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The Boys Of Srinagar

By Kavita Pai

28 June, 2010
Countercurrents.org

The bus load of passengers mostly hailing from Jammu, a few from Delhi, was excited. Finally after four days at the Kheer Bhawani yatra they were entering the city many of them had last seen twenty, twenty one years ago. The agenda for the day was a visit to the Zeshtha Devi shrine off the Dal and then directly, Jammu – that at least was the tour operator’s plan. But they were going to have none of it.

Even before reaching the shrine they had begun pleading with the bus driver and conductor to stop over ‘just for five minutes’ at Shalimar. At Nishat. At the Mughal Garden.
The driver was unrelenting – he had orders to drive to Zeshtha Devi without stopping anywhere en route. The passengers grumbled – he had promised them a tour of the spots – Sonamarg, Gulmarg, Srinagar. “Hamare liye nahi, hamare bachchon ke liye, yeh pehli baar Kashmir aaye hain,” they chorused. Other buses had gone to these plus Kokernag, Verinag, Mattan, and there he was herding them back to hot Jammu. It was just not fair.

The shrine arrived and the passengers stopped sulking – after all they were here for the yatra, for a religious pilgrimage. Who knows the Mata may smile and the tour manager relent.

Worship done, they boarded the bus again. Something had changed. The manager who had thus far taken a lot of flak for a poorly managed tour cleared his throat self-importantly and sought everyone’s attention.

“There is hartal in the city. The ‘pathrav’ continues and we heard there was firing too – it was on Aajtak. I want all of you to close the windows and stay in your seats. We will not enter the city at any cost and we will not stop any where till we get to a safe place.”

The eyes that had longingly drunk in the landscape for the past five days, that had scanned the milling crowd for familiar faces summoned from the recesses of memory, that had lit up when total strangers asked them to come back home, now glazed over with fear.

“But it must be in the city, in down town,” I said, not wanting this fear to be their last memory of the place. As I listed the ‘secure’ areas as opposed to the troubled ones they looked at me with mounting concern.

“We cannot drop you at Dal Gate, it’s not safe, you can get down at Batwara Chowk,” said the manager.

‘That’s fine,” I said, and then, to my new friends, “Don’t worry, it’s not far from where I want to go. I don’t have to go to Dal Gate, I can go home this way too.”

“She knows her way better than us,” said Kiran, half wistful, half scared. “She has been coming here recently whereas we were here twenty one years ago.”

As I got down, the silence in the bus was deafening. The children all leaned out of the windows to bid me good bye while their parents turned inwards, blotting out the serene landscape.

At Batwara Chowk I get into an auto. Something seems amiss – shops have downed shutters even in this area where it used to be business as normal, come curfew or hartal.

I ask the driver about the ‘haalaat’. “As usual,” he says, relenting to add, “but its getting worse.”

I reach my friend’s house in a ‘safe’ area and find out the reason why she was sounding so tense over the phone. Another boy has been killed, this time in direct firing on a funeral procession. There is curfew in many parts of the city and a hartal has been declared for the next day, a ‘civil curfew’.

Civil Curfew. I first heard this term two years ago during the Amarnath agitation when I was similarly stuck indoors for days on end.

I was staying with a Kashmiri family in Rajbaug at the time and for the whole one week I was there, housebound on account of the curfew, I watched local channels all day with their young son.

“You should have come here during ‘Muzaffarabad Chalo’ or ‘UN chalo’. You should have seen the crowds then..oh, oh,oh!”

“Did you join the rallies too?” I asked S.

“No, but we gave them water, fruits… no one went from here, people from here don’t take part in these things,” says S in disgust, unselfconsciously. As far as I know, S, a cycle mechanic then who now runs a motor spare parts shop, has never taken part in a rally. But this is Kashmir and I may be wrong.

“They’ve given a ‘Lal Chowk Chalo’ call, let’s see what happens now,” he says, flipping channels to check if there’s any new announcement from the Committee.
Two hears hence, it is like I’m watching an action replay of the Amarnath agitation. T’s two sons mostly while away the curfew watching dubbed Tamil action flicks, but the 8 pm news is sacrosanct, as that’s when the future course of action will be announced.

But watching the news is only a ritual to confirm what they already know. All through the day the seventeen year old gets updates on his cell phone.

“There will be civil curfew tomorrow,” he says. Who sends you these messages, I ask him.

“ Aircel, they have SMS alerts.”

As I blink in confusion – anything is possible here – T says, “No, Geelani himself sends them to him. Is facts he takes decisions only after consulting my son.”
The seventeen years old scowls in derision.

If there is one thing that seems to have changed in Srinagar, it is the open contempt among youngsters for Geelani’s brand of politics. In October 2008 too there was despair over the lack of leadership and frustration over the unending ‘chalo’ calls, but this time, more than one youngster I talked to said that the biggest problem is the lack of unity among the leadership, and the biggest road block to unity was Geelani.

“Ab dekhna, aaj usne hartal ki call dee hai, kal use khud uthayega,” says the teenager. (“Just watch, he has given a hartal call now, tomorrow he will lift it himself.”)

If there is anyone he and youngsters like him adore in the Valley it is the ‘ladke’, the boys. It is the boys who enforce civil curfew, and if the boys have their way, they would put an end to this charade and extend the hartal indefinitely.

“Ladke nahi maanenge, aap dekhna. Parsun chahrum hai na, chowtha din, uss din kaise uthane denge curfew? Ab dekhna hai kiska pallaa bhari hai, Geelani ka ya ladkon ka” (“The boys won’t agree, you will see. Day after is the forth day of mourning, how can the curfew be lifted? It remains to be seen whose will prevails – Geelani’s or the boys’”)

Like S, M is not the type to take part in ‘pathravs’. Thanks to his mother who keeps a tight, though increasingly strained, grip on both her sons.

“Yeh CRP waale zaleel hain, kisiko nahi chhodte (these CRPF men are shameless, they spare no one). One day they showed a picture of the boys on TV and said ‘we have identified them and we will arrest them soon. One of them wore a scarf exactly like the one M had.”

“Tab se bhai ne woh scarf cupboard mein bandh rakhi hai, ek baar bhi nahi pehni,” pipes up R, the ten year old. (“Since then he has locked up the scarf in the cupboard, hasn’t worn it once”)

“Every other day people are killed,” says T. “I feel like taking a gun myself and shooting them down.”

“Where’s the gun? Give me that broom. Mamu, give mummy the gun, she’s going to war!” mocks M. “Nothing’s going to come of this. There will be two days of hartal and then it will be lifted. Or they will get arrested.”

“And if it goes beyond two days I’ll go to Jammu and take up a job there,” says his ‘uncle’, T’s cousin.

“Who benefits from hartals? Only the salaried class which sits at home and enjoys the holiday. The daily wage employee, he will be destroyed.”


Tired of watching television, I soon take to the streets which are empty of traffic.

Near Lal Ded hospital I search in vain for a newspaper vendor. Finally T who has come out to buy some medicines asks the medical shop owner for his copy. “We have stopped reading newspapers,” he says.

I carry on alone to Residency Road via the Bund. All shops are shut and the only people I meet are a couple of hawkers here, a roadside chai wala there, a waiter manning an empty cafe who is embarrassed that he cannot even offer a cup of tea to an old customer.

The hawker is Bihari and his companion, Kashmiri. Kashmir’s nice, everything is fine. There is no fear, he is doing well, thank you very much, says the Bihari, echoing his friend.

“This is all the doing of trouble makers, those who want to disrupt the peace,” says the chai wala. “One cannot blame the government. It is the Hurriyat that is responsible for the tension.”

What about the firing on the funeral procession, I ask him, was that justified?

‘But they attacked a bunker, tried to set fire to a vehicle,’ he says.

“Does that justify firing?”

“Bahut galat ho raha hai,” shudders the seventy five year old waiter. “Itni sakhti, itni sakhti. Roz bachchon ko maar rahe hain, roz hartal.” (“This is very wrong. So much oppression! Everyday they kill children, every day is hartal.”)

“How do you manage?” I ask him.”What do your sons do?”

His eyes brim over with tears. “One is a tailor, the other a labourer. We eat if we earn. We can go hungry once in a while but how do we feed the kids, can we let them starve? Who knows when this will end.”

Back home the family’s eager to cheer me up but I’m not keen on Shalimar or Nishat or the Dal in this gloom. But then I hear the word Harwan. “I’ve always wanted to go there, the next time I’m here we must.”

Before I know it we are all bundled up in a beat up Maruti and driving towards Harwan. We stop outside what looks like a park. It’s Dachigam and T and her younger son are thrilled to be outdoors. The elder son, as befits a teenager, chooses to sulk in the car, and while I’d rather follow suit, I join the rest of the family.

It is not bad at all. Scores of families with picnic baskets are lazing under the shade of magnificent chinars, bathing in the ice cold mountain water. As we leave less than an hour later, an endless stream of people continues to pour in.

Finally in the car I tell the family about my real interest in Harwan. “Why didn’t you say so before?” they say. A short distance before Dachigam on the road from Srinagar I’d seen a board marked “… monastery” and it is there that we turn.

On the trek uphill, T’s brother and the kids are skeptical at what looks like a wild goose chase, especially as I can’t tell them anything definite about the place. “No, there’s no temple there. No, no idols, no statues. Religious? Perhaps.”

And then I spot the ASI board. I look in vain for something that gives information on the site or points to its exact location, but this being ASI property, there’s nothing.
Finally we crest a bump and there it is. Isolated, and there fore well maintained by ASI standards.

As I wander around the site the family stands at a distance watching me expectantly. Having come here I’m at a loss what to do.

R joins me in a while. “Yahan inki adalat hoti thi na Didi?” (“There was a court here, right?”)

“Who told you that?” I ask him.

“Mamu said so. And that was the place where they punished sinners by burning him.”

I try, but he hasn’t heard of the Buddha.

Finally I find the rusting ASI board propped up against a tree, giving information in three languages – English, Hindi and Urdu - about Kanishka and the Fourth Council. I tell R briefly about Nagarjuna and the Kashmir connection. Unlike most adults I meet here he is curious and tries really hard to grasp what I say.

Back home, M excitedly turns to me, “Yeh dekhna Didi, yeh bahut achchi hai.. Maas”(“Watch this, Didi, its good..Maas”)

A Telugu potboiler dubbed into Hindi is playing and both brothers claim it’s their favourite, especially its hero, Maas.

“His name is not Maas, its Nagarjuna,” I say. “I like him too.”

“What’s that again? Naga..?” asks S.

“Nagarjuna. He is a Telugu super star. You remember the place we went to this evening? The teacher I told you about, Nagarjuna. They share a name.”

He is content with this and spends the next couple of minutes committing the name to memory.

The eight o’clock news confirms the SMS alert – there would be no hartal the next two days.

“Do you think the meeting on the 24th will lead to anything?” I ask M and T.

“Nothing. Geelani won’t allow it. Mirwaiz and the others had invited him but he refused,” says M.

R who has been busy copying out a Kashmiri poem for me turns to me suddenly, “Inko ‘Do or Die’ karna chahiye, hai na Didi?”(“They should adopt ‘Do or Die’ right?”)

“What?”

“Do or Die!”

“But they haven’t read history, R. You have, therefore you know, but they don’t.”

The next day as I’m travelling back to Jammu I receive news that while there have been protests in Maisuma, the city is back to functioning ‘normally’. Briefly M had hoped that the tide will turn, but finally his cynicism had won out.

In Jammu I scan the newspapers for announcements from the leadership. The new call is “Quit Kashmir”, reminiscent of Gandhi’s ‘Quit India’, and a piece in Kashmir Times compares it to Sheikh Abdullah’s call against Hari Singh over sixty years ago.

The schedule for the week long protests is out and so are t-shirts on Facebook. Who is going to lead this revolution, I wonder.

Meanwhile the foot soldiers, or the sacrificial lambs, or the self appointed leaders of the ‘new wave’, depending on which way you look at it, stamp their feet growing increasingly impatient.

T is afraid for them. This is not their battle, they who are as old as her sons. Her logic is simple.

“Hartal ho toh sabko bandh rakhna chahiye, hai na? Jab tak saare ismein shaamil nahi honge yahan kuch nahi badlega,” says T. “Hum mein unity nahi hai, isliye hamara kuch nahi hoga.” (“If there is a call for hartal everyone must join in, right? Unless and until everyone participates nothing will change. We are not united which is why we will never amount to anything.”)