The crowd itself was a human jumble. The contractor who carried whiskey in a petrol can and the uptight lawyer who waited for passersby to greet him, the tailor who entertained the idle youth in his shop with tall stories while prodding away on his sewing machine and the chemist who would fall asleep behind the counter, the old fox who bragged of his connections with congressional politicians in Delhi and the unemployed graduate who had appointed himself the English-language commentator for the village cricket team’s matches, the Salafi revivalist who sold plastic shoes and the Communist basket weaver with Stalin mustache all marched together, their voices joining in a resounding cry for freedom. Amid the collision of bodies, the holding of hands, the interlocking of eyes in affirmation and confirmation, the merging of a thousand voices, I had ceased to be a shy, bookish boy hunched by the expectations of my family. I wasn’t scared of being scolded anymore; I felt a part of something much bigger. I let myself go fly with the crowd. Aazadi! Throughout the winter, almost every Kashmiri man was a Farhad, ready to mold the mountains for his Shirin: freedom!
WAR TILL VICTORY was graffitied everywhere in Kashmir; it was painted alongside another slogan: SELF-DETERMINATION IS OUR BIRTHRIGHT! The Indian government seemed to have deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to crush the rebellion. Almost every day the soldiers patrolled our village in a mixture of aggression and nervousness, their fingers close to the triggers of their automatic and semiautomatic machine guns. Military and paramilitary camps sprouted up in almost every small town and village.
It became harder for Father to visit home on weekends. He stopped traveling in his official vehicle, as that made him conspicuous. The journey from his office in Srinagar to our village, once a lovely two-hour ride, had become a risky, life-threatening affair. Almost every time he came home, it took him around five hours. On a lucky day, his bus would be stopped only every fifteen minutes, and at each military check post, he and other passengers would be made to stand in a queue, holding an identity card and anything else they carried. After a body search, Father would walk half a mile from the check post and wait in another queue for the bus to arrive. On various other days, he barely escaped getting killed.
Father worked in a colonial castlelike office compound a few minutes from the city center, Lal Chowk, and the adjacent Maisuma area, the home of JKLF commander Yasin Malik. Gun battles between the JKLF guerrillas and the Indian soldiers, and hand grenades exploding near the paramilitary bunkers and patrols, were becoming a routine near Father’s office.
One afternoon he stepped out of his office compound with a few colleagues, a group of middle-aged bureaucrats in suits and neckties carrying office files. They crossed the military check post outside their office gate and began walking toward Lal Chowk to catch buses home. Suddenly, the shopkeepers by the road jumped from their counters, pulled down the shutters, and began to run. Rapid bursts of gunfire resounded in the alleys behind the office; louder explosions came from Lal Chowk. As a burning passenger bus rushed down the street, Father and his colleagues stood in a huddle close to the massive stone-and-brick pillars of the office gate, waiting for the gunfire to stop.
A stern bark from the road startled them. “Hands up!” A group of angry Indian paramilitaries stood across the narrow road, their guns raised at Father’s group. Some policemen guarding the office compound stepped forward and shouted at the soldiers, “Don’t shoot! They are government officers! They work here!”
A week later, Father and a friend of his were walking toward Lal Chowk after work when a grenade exploded across the street. They wanted to rush back to the office, but heavy gunfire seemed to come from all directions. Father and his friend ran toward a roadside tea stall. His friend slipped and fell into a manhole. Father dragged him out, and they hid in the tea shop, under wooden tables. They lay on the dusty, mud floor for a long time.
That winter began my political education. It took the form of acronyms: JKLF (Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front), JKSLF (Jammu and Kashmir Students Liberation Front), BSF (Border Security Force), CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force). I learned new phrases: frisking, crackdown, bunker, search, identity card, arrest, and torture. That winter, too, busloads of Kashmiri youth went to border towns and crossed over to Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir for arms training. They returned as militants carrying Kalashnikovs, hand grenades, light machine guns, and rocket launchers issued by Pakistan.
My friends were talking about a novel, Pahadoon Ka Beta, the story of a young Afghan boy who fought the Russians. I wanted to read it and found a copy with a cousin toward the end of my winter vacation. It was a slim paperback, with a green cover featuring a boy with a gun. It read like a Frederick Forsyth thriller. Ali, its young protagonist, was both James Bond and Rambo. He seemed to have destroyed hundreds of Russian tanks, undertaken espionage missions within Russia, and even rescued his father from a Russian prison. Its charm and fame seemed to lie in its obvious romanticizing of a guerrilla fighter at a time when almost every young person in Kashmir wanted to either be a guerrilla fighter or get to know one.
And there was a movie everybody wanted to watch: Arab-American filmmaker Mustafa Akkad’s Lion of the Desert. Father had bought a black-and-white television set, but we didn’t have a video cassette player. One of our neighbors had one, and his son promised to let me watch Lion of the Desert if I could get a copy of the film. I couldn’t find it. But one day I heard the men sitting at a shop front near my house talk about it. Rashid, a bus driver who often ferried passengers from Anantnag to Srinagar, was talking about having seen Lion of the Desert many years ago. He had watched it at the Regal Talkies in Lal Chowk. He narrated the story of Omar Mukhtar, an aging Libyan tribal chief who fought the occupying Italian army of Mussolini till he was arrested and hanged. “He was fair and tall and had a short white beard,” Rashid described Mukhtar, played by Anthony Quinn. “After the Italians arrest him, the Italian commander asks him to organize the surrender of his men. Omar Mukhtar is old and in chains but he tells the Italian general that they will never surrender, that the Italians have no right to be in Libya, that no nation has a right to occupy another nation. The Italians hang Omar Mukhtar.”
Those animated conversations at the shop fronts would come to a sudden halt every time we saw a column of soldiers or a convoy of trucks and armored cars pass by. The Indian government seemed to have deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to crush the rebellion. Morning to evening, the soldiers patrolled the road through our village. They walked in long lines on both sides of the road in uniforms and bulletproof helmets, their fingers close to their triggers. Some of them carried big cylindrical guns that fired mortars. Every time we saw a soldier with a mortar gun, someone would talk about how the soldiers used the mortar guns to burn houses wherever they came under attack from the militants. Rashid talked about a town called Handwara, near the border, that was burned by Indian troops. “They throw gunpowder over the houses and then fire mortars, and an entire village is burned in an hour.”
Military and paramilitary camps sprouted up in almost every small town and village. A camp was set up near my village, too: Sandbags fortified its windows and doors, coils of barbed wire formed a boundary around the camp, empty liquor bottles hung from the barbed wire, and grim-looking soldiers who stood in the sandbag bunkers along the fence held on to their machine guns. Every pedestrian and automobile had to stop a hundred meters from the camp; people had to raise their hands and walk in a queue to a bunker, where a soldier frisked them and checked identity cards. No farmer, shopkeeper, or artisan had official papers except for maybe a ration card with his address and the names of family members written on it. Only the few men like my father or grandfather who worked for the local government had state identification cards.
My school was closed for the winter holidays till March. I bought an identity card from our neighborhood stationery store. The shopkeeper had bought a big bundle of identity cards from a dealer in the nearby town of Anantnag. He boasted that