Your history gets in the way of my memory.....

“At a certain point I lost track of you.
You needed me. You needed me to perfect me.
In your absence you polished me into the Enemy.
Your history gets in the way of my memory”

…Agha Shahid Ali from his poetry collection ‘The Country without a Post Office’


She lived alone in that window-less one room tenement at Muthi migrant camp with memories of her son and husband who were killed by the militants in early 1990s in Ashmuj, a quiet hamlet in South Kashmir. Though many years have passed, but the expression in those eyes, reflecting the only light coming from the door, still haunts me. I had gone there to cover a human interest story. And I felt, no matter, how much try, I can never translate that moist expression in the eyes, into dry words. The fog of a lifetime of memories precipitated, giving a vacuous look in her watery eyes.

The claustrophobic room bore a melancholic look with its very few possessions, some old sepia pictures, few framed gods, few small booklets, perhaps prayer books and an almanac. For seventy plus Shyamrani, memory was a double edged sword. She wanted to remember her good old days, but those very memories would bring pain too. Memories gave a starker contrast to her life in the camp.

She was just waiting, with her sunken eyes, oblivious to rhetoric on peace, return and separate homeland, going on in numerous conferences and seminars outside. She was waiting not for the peace to return, but for her death- her “return to peace”.

The small lane that led to one room tenement in the camp was so small that two persons could not have walked hand in hand. They had to follow one another. Shyamrani, dependent mainly on the relief money, reminisced her days in Kashmir where they had a big apple orchard, a big house, a big compound, a shop and a joint family to back on. “Every thing is lost now … death is the best home now for me…”, she rued, with anger and uncertainty writ over her face. She point blankly told me, “ I will never return. For what I should return…..who is waiting for me there….’’

Shyamrani had two other sons who too lived Jammu, but they were busy in their own lives. I don’t blame them. Like them, many married couples have over the years moved away from the migrant camps, as the “all-in–one-rooms” do not provide them the required privacy. This is one of the factors that has led to the disintegration of the joint family system amongst the Pandits, leading to creation of nuclear families, many times at the cost of the elders of the family. Good or bad I don’t know.

Shyamrani’s all hope was pinned on two children of her dead son, who were facing the world without the protective ambience of their father. “ I wish they get some job. But I don’t think our children feature in the priority list of the government, that is busy in their useless talks with God knows whom. My children will move away from Kashmir, get good jobs elsewhere and then take care of me…give me a decent funeral..”, she said, adding, ``Let Kashmir go to hell. No more…..’’.

That time I felt centuries of anger had crystallized in that moment. There was resentment simmering in her heart that had turned to a clear cut rejection of any pluralistic coexistence in Kashmir. Can she be blamed ? Can she be labeled non secular?

I always think of those eyes. My inability or frustration, label it any thing, I didn’t say any consoling words to that elderly lady, which could have brought some glint of hope in her eyes. I closed my notebook, over which I had scribed some useless notes for my ``so called human interest story’’. I took her soft little hand in my hand, and held them for sometime. She looked at me in a way, I felt as if all my ancestors were looking at me through her. As she blinked her eyes, the welled up tears rolled down her wrinkled face.. Suddenly I got up and left. I didn’t look back…..i couldn’t… But the unasked questions in those parched eyes have always stayed with me…..