[Reader-list] Holding on to paradise

[cashmeeri]

"Sadly, within a couple of decades after I left Kashmir – slowly, slyly at first, and then at an accelerated speed – life as we knew it, unselfconsciously sublime, lay in ruins.
 
 I am not talking about Kashmiriyat, though that might have been the state of affairs in the Valley before it was politicized, bottled, labelled and sold as such. 
 
Like Eurydice, it disappeared the moment we turned back to look at it. But it had been a lifestyle that came to us as easily as breathing, one we later recognized in a dialectical way by its antithesis. 
 
Predictably, our precarious equilibrium did not survive the global onslaught of terrorism and the inculcated hatred that feeds it."
 
http://www.india-seminar.com/2009/600/600_sudha_koul.htm
 
 
Holding on to paradise
SUDHA KOUL
 
WHEN invited to write about how true I could be as a writer dealing with personal and human issues, particularly when writing The Tiger Ladies – a Memoir of Kashmir, I immediately accepted. I was quite chuffed at being asked to write for Seminar. Having said yes, though, it soon became apparent to me that there was a problem. For the question how true could I be, the answer was one word: completely. However, that would not do, I had to go in the opposite direction of the synoptic, ‘The conscious water saw its God and blushed.’ And I certainly needed to explain ‘completely’ at length, if only because it seems so improbable now, given the events in Kashmir.
 
I lived in Kashmir until 1968. Instead of travelling with the family on my father’s army postings, I stayed on with my grandparents in the Valley. For me it was the best place in the world, not least of all because of my grandfather, beloved professor of English Literature and all round Sufi. So it was for Kashmiris of all persuasions, for droves of tourists who came by air or land, and for natives coming back home for summer holidays. The air was pure, the cultural zephyr so free, and you could not beat the landscape. Of course, let us not forget the food, the most delicious fare you could find anywhere. But eventually the wider world beckoned and after getting a Master’s degree in political science at the University of Jammu and Kashmir, I left to teach at Lady Shri Ram College. The next year I was selected to the IAS.
 
Being the first Kashmiri woman in the Service did not seem sufficient reason to stay put when my future husband appeared on the horizon. I jumped at marriage and the prospect of children, and followed him to the US. In retrospect, not a particularly bright thing to do, giving up a career so willingly, and certainly quite a let down to my Principal, Mahmuda Ahmed Ali Shah of the Women’s College on Residency Road. A handsome descendant of Gujjars, the greatest educator and emancipator of Kashmiri women, she had proudly displayed my picture as a frontispiece in the college magazine. Other professors felt dismayed as well, and they let me know. But there it was: the eternal duvidha of the Womb and the Woman.
 
I left in the early seventies, and in many ways Kashmir remained fossilized within me. I believe this phenomenon to be true of most immigrants; they subconsciously imagine things will remain exactly as they left them. They don’t want to believe that ‘you can never go home again.’ This turned out to be devastatingly true for me.
 
 
I set up house in the US, had two children, and everything was as it had promised to be. But soon, growing restlessness with a purely domestic grind (particularly the absence of household help that cheap labour in India gets us addicted to) had me dreaming of the past. Debates and plays at college in Srinagar, my teaching stint in New Delhi, on particularly bad days even the Allahabad katchery, the lonely (I was the only woman official for miles and had to keep myself to myself) yellow mustard fields of my winter tours and ghost-ridden dak bungalows. It was clear I had to transcend being completely household bound; even more importantly, I had to retrieve my standing with my disappointed mentors and myself as well. But children and attendant obligations necessitated it be something I do from home; too many horror stories of baby sitters.
 
I have always written, unheeded and unpublished, except for the schoolgirl poetry I read over Radio Kashmir. So I started writing in the US as well, though I had not found my writing voice, which is why my first two books were manuals, written between chores, nothing that required sustained involvement. The books Curries Without Worries and Come With Me to India were good enough, but not anything to write home to the Women’s College about. Besides, I had begun to fancy myself as a creative writer and these two just did not fit the bill. It would take something momentous to get me to write the way I wanted to.
 
While all these selfish little preoccupations overtook my predictable suburban American existence, a catastrophe was unfolding back home. Life as I knew it in Kashmir had started to self-destruct. When I left India the rumblings of discontent in Kashmir were becoming a little louder, but still so infrequently that one thought nothing of it. We who lived in Kashmir had for decades known that there were some who dreamt of Pakistan, and some of independence, and off and on we encountered something to that effect. But there was nothing ominous or imminent about it; people went about their business as usual and our lives continued apace.
 
Kashmiri Pandits belonged to a minority that was minuscule in size but huge in importance, both in their own complacent eyes and in the eyes of the Muslim majority, and no one noticed anything odd about their demographic profile. But increasingly, after the seventies, thanks to cross-border propaganda and within border governmental mismanagement, the thought that the Hindus did not warrant such excess in status began to take hold. While all this was brewing, we Pandits hardly realized our insignificance in the political game; we carried on in a surreal world where a microscopic minority walked about with no fear from a benign Muslim majority. We had taken it for granted ever since we could remember.
 
 
Sadly, within a couple of decades after I left Kashmir – slowly, slyly at first, and then at an accelerated speed – life as we knew it, unselfconsciously sublime, lay in ruins. I am not talking about Kashmiriyat, though that might have been the state of affairs in the Valley before it was politicized, bottled, labelled and sold as such. Like Eurydice, it disappeared the moment we turned back to look at it. But it had been a lifestyle that came to us as easily as breathing, one we later recognized in a dialectical way by its antithesis. Predictably, our precarious equilibrium did not survive the global onslaught of terrorism and the inculcated hatred that feeds it. By the nineties, Afghanistan and Kashmir were competing for news coverage of violence and terrorism and, by the end of the millennium, the charmed life we Kashmiris enjoyed was gone.
 
 
Where all my recollections and narratives had been about Kashmiris living together peaceably, legs intertwined as it were, now increasingly the news from home gave the lie to that fact. They say your stories should be about that which you know, but what did I know about Kashmir? My disoriented nerves were jarred by alternate legends of betrayal and trust. A childhood friend killing another under pretence of wanting to play the table tennis they both adored, Pandits handing over their house keys to Muslim neighbours before fleeing the Valley in transport provided by another Muslim friend.
 
Television and newspaper reportage, letters, phone calls, gossip from visiting relatives, came in wave upon wave, and while all too true, made no sense to me. Did this ugliness or evil exist in the years I lived in Kashmir? If so, it never came up before me or anyone else I knew. The complete evaporation of the bucolic world I had left behind had been accomplished, and worse, replaced by barbaric impossibilities that soon proved to be all too real. My Valley was no longer recognizable; I had to find my feet again no matter how impossible it seemed, if only to retain my sanity.
 
The only way to go about that, from where I was, was to write. Of course, I always thought I’d write about Kashmir, just for my girls if nothing else. They had such a different childhood as first generation children of immigrants, with all the attendant angst of people not yet rooted in the soil. The only antidote was their solid, long-standing background, their deep roots in a rare Valley. But their antecedents were fast disappearing, as were the generations before me; soon there would be no proof that that world had actually existed. I was the only connection, and unless I got down to it and captured Kashmir and what it meant to us in some form, it would become the stuff of myth, hearsay without documentary evidence.
 
 
The worse the situation became in Kashmir, the more determinedly I wrote, with no thought of repercussions or political correctness. My children had gone back to Kashmir several times. They knew some of the life I was writing about, the people involved, and I could not allow it all to become chimerical. The more impossible the recounting, the more essential it be done, before my mind was befuddled by violence and propaganda, my memory swallowed by the ensuing rhetoric, demagoguery and media explosion. I would put it down chronologically to set the record straight, as it were. Yet, I wondered in the face of what was coming out of Kashmir now, had I dreamt it all, how could it be so different from what I knew?
 
In retrospect I don’t think I would have written The Tiger Ladies if I did not live miles away from Kashmir. Perhaps the distance allowed me to write with a larger heart than I might have had, had I lived in the Valley. Bereft at the loss of my Kashmiri life, I tossed and turned until I finally found my tongue. I could write only if I wrote without compromise, without anger, so that there would be some place where my Valley continued to exist, where I could revisit it.
 
Those days I seemed to be one of the few persistently talking about what had been. Kashmir made its violent debut in international media soon after Afghanistan did, and for the most part the world could not tell the two apart. A deluge of analysis, reportage, and more analysis followed; writers were embroiled in the business of understanding or explaining exactly what happened. An international blame game was afoot; people tried to fit Kashmir into moulds they could easily hate.
 
Now I have nothing against Afghanistan, but anyone can tell you its topography and terrain are quite different from the lush green valley of Kashmir, not to mention the warlike Afghan culture which is at the other end of the spectrum from the pacific sufism of the Valley. But all across the media, Kashmiris were portrayed as just an offshoot of some Afghani tribal faction, guns in hand, faces masked, walking bleak forbidding mountains. The internet was populated by the corpses of Kashmiri Pandits who had been raped and killed just for being Hindu and over populated Muslim graveyards. This could not be denied. Kashmir had become just another violent mountain nation, but I was writing about a Kashmir where this would have been horrifying anathema. Mutual respect and affection was a truth so self-evident then, but now it was dismissed, albeit understandably, as the creation of a bleeding heart liberal.
 
 
Fortunately, I received my entire education in a Kashmir where you never had to worry about being politically or otherwise correct. We were and I believe still are a valley of mad men and women, revering lunacy and beatifying it. The Muslims led a full religious, economic, cultural and political life, and so did the Hindus, sometimes even praying at the same shrines, wishing each other, participating in traditional and new ways in each other’s spiritual preoccupations. I was uninhibited by experience. Besides what was my agenda? I was not planning to clamber on to a podium and point fingers, although God knows I did not have enough fingers for runaway corruption, poverty, the emasculation, derision and cultural ignorance, the seduction of violence, the quick fix promised by terrorism, to name a few culprits. There was enough of that, reams on what Kashmir had become.
 
 
But no one bothered about what it had been. My mandate was clear. In Kashmir we used to just have friends; now one spoke of Kashmiri Muslim or Hindu friends. True, when we met in the US we still shared an infatuation with the motherland, and memories of Kashmiri life and literature and music. But now, after the fall, there was a glass divide, we could see each other clearly through it; it was the same person, only one could not reach out in the same way.
 
Had everyone forgotten, I wondered? Had anyone archived our life together?
 
Perhaps I did have a tiny agenda, now that the two Kashmirs, Pandit and Muslim, seemed irreconcilable. Perhaps I tried in my own way, to heal, a difficult if not foolish task. But to quote my dearest friend, the brilliant Kashmiri poet Agha Shahid Ali, who is no more and we are so much the poorer for it:
 
‘Who is the guardian tonight of the Gates of Paradise?
My memory is again in the way of your history.’
(Country Without a Post Office, Norton, 1997)
 
Whatever happened to a Muslim friend running through the streets of Srinagar in the middle of the night, banging on our door when her father suffered a diabetic collapse, not stopping at the nearest Muslim’s house? One did not think then of houses as having a religious persuasion. Or the two old Muslim retainers in our house with power of life and death over us and our friends as well, should we transgress in the absence of our elders gone on a long visit, usually by doonga to a Hindu shrine. It was hard to imagine that if the two, long gone, came back to life again, I would not be able to entrust my infant daughters to them. They were ours and we theirs.
 
 
The memories of all Kashmiris were now smoked by the smell of gunpowder. It was not only the Muslims, who thanks to proactive governments had seen a remarkable resurgence in line with their numbers, who were saying they were disenfranchised and oppressed. Even the Hindus now started recounting their past in Kashmir as sorrowful and persecuted.
 
Can anyone believe today that when our relatives in the old city on Safa Kadal, the Seventh Bridge on the Jhelum, had a wedding, we girls would walk home to suburbia after mehndiraat or lagan in the middle of the night singing at the moon, accompanied only by a servant who was as likely to be a Muslim as a Hindu? This was in the 1960s. And now, bloodshed and rapes and dislocation! It was just convenient to paint everyone with the same large brush; hence the Muslims were all terrorists or sympathizers and the Hindus were all in cahoots with the repressive Indian government. The catechism was: if you are not with us, you must be against us.
 
Would it be possible to extricate a clear whole recollection from the pile of debris that Kashmiri life had become?
 
I threw myself into writing with intense dedication. Getting my manuscript published was a very remote possibility, so I had nothing to fear. There was no danger that anything I wrote would make any difference, I should be so lucky, I thought. There was no expectation of readership, no fear of repercussion, no circumspection; I was irrelevant to the disaster. The situation in Kashmir was not delicate or volatile any more, it was out of hand and out of luck.
 
 
The incontrovertible fact was that one way or the other when the snowflakes settled in Srinagar, the Kashmiri Pandits were gone. An entire generation of Kashmiri Muslims has now grown up without Hindus in their midst. We were different or so we thought, and had lived with Muslims; for us they just had another religion, they were not the other. When I said this to newly radicalized Pandits, I was shooed or booed. Their home, their homeland, their flora and fauna upon which their utterly irreplaceable liturgical life was based had gone. It could not be regained, literally and figuratively, and all for no fault of theirs. There was no historical precedent for this outburst of mutual spleen and they were in no mood for understanding. If and when the book is published, I thought, no Kashmiri is going to read it; the Muslims will think I am a collaborator and the Pandits will think I betrayed them.
 
I kept my eyes on the prize. Unless one knew what had existed before it was difficult to assess what was lost. There was still was no archive of the mutually respectful and loving coexistence Pandits and Muslims had in Kashmir, and the reason for this was obvious. The tsunami came upon us so suddenly, so to speak; no one had thought our life in Kashmir was endangered and had to be recorded. We thought we would go on living in Kashmir forever; no one thought spontaneous combustion by hell fire would consume an entire culture.
 
Did I hold back anything? I don’t think so. Did I avoid any issue? I don’t think so. It was not a political analysis of the situation, though like it or not the markers for my story were political events and developments.
 
However, there was one area in which I was circumspect; I had to make sure there was no invasion into the privacy of the people in the book. This presented a conundrum. I was writing a memoir, so what was I to do? My agent rescued me. She said the gamut runs from autobiography to literary memoir, with memoir somewhere in between. A literary memoir allowed me some license; I took that and ran. My grandmother is my grandmother but on that peg I hung other pictures as well, many composites.
 
 
Gratifyingly, at a time when Pandits and Muslims were mourning separately, with nothing to say to each other, letters and phone calls from Kashmiris of all stripes told me how my book had moved them. Even Pandits who thought I was too lenient in my view of Kashmiri Muslims and Muslims who openly acknowledge their desire for independence, now that Pakistan has lost much of its shine, acknowledged our ancient commonweal, now in shards.
 
I had not judged between competing truths, mainly because I could not. Being so far away physically and culturally, I recorded what I remembered. They might not agree with me on every page, but they know where I come from.
 
But is it enough for us to regain Paradise Lost?