberate Bangladesh when I was a
teenager at college in Kolkata in 1971. I recall that Lt. Gen. Jagjit Singh
Arora and his wife, friends of my parents, had come to dinner at our home, along
with others, in November 1971. In
December, Indian troops marched into East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh.
Over 2 million civilians died. Over 400,000 women were raped by the Pakistan
armed forces. I was horrified, more distressed by the day over man’s inhumanity
to humankind. I was a pacifist even then.
Act 3. In the mid-1980s, while at Indian Express, I was
talked into interviewing Gavin Young, who reported for the Sunday Times in London, by our editor Saeed Naqvi. He insisted that
I would find Young intelligent and engaging because he had covered 14 wars
across the globe, including the Vietnam war for over a decade. I’ll never
forget what Young he told me: that wars are not about soldiers and generals,
politicians or power; they are about little people in unknown places who are
impacted by it all. (Young was, after all, a witness to the surrender of
Pakistani Lt. Gen. Niazi to Gen. Arora in a bunker in former East Pakistan).
His home-truth rang sharply through my being as I read Peer’s
human documentary in words. He made me think of the mythical ‘objectivity’ that
is supposed to be the mean in journalism. After all Peer did report for
Tehelka, which I respect. But how can you possibly be objective about your
family, your closest friends, a land that means the world to you? Basharat Peer
brings Kashmir today alive with confidence, emotion ~ and a quiet, yet poetic,
touch. That’s an amazing feat, to my eyes.
 |
| Basharat Peer |
At just 32 when the book was published in 2008, Peer couched
his reportage with flair and great emotional intelligence. Such as
the impact of the interrogation camp at Papa-2, or the shattering impact of
‘disappeared persons,’ or how the redressal mechanism is totally corrupted, or
the disappearance of Kashmiri Pandits and where they are now.
Take this excerpt about the book’s raison d’etre:
“I shared some stories with a few friends in New Delhi, but
I could never say everything. I would find myself stopping in the middle of a
sentence, choked, rendered inarticulate by memory. The telling, even in the
shade of intimacy, was painful. There was also a sense of shame that overcame
me very time I walked into a bookstore. People from almost every conflict zone
had told their stories: Palestinians, Israelis, Bosnians, Kurds, Tibetans,
Lebanese, East Germans, Africans, East Timorese, and many more. I felt the
absence of our own telling, the unwritten books about the Kashmiri experience,
from the bookshelves, as vividly as the absence of a beloved ~ the empty chair
staring at you across the table in a coffee shop, the vacant seat in a theatre
playing a movie she would have laughed through, the email with an idiosyncratic
title that did not arrive in the inbox. The memories and stories of Kashmir
that I carried with me like my VIP suitcase could fade away. I had to find the
words to save memory from the callous varnish of time. I knew I had to write.
And to write, I had to return and revisit the people and places that had
haunted me for years…”
This is the story of Peer’s life. But it is equally about
the lives of the 70,000 young men who have lost their lives in the ongoing
battle in Kashmir. For bereft of hope,
without access to quality education or good jobs, a youthful generation has
chosen to model its resistance on the stone-throwing youths of the second
Palestinian intifada, not on the
Pakistani militias who trained them to use guns.
Curfewed Night was
on the New Yorker list of the year’s 100 best books. Granta editor John Freeman
picked it among the five best debut books of the year. It won the Vodaphone Crossword
non-fiction award 2008.
Why? For multiple reasons. Peer has access to the men who
move about only at night. He tunes in to those who fight against the might of
the Indian state. But most deeply, he is the voice of real Kashmiri people,
like the old man who, mourning his murdered family, said to Peer: “Go back and tell them what has happened
here.”
Peer has done just that. He reveals the insider truths of Kashmir
of the recent past with an incandescent brilliance that is tragic, poignant,
and impossible to forget. If you’ve been as puzzled as I was about the true story
of this tragic state, this is the one book I would reach for. It lights the way
to understanding.
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