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A River And Nine Bridges

By Raja Jaikrishan

18 July, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Words like honored guests seldom oblige. They knock at the door bolted from within. They want to get in but my hand fails to reach the bolt. Annoyed, they fly away.
They coalesce, hurtle, break and join; form a phrase or two. Then perch on fingers punching overused keys.

Between the idea and the word
there is more than we can understand.
There are ideas for which no words can be found
The thought lost in the eyes of a unicorn
appears again in a dog’s laugh. (Vladimir Holan)

The inadvertent gaps between the words stalk. I hurry to fill those and leave fresh ones. They stare at the honor (the head scarf, hijab) like security forces guarding residents raring to pelt stones.

The stressed out keys have made words out of flotsam images in the furrows of brain. They exert pressure on the cells.

A dark cloud floats over the tree. Is it chinar? How can it be? Chinar doesn’t grow in the plains. In the pool of water or blood is the building with my home upside down.
Memories weave images out of words. Or, is it the other way round?

The Jehlum divides Srinagar into two halves. It appears again and again before the mind’s eye. It does not flow like bloodied line of actual control. There are nine bridges over this river that pours into Pakistan. There are some power projects over it. Government of India aids these projects. Over the years states debts have been mounting. No government (both at the Centre and state) will ever ask for the principal or the interest. It goes with the special status of the state.

When Pakistan tried to annex Kashmir the second time in 1965my father was home .He dug a trench in the basement .I was old enough to pitch in. I have started getting nostalgic.

An embankment runs along the Jehlum from Zero Bridge to the eighth bridge. It is called Bandh. There are ghats lined with Shikaras that ferry people across the river. The boatmen seldom start a song for the current is not strong and distance is short.

Poet Aarti Lun Chandok says:

That summer I learned bandh meant closed. I turned
the grammar over in my head. From here,
the view was clear. The setting sun laid pinks
across the river and the vale. Immense
chinar trees draped their boughs in silhouette.
Then we were silhouette against dim light,
our shadows thin as shadows cast beneath
a gauze of silk or smoke—and no less true.
The Closed, I thought, and turned back from the view.

These lines refresh the curfew, hartal and deaths in police firing in the valley. The people are demanding Azadi like they did in 2008.When thespian MK Raina went to do theatre in ananntnag village, little did he know where to perform will the question he will have to face. The separatists timed their protests with the Indo-Pak talks over confidence building measures and trust deficit, surprised him as it did the state administration.

Before the war broke out I used to spend hours watching Jehlum water swirling around the wooden pillars. Feeling the intensity of currents. The bridge must have been very old. It used to swing as Shaktiman, Army vehicle used to cross it. Watching the currents from the swinging bridge was an experience.


A security forces jawan used to stand guard at the bridgehead. He used to be armed. He didn’t evoke any fear.

In those days too people had a vision
of the Land of the Pure.
They dreamt of what they called
Azadi, even then.
Yet, the police station was not
a dangerous place.( Azadi by Subhash Kak)

I never bothered to find out how different he looked than my cousins or me. For us a brown was Punjabi; black Madrasi and white English. Interestingly in our family there were all the three types. There were many such families in the valley.

Aarti shares her memories of early years in the troubled valley in Marketplace:

The clattering horse-drawn carriages, the horns,
the hawkers all fall silent in the flash,
then chaos rises, shattering paradise.
My loss is trivial: a childhood home
to which return would be a senseless risk
just to confirm that paradise was real.
True, even as a child I understood
that bitterness had bled into the earth
beneath the dahlias, leached into the roots
of zinnias, marigolds, to murky lakes
where lotus lay, flat-leaved, blooming in bright
profusions out of quiet pools…

Foreign minister has returned after a scrape from his counterpart in Islamabad .The valley is under curfew. There will be protests and talks or composite dialogue .The police will open fire with intention to kill, not scare. Media will report rape and deaths and Friday hartals. This is normal.

Anyone dare watch the Jehlum currents will risk his life. The river has lost the azure color before the Kargil war .Is it crimson or plain muddy?