The burning colours of Autumn

With burning colours is how we welcome the winters. The word "burning" does identify with the current scenario which has been so since a long time now, ever since I can remember.

Burning on the outside of course

And burning on the inside too

Winters seem to be dreary, removing all signs of life, sucking the spirit out of the air. Still the beauty of autumn is enough to entrance one and dismiss from his mind the advancing end of life.

A little fire

A little more

A little red

A little more

Leaves you dead, just like before

I have always characterized the season by red and brown chinar leaves, a sight which used to be very common in Autumns at my school. I remember how I used to love playing with the dead, fallen leaves, knowing little what it meant, knowing little of the lifelessness that lurked.

It all begins with a little change. The air is different, the end of something and the beginning of the other thing is sensed.

A little change in colour

A little more

A little stranger air

A little more

A little sleep

A little more

Little by little is how silence appears - the soul departs

It amazes me how I am writing about something and how it relates to a greater something else. A pleasure for those who can put the pieces together and a little dissatisfaction for those who fail to do so.

The entire scene of burning and dying is an exhibition of how life ceases to exist here. Be

it the Chinars in my school or the Kashmir on the streets.

Its remarkable to notice, when one starts to write about Kashmir, no matter what aspect he decides to choose he unintentionally ends up pointing out the most distressing one and the one most obvious to him. The one I have learned to never disunite from the very image I hold of the place. Its the pain deep inside which keeps reminding you that you are alive, still alive.

As this season goes by, the count of the leaves shed rising, the number of Kashmiri lives lost at the hands of those who we despise grows at a faster rate, much faster. This makes it seem that it is much of an uncomplicated and facile task for those who effortlessly bring an end, an end to lives not considered of any value and an end to the pain they have faced all these years, leaving Kashmir again in immeasurable but familiar anguish.

Agha Shahid Ali wrote,

"A Brigadier says, the boys of Kashmir break so easily, we make their bodies sing, on the rack, till no song is left to sing"

" I will die, in autumn, in Kashmir,

and the shadowed routine of each vein

will almost be news, the blood censored,

for the Saffron Sun and the Times of Rain. "

-Agha Shahid Ali

I lay here in rest/unrest, unmarked

They know not where I am,

They keep searching for me.

I try to tell them I lay here, beneath my own soil, with many more like me,

They cannot hear.

“At 38 places visited in north Kashmir, there were 2,156 unidentified dead bodies buried in unmarked graves,” the inquiry report published by the Indian government’s Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission (J&KSHRC) said.

Yet another revelation which would leave a common Kashmiri thinking, wondering if it is true. It all seems to be an illusive situation, which one would never believe. Those who hear are left gasping, they can’t digest it.

But we, here in Kashmir, have learnt to believe everything, however inhuman it may sound.

We have been subdued when we tried to unite

We have been quietened when we tried to speak

We are used to helpless situations

We are used to domination

Thinking of it, one goes through immeasurable torment, yet we have learnt to live with this never healing wound.

Although accustomed to all the oppression and prejudice we still demand justice.

‘Justice’ is something I would never associate with Kashmir. Growing up here, I never heard of it. I could only feel its absence.

When I die, they’ll carry me on their shoulders draped in a white shroud.

Wailing, screaming, my mother and sisters, calling after me, wanting me to come back.

They’ll bury me and pray, pray to Allah for granting me Jannah and forgive all my sins.

I was killed at their hands, murdered by those who rule over me in my own land.

I contemplate and fail to understand why, I have been wasted.

There is no one to carry me, no one to cry.

I am deprived of my last rites. No prayers for me.

They hide me along with the others, there are too many.

Back home my mother keeps waiting, anticipating my return.

She wouldn’t believe I have died. She’s certain I still exist,

I do, but I might not be able to prove it to her.

She awaits her ‘disappeared’ son like so many others,

He has already reached his final abode.

He lies there in rest/unrest,

Hoping for justice, something which he never heard of in his land.

Ignoring voices in Kashmir

“We’re inside the fire, looking for the dark,”

one card lying on the

street says, “I want

to be he who pours

blood. To soak your hands.

Or I’ll leave mine in

the cold till the rain

is ink, and my

fingers, at the edge of pain,

are seals all night

to cancel the stamps.”

The mad guide! The

lost speak like this. They haunt

a country when it is ash.

“Everything is finished, nothing remains.”

I must force silence

to be a mirror

to see his voice

again for directions.

Fire runs in waves.

Should I cross that river?

Each post office is boarded up. Who will deliver

parchment cut in paisleys, my news to prisons?

Only silence can now trace my letters

to him. Or in a dead office the dark panes.

Excerpts

from “A Country

Without A Post Office” by Agha Shahid Ali

Recommended: Ignoring voices in Kashmir | ikners.com

The long way home

The summer of 2011 has been kind to Kashmir. It has spared the Valley the violence that led to the deaths of over a hundred young stone-pelters last summer. The mood in the Valley is turning: tourists are back, the army has largely retreated to its barracks and the necklace of stalls that rings the banks of Dal Lake does brisk business late into the evening. The number of tourists this year (7,54,588) has for the first time surpassed the number in 1988 (7,22,035) – the year before militancy hijacked the Valley.

Exactly seven years ago, in August 2004, on my way to interview the then chief minister Mufti Mohammad Sayeed at his heavily guarded Srinagar residence, the roads were deser-ted except for grim-faced armymen with assault rifles. Much has changed for the better in the Valley since. Many shops in Srinagar’s Lal Chowk, shuttered last summer, are now open till midnight. And yet serious problems continue to blight the Valley. The first, much debated, is granting greater autonomy to Kashmir within the elastic boundaries of the Indian Constitution. The second, much ignored, is the question of Kashmir’s exiled Pandits.

Continued at:

The long way home « THE LAWFILE

Kashmir through their eyes

For Indians and Pakistanis, Kashmir is much more than a strategically important valley: it is the crystallisation of a conflict defined by the division of a nation. In the non-Kashmiri imagination, the valley is a battleground not just for the two countries themselves, but for the very ideologies that led to the partition of the subcontinent over 60 years ago.

Al Jazeera spoke with citizens on both sides of the border, and abroad, to try and understand just what place Kashmir has in their collective imaginations.

We asked them four questions:

Q1. What does Kashmir mean to you as an Indian/Pakistani?
Q2. What images does the word ‘Kashmir’ evoke for you?
Q3. Do you think that Pakistan or India have a ‘right’ to Kashmir?
Q4. Where does the Kashmiris’ will figure in your conception of a solution to the dispute?

Continued at :

Kashmir | ikners.com

My story begins

They call it paradise, we call it home. And nothing about home ever seems special until time makes you realize what you have or in much unfortunate cases what you had. Is it not said that we don’t realize the worth of something until we lose it?

Only those who have gone through bad times know how to value the happy little things that happen in life.

Being born in Kashmir, I never knew how special a thing my origin was.

Beautiful EVERYTHING – We have mountains, we have rivers, we have the freshest of airs, we have the loveliest of weathers, we have a rich culture; a fairytale backdrop.

But how can there be a happy ending without all the characters fighting for happiness, love, and freedom? How can we have something without earning it?

Growing up I never knew that we were fighting a war – a war for our own existence. I didn’t know that someday I too would be fighting, fighting for freedom, the freedom to live.

While in Delhi on one of those common trips that we Kashmiris make to Indian cities in winter, I realized that there was something very different about this place. It didn’t have those men in uniform at every corner that I was accustomed to see at home. It made me feel special, like when there is something that you have and the other person doesn’t, it was that moment of joy and pride. Something to show off. I was a happy child oblivious to the fact that they were not there for us, but to watch us because prisoners must have watchers so that they may not dare to dream again. Dream of free existence.

It was dark, it had been so ever since.

But what does one who has never known light know what dark is?

And then the silence was betrayed, the word came out, out loud:

We are not who we are,

Our existence holds a lot more,

Something about which we were never told,

Painful times our fathers never dared to talk about.

But a word once uttered, can never be taken back,

A truth once told can’t be denied.

Knowledge is not of much use until we put it into use. We knew of the prejudiced life we were living but would we do something about it?

In this world there are all kinds of people. There are those who wouldn’t fight, those who would fight to win, those who would fight to prove the other side wrong and those who would fight because they knew that they were being wronged; they would fight for justice.

Allah states, “O My slaves, I have forbidden injustice for Myself and forbade it also for you. So avoid being unjust to one another.” (Saheeh Muslim)