Arshid Malik
Kashmir valley and its people have been going through difficult times for long now. Our society altogether is not doing well, even though the situation, as they say “on the ground” has improved considerably. One wonders, is it the internal dynamics of the ongoing strife, the state and the central governments or is the whole thing just a nightmare that will go away as we wake up? To me it is like a poem that flows through itself in sunshine and shade.
I figure that the Kashmiri people have absorbed the shocks of the ongoing strife to such a degree that on the face of it not much is palpable while deep down things are on the boil. And, eventually what have we got at the end of the day? I would say…
The government at the centre has been talking about rehab packages and stuff while the state government has been scheming prosperity packages all along no matter which party’s candidate is holding the chair. The separatist leadership has been chanting the same slogans for what seems like reticent decades. And the school going child cannot stop wondering while taking the ride back home on the bus as to why life doesn’t feel as lively as they show it on television.
The number of suicides attempted or else committed is growing with every passing day. The old man who set foot on the bridge with his head held high stoops suddenly to pick up what seems like the torn end of the shirt which he remembers his son wore the day he went missing. Figures are talking heads that defeat all feats of wit and wisdom.
In a village the willows weep over insipient adjudications of the council while the murdered loathe in the shadows of the half-dead. The water whispers eulogies to the land as the leper at the end of the street breaks a sweat and sings, “Do not touch me if disease is what you fear”.
Power as a structure has humans as appendages and tentacles that make life believe that it could fathom what it lost but spins into oblivion what it will end up losing. The pamphlet in the morning newspaper reads “the sinful are being vindicated” at the price of a shot and suddenly everybody is interested. The dogs here do not howl at the moon as often for they have bodies to sniff.
Shook up out of sleep by the agonising cries of a bemoaned mother, the orphan goes back to sleep for he never knew love as it comes. Where are the soulless people who think they play our strings?
The Jehlum overflows each night but the banks are never sodden. The morning mist brews fire but the thick skinned do not sense. The raindrops disappear in the thin of it and our rainbows appear like halved torsos.
At the center of the conference table sits a gleaming slit as discussions heat up. Our dreams catch a bus in search of a muse. The angered shopkeeper shouts at his salesman, “I told you a hundred times not to sneeze when I cough”. With pleasure comes pain but when pain replaces leisure guests are no longer welcome.
Our machines on fours are no match for the furnaces they have lit up though gobbled in gossip the head gear didn’t care to vote.
No one rears cattle and wastes the yield but in Kashmir, things take a different turn.
(Even though I have stepped out of the realm of reasonable literature here, this piece of writing weaves its way through a pipedream into what could be described as real yet obnoxious animation and would best serve as a footnote to our collective thoughts).
