1 � Fragile Fairyland

I was born in winter in Kashmir. My village in the southern district

of Anantnag sat on the wedge of a mountain range. Paddy fields,
green in early summer and golden by autumn, surrounded the
cluster of mud-and-brick houses. In winter, snow slid slowly from our
roof and fell on our lawns with a thud. My younger brother and I made
snowmen using pieces of charcoal for their eyes. And when our mother
was busy with some household chore and Grandfather was away, we
rushed to the roof, broke icicles off it, mixed them with a concoction
of milk and sugar stolen from the kitchen, and ate our homemade ice
creams. We would often slide down the slope of the hill overlooking
our neighborhood or play cricket on the frozen waters of a pond. We
risked being scolded or beaten by Grandfather, the school headmaster.
And if he passed by our winter cricket pitch, he expressed his preference
of textbooks over cricket through his dreaded shout: “You good-for-
nothings!” At his familiar bark, the cricket players would scatter in all
directions and disappear. School headmasters were feared like military
and paramilitary men are, not just by their grandchildren but by every
single child in the village.
On winter afternoons, Grandfather joined the men of our neighbor-
hood sitting at the storefronts warming themselves with kangris, our
mobile fire pots, gossiping or talking about how that year’s snowfall
would affect the mustard crop in the spring. After the muezzin gave the

3
Curfewed Night � 4

call for afternoon prayers, they left the shop fronts, fed the cattle at
home, prayed at the neighborhood mosque, and returned to the store-
fronts to talk.
Spring was the season of green mountains and meadows, blushing
snow and the expanse of yellow mustard flowers in the fields around our
village. On Radio Kashmir, they played songs in Kashmiri celebrating
the flowers in the meadows and the nightingales on willow branches.
My favorite song ended with the refrain: “And the nightingale sings to
the flowers: Our land is a garden!” When we had to harvest a crop, our
neighbors and friends would send someone to help; when it was their
turn, we would reciprocate. You never needed to make a formal request
weeks in advance. Somebody always turned up.
During the farming season, Akhoon, the mullah who refused to
believe that Neil Armstrong had landed on the moon, complained about
the thinning attendance at our neighborhood mosque. I struggled to
hold back my laughter when the villagers eager to get back to farming
coughed during the prayers to make him finish faster. He compromised
by reading shorter chapters from the Quran. Later in the day he would
turn up at the fields to collect a seasonal donation—his fee for leading
the prayers at the mosque.
In summer, after the mustard was reaped, we planted rice seedlings.
On weekdays before we left for school, my brother and I took samo-
vars of kahwa, the sweet brew of saffron, almonds, and cinnamon, to the
laborers working in our fields. On weekends, I would help carry sacks
of seedlings from the nurseries; Mother, my aunts, and other neighbor-
hood women bent in rows in the well-watered fields, planted, and sang.
Grandfather kept an eye on a farmer whose holdings bordered our
farms. We would see him walking toward the fields, and Grandfather
would turn to me: “So, whom do you see?” “I see Mongoose,” I would
reply. And we would laugh. A short, wiry man with a wrinkled face,
Mongoose specialized in things that led to arguments—diverting water
to his fields or scraping the sides of our fields with a shovel to increase
his holdings by a few inches.
Mongoose, Grandfather, and all the other villagers worried about the
 5 � Fragile Fairyland

clouds and the rainfall. Untimely rain could spoil the crop. If there were
clouds on the northern horizon, they said, there would be rain. And
around sunset, if they saw streaks of scarlet in the sky, they said, “There
has been a murder somewhere. When a man is killed, the sky turns red.”
Over more cups of kahwa, the rice stalks were threshed in autumn.
Grains were stored in wooden barns, and haystacks rose like mini-moun-
tains in the threshing fields, around which the children played hide-and-
seek. The apples in our orchards would be ready to be plucked, graded,
packed into boxes of thin willow planks, and sold to a merchant. Village
children stole apples; my brother and I would alternate as lookouts after
school. Few stole from our orchard; they were too scared of my grand-
father. “If they steal apples today, tomorrow they will rob a bank. These
boys will grow up to be like Janak Singh,” Grandfather would say. Many
years ago, Janak Singh, a man from a neighboring village, had killed a
guard while robbing a bank. He had been arrested and sent to prison for
fourteen years. Nobody had killed a man in our area before or since.
On the way home from school on those mid-eighties afternoons, I
would often stare from the bus window at Janak Singh’s thatch-roofed
house as if seeing it once again would reveal some secret. My house, a
three-floor rectangle of red bricks and varnished wood covered by a cone
of tin sheets, was just a mile up the road. I would stand on the steps and
watch the tourist buses passing by. The multicolored buses carried visi-
tors from distant cities like Bombay, Calcutta, and Delhi; and also many
angrez—the word for the British and our only word for Westerners. The
angrez were interesting; some had very long hair, and some shaved their
heads. They rode big motorbikes and at times were half naked. We waved
at them; they waved back. I had asked a neighbor who worked in a hotel,
“Why do the angrez travel and we do not?” “Because they are angrez and we
are not,” he said. But I worked it out. They had to travel to see Kashmir.
Father had bought me an American comic book dictionary, which
taught words using stories of Superman, Batman and Robin, and Flash.
I would often read it by the jaundiced light of our kerosene lantern and
think that if Flash lived in Kashmir, we could have asked him to fix our
errant power supply. I preferred reading the comics to the sums my
Curfewed Night � 6

grandfather wanted me to master. They added new stories to the collec-

tion of Persian and Kashmiri legends I heard from my grandmother and
our servant Akram—legends such as the tale of Farhad’s love for Shirin.
Akram always began the story by saying, “It is said that once upon a
time in Iran, there was a most beautiful queen called Shirin . . .” The
young sculptor Farhad was enamored of her and loitered around, seek-
ing a glance of Shirin. Over time Shirin began to develop a liking for
him. Her husband, King Khusro, was furious, and his advisers suggested
a plan to be rid of Farhad: They told Farhad that Shirin would be his if he
could dig a canal from a distant Behistun mountain to the palace. Shirin
told Farhad about his impossible task and the artist-lover set off for the
mountains with his spade. Farhad toiled alone for years, molding the
mountains, crying out the name of his beloved, sculpting Shirin’s face
on the rocks along the canal.
Farhad had survived the impossible task, and the canal was near-
ing completion. King Khusro was worried by the thought of keeping
his promise and letting his wife marry another man, a commoner. His
advisers had a plan: An old woman should be sent to the mountains to
tell Farhad that Shirin was dead. It would break Farhad’s resolve and
make him leave the canal unfinished. Farhad was toiling away when an
old woman arrived, crying, choking on her words. “Mother, why do
you cry?” he asked. “I cry for a dead beauty,” she said. “And I cry for
you, brave man!” “For me?” a surprised Farhad asked. “You have cut the
mountains, brave man! But your beloved, the beautiful Shirin, is dead!”
Farhad struck himself with his spade and fell, his last cry resounding
through the mountains: Shirin!
My family ate dinner together in our kitchen-cum–drawing room,
sitting around a long yellow sheet laid out on the floor, verses of Urdu
and Farsi poetry extolling the beauty of hospitality painted in black
along its borders. Dinner often began with Grandfather leaning against
a cushion in the center of the room and turning to my mother: “Hama,
looks like your mother will starve us today.” Grandmother would stop
puffing her hookah and say, “I was thinking of evening prayers. But any-
way, let me feed you first.” And she would amble toward her wooden
 7 � Fragile Fairyland

seat near the earthen hearth above which our tin-plated copper plates
and bowls sat on various shelves. Mother would leave aside her knitting
kit or the papers of her students and briskly move to arrange the plates
and bowls near Grandmother’s throne. I would fill a jar with water and
get the bowl for washing hands. “Call the girls,” mother would say, and I
would go upstairs to announce to my aunts that dinner was ready.
Two of my younger aunts—Tasleema and Rubeena—lived with us;
the others were married but visited often with their kids and husbands.
Tasleema, the geek, was always poring over thick chemistry and zool-
ogy texts or preparing some speech for her college debating society and
practicing her hand gestures in front of a mirror. Rubeena didn’t care
much about textbooks but had great interest in women’s magazines,
detective fiction, and Bollywood songs, which always played at a low
volume on her transistor, strategically placed by her side, to be switched
off quickly if she heard someone climbing the stairs.
We would form a circle with Grandfather at its center and eat. Almost
every time we cooked meat or chicken, he would cut a portion of his
share and place it on my plate and tell Tasleema to bring a glass of milk
for Akram, who would be visibly tired after a long day of work at the
orchards or the fields.
In the morning, we would gather around a samovar of pink salty milk
tea, and then Grandfather and Mother would leave to teach, and my aunts,
my brother, and I would leave for our colleges and schools. My school,
a crumbling wooden building in the neighboring small town of Mat-
tan, was named Lyceum after Plato’s academy. Saturdays meant quizzes,
debates, and essay competitions. Once I got the first prize—three carbon
pencils and two notebooks wrapped in pink paper—for writing about
the hazards of a nuclear war. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just names to
memorize for a quiz, as were the strange names of those bombs—Little
Boy and Fat Man. I concerned myself with learning to ride a bicycle,
playing cricket for my school team, grabbing my share of fireen (a sweet
pudding of almonds, raisins, milk, and semolina topped by poppy seeds
and served during a break in the nightlong prayers at our mosque before
Eid), or trying to stretch the predawn eating limit during Ramadan.
 Curfewed Night � 8

We woke up long before dawn during Ramadan. Grandmother and

Mother heated the food and the traditional salty tea. Grandfather read
the Quran; my younger brother, Wajahat, and I yawned till we ate. We
ate quickly because you had to stop eating after you heard the call for
prayers. Often we would take a few more bites after the azaan, the call
for prayer, peeping out of the kitchen window and turning back to say,
“You still can’t see the hair on your forearm without artificial light.” The
expression dated back to the times when there were no watches. People
determined daybreak by looking at their arms. If they could see the hair
on their forearms, they decided it was dawn and stopped eating. Despite
Japanese electronic watches, the tradition came in handy when you were
trying to gulp down some more tea or eat another morsel. Grandfather,
who ate little, would remind us of the purpose of fasting: “To understand
what hunger means and to learn to be kind to the poor.”
Toward the end of Ramadan, the talk about the meanings of fasting
would lessen, and my brother and I would grow excited about the festi-
val of Eid. On the twenty-ninth evening, everyone searched the sky with
great hope for the silver sliver of a new crescent announcing the end of
fasting. But the orange sun seemed to slide behind the jagged mountain
peaks with great reluctance, as if it were being imprisoned for the night.
All the neighborhood children would stand in the courtyard of our
house staring at the horizon as it changed from shades of red and orange
to a dark blue. We looked and shouted at each other, “You saw it?” “Not
yet.” Soon we would run up the stairs of our houses, continuing our
search from the windows; our shouts grew louder as we moved from
the first floor to the second to the third. If the crescent remained eva-
sive, my brother and I would scuttle back to the kitchen, where Grand-
father would be jumping from one radio station to the other, hoping for
reports of crescent spotting.
Every morning on Eid, Mother would prepare kahwa. My brother and I
followed Father and Grandfather to a clearing on the slope of the moun-
tain overlooking the village shaded by walnut trees, which served as
Eidgah, the ceremonial village ground for Eid prayers twice a year, and
marked as such by an arched pulpit in a western corner from where the

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 9 � Fragile Fairyland

imam led the prayers and read his sermon. We met relatives and friends
on the way. Everybody dressed in new clothes and smiled broadly. We sat
in long rows on jute mats brought from our mosque. The prayers lasted
only a few minutes, but a very long sermon followed. The preacher gave
the same sermon every year, and my friends and I would look for ways of
slipping away. Our parents, relatives, and neighbors gave us Eidyaneh, or
pocket money, to spend on toys and crackers.
Young men and adolescents from our village would hire a bus and go
to the Heaven cinema in the neighboring town, Anantnag, and watch
the latest Bollywood film. I wasn’t allowed to join them, but after they
returned, I was riveted by their detailed retelling of the movie. I would
populate their stories with the faces from movie posters. The canvases,
covered in bright reds, yellows, greens, and browns, hung from electric
poles by the roadside or were ferried around the village once a week on
a tonga, a horse carriage, while an announcer standing beside the tonga
wallah, the carriage driver, dramatically proclaimed the release of a new
movie from a megaphone. Every poster was a collage of hypertheatri-
cal expressions: an angry hero in a green shirt and blue trousers, with a
pistol in hand and a rivulet of blood dripping from his face; a woman in
a red sari tied to a pole with thick ropes, her locks falling over her ago-
nized face; the luxuriously mustached villain in a golden suit, smoking a
pipe or smiling a treacherous smile.
I would spend most evenings doing my homework. One evening
I was distracted by the strains of a Bollywood song coming from our
neighbor’s house. I hunched over my notebooks, but the music made my
body restless, eager to break away. I tried to focus on the sums, but the
answers kept going wrong. Grandfather slapped me and left the room.
Every schoolboy got a few canings and slaps for not doing the home-
work properly. Grandfather tried to ensure that no music was played
in our house; anything that he considered un-Islamic was forbidden.
Strict interpretations of Islam do consider music—except at a wedding—
un-Islamic. Mohammed Iqbal, the great Urdu poet and philosopher of
Kashmiri ancestry who had studied philosophy in Munich, was influ-
enced by Nietzsche, and propagated the ideal of superman-like Muslim
Curfewed Night � 10

youth, was welcome. Bollywood actresses dancing around trees, singing

songs of love and longing, could lead to bad grades and worse: a weak-
ened faith. Once I did not come first in class and hid under my father’s
bed to escape a beating. “Spare the rod and spoil the child,” Grandfather
loved to say. He spent about two hours every evening giving me lessons,
checking my notebooks, smiling if I lived up to his expectations, scold-
ing me if I failed. He wanted me to be like his best student: my father.

In the late-1960s, Grandfather was teaching in a high school in a neigh-

boring village when he noticed an eighth-grade student. Ahmad was the
brightest in the school and also one of the poorest—an orphan being
raised by his cousins, who wore ill-fitting hand-me-downs and wore
torn bathroom slippers instead of shoes. Grandfather felt that with a
good education and family support, Ahmad could go far, and he would
often mention him to my grandmother. “Go, talk to his family. We can
support him,” she told her young husband. And thus my grandfather
became a mentor and a de facto father to young Ahmad.
Ahmad taught at a private school while in college; after graduation
he got a high school teacher’s job, like my grandfather. Then some of my
grandfather’s friends suggested that he should marry Ahmad to his eldest
daughter, Hameeda, who also had graduated from college and become a
teacher. Ahmad and Hameeda had known each other since school. They
agreed to the proposal and were married. A year later, Ahmad qualified
for the competitive selection test for the Kashmir civil service and was
appointed a magistrate. And then I was born, their first son, in the winter
of 1977. Father’s postings in various towns across Kashmir kept him away
most of the time.
On most Saturday evenings throughout my childhood in the mid-
eighties, a blue Willys jeep would drive to my village in southern Kash-
mir. It would follow the black ribbonlike road dividing vast expanses of
paddy and mustard fields in a small valley guarded by the mighty Hima-
layas. Two- and three-floor mud-and-brick houses with tin and thatch
roofs faced the road. Most were naked brick, and though a few were
 11 � Fragile Fairyland

brightly painted, dust and time had colored their rough timber windows
and doors a deep brown. A ground-level room in every third house had
been converted into a shop. Villagers sat in the wooden storefronts
gossiping, talking politics and cricket, waving at the jeep. A not-so-tall
man in his early thirties, almost always wearing a suit, a matching tie,
and brown Bata shoes, would raise his right hand in greeting. He had
deep brown eyes, a straight nose, plump pink cheeks, and the begin-
nings of a belly. The Willys would slowly come to a halt in a village
square, not far from a blue-and-green milestone that gave the name of
our village: seer, 0 kilometers.
Father would step out of the jeep and walk toward us, past a gro-
cery store and a pharmacy. People at the storefronts would say, “Peer
Sahib is here.” They would rise from their seats, and a chorus of greet-
ings and hands would welcome him home. The first hand Father shook
was that of my grandfather, who would blush with pride. I would run
toward Father and grab the piles of books, newspapers, and office files
he carried. He would sit in his usual corner in our drawing room, facing
the road. I would run to the baker next to the pharmacy and get fresh
bread. Mother would bring a boiling samovar of noon chai, the salty pink-
ish Kashmiri tea.

Father would tell me stories from the papers and encourage me to read
the newsmagazines, answering my questions over more cups of tea. In
one of those sessions, he told me that he wanted me to join the Indian
civil service when I grew up. It had a professional exam tougher than
that of the provincial Kashmir civil service, which led to higher posi-
tions in the bureaucracy than my father’s. “He didn’t have the resources
and time that you will have,” Mother said. Father began preparing me,
bringing me children’s books about politics, history, and English litera-
ture, books such as Tales from Charles and Mary Lamb’s Shakespeare or One Hun-
dred Great Lives. We would read them together every time Father came
home. One of his heroes was Abraham Lincoln, and he talked a lot about
how Lincoln read by candlelight and, through his hard work and hon-
Curfewed Night � 12

esty, became the president of America. In a few years we had made the
transition to spending Sundays reading Othello, Hamlet, and The Merchant of
Venice.
Despite the apparent tranquillity of our lives, I was beginning to get
a vague sense of the troubled politics of Kashmir. In 1986 India and Paki-
stan were playing each other in the finals of a cricket tournament in the
United Arab Emirates. On the day of the match, the atmosphere on the
bus I took home from school was charged. Men, women, and children—
some standing in the aisle and others on seats—huddled around radios,
straining to catch every word of the commentary. Pakistan was chasing
a difficult score set by India, and the number of balls they could play was
running out fast. I stood in a corner behind the driver’s seat and watched
the driver push harder on the accelerator and continually take a hand off
the wheel to raise the volume of the transistor on the dashboard. Every-
body wanted to get home for the final phase of the match. Every time
Javed Miandad, the Pakistani batsman, missed a ball, the bus erupted in
a chorus of swearing. Every time he hit the ball and scored a run, we let
out loud exclamations of joy.
The bus stopped in the tiny market near my house. Excited crowds had
gathered at the pharmacy and the butcher’s shop. The match was about
to end. Abu, the old butcher, was biting his lips. I rushed to drop my
school bag at home. In our drawing room, my grandfather, my aunts, and
my mother sat in a circle around the radio. Grandmother faced Mecca on
a prayer mat, seeking divine help for the Pakistani team. I dashed outside
and heard the radio commentator say, “Pakistan needs three runs on one
ball to win this match. Chetan Sharma will be bowling to Javed Miandad
from the pavilion end of the stadium.” The crowd was silent, tense. Abu’s
hands fell at his sides. “There is no chance. Just no chance!” He seized
his radio and smashed it on the road. We watched the pieces scatter,
and then we gathered around the pharmacist’s radio. Chetan Sharma, the
Indian bowler, was about to bowl the last deciding ball of the match to
the Pakistani batsman, Miandad. The commentator told us that Miandad
was scanning the field, deciding where to hit the ball when it reached
him. Then he bowed west toward Mecca in prayer. He rose from the
 13 � Fragile Fairyland

ground and faced Sharma, who was running toward the wickets. Sharma
was close to the wickets, and a tense Miandad faced him. The stadium
was silent. Sharma threw the ball. It was a full toss. Miandad swung his
bat. Almost everyone stepped back and waited. Silence. Amin pushed
his shirtsleeves up to the elbows; Abu continued biting his lips; and I
boxed my left palm with my right fist. The commentator shouted, “It is a
six! Pakistan has won the match. They have scored three more runs than
required.” People hugged, jumped around, and shouted over the din of
the celebratory firecrackers.
Kashmir was the largest of the approximately five hundred princely
states under British sovereignty as of 1947. Kashmir was predominantly
Muslim but ruled by a Hindu maharaja, Hari Singh; the popular leader,
Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, preferred India to Pakistan and an inde-
pendent Kashmir to both. When India was violently partitioned in 1947,
both Singh and Sheikh Abdullah sought time before deciding Kashmir’s
fate. In October 1947, however, tribesmen from the northwest frontier
province of Pakistan, supported by the Pakistani army, invaded Kashmir,
forcing their hand. Singh decided to join India, and Sheikh Abdullah,
who was a friend of the new Indian prime minister, Nehru, supported
him. In January 1949 the fighting stopped after the UN intervened. The
UN endorsed a plebiscite for Kashmiris to determine which country
they wanted to belong to, and created a cease-fire line. The line still
divides Kashmir into Pakistan-controlled and India-controlled parts,
and it is now known as the Line of Control (LoC).

The agreement of accession that Hari Singh signed with India in Octo-
ber 1947 gave Kashmir great autonomy. India controlled only defense,
foreign affairs, and telecommunications. Kashmir had its own constitu-
tion and flag; the heads of its local government were called the president
and the prime minister. Gradually, this autonomy disappeared. In 1953
India jailed Sheikh Abdullah, who was then Kashmir’s prime minister,
after he implemented a radical land reform and gave a speech suggest-
ing the possibility of an independent Kashmir. In the following decades,
Curfewed Night � 14

India installed puppet rulers, eroded the legal status of Kashmiri auton-
omy, and ignored the democratic rights of the Kashmiris. Sheikh Abdul-
lah remained in jail for around seventeen years; when he was released,
he signed a compromise with the Indian government in which he gave
up the demand for the plebiscite that the UN had recommended. He
spent the remaining years of his life in power, and the period (also of my
childhood) was relatively peaceful. In 1987, five years after his death, the
Indian government rigged state elections, arresting opposition candi-
dates and terrorizing their supporters.
In the summer of 1988, a year after the troubled elections—when I
was eleven—Father sent me to a government-run subsidized boarding
school in Aishmuqam, a small town five miles from my village. I was
bad at sports and spent long happy hours in the library reading Steven-
son, Dickens, Kipling, and Defoe. I saw less and less of Father, as he had
been transferred to Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital. But when we were
home together, we took our usual places, and Father taught me poetry.
He would recite a few verses from a poem and say, “If you explain the
meaning, you will get two rupees.” It was a lot of pocket money, and I
tried hard.
In December 1989 I returned home for my winter holidays, hop-
ing to join Father for the winter vacations in Srinagar. A week later, a
group of armed young Kashmiris, led by a twenty-one-year-old named
Yasin Malik, kidnapped the daughter of the federal Indian home minis-
ter. Malik and his comrades demanded the release of their jailed friends.
After negotiations, the Indian government gave in. People cheered for
the young guerrillas.
Yasin Malik, who led the militants of the Jammu and Kashmir Lib-
eration Front (JKLF), had been one of the polling agents arrested and
tortured after the rigged elections of 1987. The bottled-up resent-
ment against Indian rule and the treatment of Kashmiris erupted like
a volcano. The young guerrillas led by Malik and his friends, challeng-
ing India, were seen as heroes—most of them had received training in
Pakistani camps between early 1988 and late 1989, and they had in turn
secretly trained many more within Kashmir. In the next two months,
 15 � Fragile Fairyland

the Indian government responded ruthlessly. Hundreds were killed and

arrested after Indian troops opened fire on pro-independence Kashmiri
protesters. It was January 1990. I was thirteen.

The war of my adolescence had started. Today I fail to remember the

beginnings. I fail to remember who told me about aazadi, or freedom,
who told me about militants, who told me it had begun. I fail to remem-
ber the date, the name, the place, the image that announced the war—a
war that continues still. Time and again I look back and try to cull from
memory the moment that was to change everything I had been and
would be.
The night of January 20, 1990, was long and sad. Before dinner, my
family gathered as usual around the radio for the evening news on BBC
World Service. Two days earlier, Jagmohan, an Indian bureaucrat infa-
mous for his hatred of Muslims, had been appointed the governor of
Jammu and Kashmir. He gave orders to crush the incipient rebellion.
Throughout the night of January 19, Indian paramilitary men slammed
doors in Srinagar and dragged out young men. By morning hundreds
had been arrested; curfew was imposed. Kashmiris poured out onto the
streets in thousands and shouted slogans of freedom from India.
One protest began from a southern Srinagar area where my parents
now live, passed the city center, Lal Chowk, and marched through the
nearby Maisuma district toward the shrine of a revered Sufi saint a few
miles ahead. Protesters were crossing the dilapidated wooden Gawkadal
Bridge in Maisuma when the Indian paramilitary, the Central Reserve
Police Force, opened fire. More than fifty people were killed. It was the
first massacre in the Kashmir valley. As the news sank in, we all wept.
The massacre had occurred a few hundred meters from my father’s
office. Mother was certain he would be safe. “He wouldn’t have gone to
work on a tense day like that. He will be fine,” she said. “And he would
never go near a procession,” Grandfather added. But there was no way to
get the same assurance from Father by hearing his voice for a few min-
utes: There were no phones in our village. Grandfather walked out of
Curfewed Night � 16

the room onto the lawn; we followed him. Our neighbors had come out
as well. We looked at one another. Nobody said much. Later that night I
lay in my bed imagining the massacre in Srinagar.
Kashmiri mornings are full of activity. I would wake up to the banging
of utensils in the kitchen; the sounds of chickens running around in the
courtyard after Grandmother let them out of their coop; one or another
of our neighbors herding their cattle out to graze on the mountainside;
the brisk footfalls and chatter of village women passing by on their way
back from the forest, carrying bundles of fir and pine branches they’d
gathered for timber; the repeated honking of the first bus leaving the vil-
lage calling passengers; the newsreader’s words in a flat monotone float-
ing from our black Phillips radio on a windowsill in the kitchen.
The village was unusually silent that morning. Hasan, the neighbor-
hood baker who always made wisecracks as we waited for him to bake
fresh lawasa, looked sullen as he slapped round loaves of dough with
ferocity. He stared at the flames leaping out of the oven, turned toward
me, and said, “Those murderers will burn in a fire far brighter than this. I
cried when I heard it on the radio last night.”
The shops did not open, and the buses did not leave the village. There
was no way to reach Father. Like most people in Kashmir, we relied on
the public phone at the district post office in the nearby town of Anant-
nag. But the post office would be closed because of the protests. Father
had called a friend in Anantnag, who visited us the next day with the
news of his safety. Villagers stood around repeating how they’d heard
the news on the radio. I felt anger spread in me. A young man raised a
slogan: hum kya chahte? aazadi! (We want? Freedom!) He repeated, and
we repeated after him: We want? Freedom!
The protest gathered momentum. Voices that were reluctant and low
in the beginning became firm and loud. The crowd began a slow but spir-
ited march along the main street of the village. Old and young women
appeared at the windows of the houses. New chants were created and
improvised. A young man raised an arm toward a group of women
watching the procession from a communal tap and shouted, “Our moth-
ers demand!” The crowd responded: Aazadi! He repeated: “Our sisters
 17 � Fragile Fairyland

demand!” The crowd: Aazadi! A rush of adrenaline shot through me, and
I marched ahead of my friends and joined the leaders of the procession.
Somebody who was carrying his young son on his shoulders shouted:
“Our children demand!” Aazadi!
By February 1990 Kashmir was in the midst of a full-blown rebellion
against India. Every evening we heard the news of more protests and
deaths on the BBC World Service radio. Protests followed killings, and
killings followed protests. News came from Srinagar that hundreds of
thousands of people had marched to pray for independence at the shrine
of the patron saint of Kashmir, Nooruddin Rishi, in a town an hour away
from Srinagar. All over Kashmir, similar marches to the shrines of Sufi
saints were launched. Another day I joined a procession to the shrine of a
much-revered Sufi saint, Zain Shah Sahib, at Aishmuqam, near my school.
A few young men led us wearing white cotton shrouds. They seemed
to be in a trance, whirling like dervishes, singing pro-independence
songs. I walked behind them, repeating their words in complete wonder.
Men, women, and children stood on the sidewalks, offering food and
beverages and showering flower petals and shireen—round white balls of
boiled sugar and rice—on us, a practice held in shrines and at wedding
ceremonies.
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 chem-
ist 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
Curfewed Night � 18

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. Mili-
tary 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 jour-
ney 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 min-
utes 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 col-
leagues, a group of middle-aged bureaucrats in suits and neckties carry-
ing office files. They crossed the military check post outside their office
gate and began walking toward Lal Chowk to catch buses home. Sud-
denly, the shopkeepers by the road jumped from their counters, pulled
down the shutters, and began to run. Rapid bursts of gunfire resounded
 19 � Fragile Fairyland

in the alleys behind the office; louder explosions came from Lal Chowk.
As a burning passenger bus rushed down the street, Father and his col-
leagues 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 acro-
nyms: 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 Rus-
sian tanks, undertaken espionage missions within Russia, and even res-
cued 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
Curfewed Night � 20

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. Morn-
ing to evening, the soldiers patrolled the road through our village. They
walked in long lines on both sides of the road in uniforms and bullet-
proof 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 mor-
tar guns to burn houses wherever they came under attack from the mili-
tants. 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 for-
 21 � Fragile Fairyland

tified 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 shop-
keeper had bought a big bundle of identity cards from a dealer in the
nearby town of Anantnag. He boasted that the identity cards he sold
worked best with soldiers. They said indian identity card and had an
impression of the Indian emblem: a pillar with four lions on four sides,
a wheel, and a pair of oxen on its base. I got my identity card signed and
stamped by the local magistrate and promptly pulled it out whenever I
was stopped by soldiers on the street or was walking past one of their
numerous check posts. It became a part of me.
In our mosque, after prayers and before the recitation of darood—
a song praising the Prophet Muhammad—people made spontaneous
speeches and shouted slogans of aazadi. I specifically asked God to give
us freedom by the next year. But there were also moments of frivol-
ity. One day a young man from our village who worked in Srinagar gave
a speech at the mosque. He grabbed the microphone and shouted in
Arabic, “Kabiran kabira!” The slogan meant “Who is the greatest?” But no
one understood. None of us spoke Arabic. He shouted again, and again
there was silence—then the adolescents in the last row, the backbench-
ers of faith, began to laugh. Embarrassed, the young man explained that
in reply to the slogan we were supposed to shout, “Allah-o-Akbar!” (God is
great). He shouted again, “Kabiran kabira!” He was answered with a hesi-
tant, awkward “Allah-o-Akbar.” For about a year after, we teased him.