Imagine a life where the most basic tasks you undertake are ruled by fear. Imagine if the simplest of chores you need to complete make you anxious – as if your life hangs on the line.
Similar emotions are felt by those living in Srinagar and the parts illegally occupied by India. Farah Bashir – previously serving as a photojournalist and now a communications consultant – was born and raised in Kashmir. She has penned her qualms, uncertainties, anxiety and dismay with which she lived in Kashmir and survived to share the tale with the world. Her book, Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir narrates her life that the citizens elsewhere do not know about. The way she writes the dedication message sends a chill down the readers’ spine even before they begin reading her memoirs. She writes, “For the children of Kashmir, who know nothing of a normal childhood.”
Bashir has divided the book into six sections: Evening, Night, Early Hours, Dawn, Morning, Afterlife. She has added 35 memoirs – each discussing a different activity tucked within fear and anxiety that remains constant. She uses these lines to begin the first memoir, “It was a chilly December evening in 1994, which had the stillness of snow without any snow.” She further wrote, “…for the first time in my life, I felt grateful for the dusk-to-dawn curfew. My grandmother, Bobeh, had died late that afternoon. It was because of the curfew that I could spend an extra night with her around.”
Bashir’s memories are written from the heart. Each sentence resonates her emotional distress that she experienced while living in a war zone. She talks about her grandmother’s life and times in many of these memoirs – highlighting her life as she remembered it to be.
Bashir takes readers on a journey – at times heartbreaking and at times distressing – as she narrates her life in Kashmir. Her short essays share how the simplest of tasks required her to plan out each and remain cautious of how the circumstance might change in the city by the powers that be.
Bashir’s memoirs are truthful and direct. They resonate with the feelings of anxiety and distress she lived with. Bashir shares the lives of her family including her parents, cousins and the distant relatives. She also discusses the griefs she and her friends faced when they lost a loved one in the conflict zone. She narrates how he and her friends got to know about the killing of Mirwaiz Maulvi Mohammad Farooq, who was the father of Bashir’s batch mate – Rabia.
Through her ordeals, Bashir gives us the lens to see how the people she knew and who were strangers lived and are living under continuous surveillance, communication blackout and curfew. Bashir explains each chapter with a certain thought – an experience only she can feel and comprehend – while giving the readers a glimpse of how it impacted those around her. The only and the most important asset the Kashmiri people have with them is family. It is in these relationships they find glimpses of hope, happiness, and courage. Bashir dwells on such family-oriented moments in her memories beginning from her grandmother. Rumours of Spring is a bold narrative written with modesty, indeed.
The writer is an independent researcher, author and columnist. He can be reached at [email protected] and Tweets at @omariftikhar