“They ask me to tell them what Shahid means-
Listen: it means ‘the beloved’ in Persian, ’witness ’in Arabic.”
It was the autumn of 2016, or perhaps winter—it was hard to tell that year—as I watched from my window the last leaves falling from the trees. I had been bedridden for more than four months, recuperating from a corrective surgery on my knee, and I had spent most of my time at the window watching a plague descend on my land.
Three months back, just after Eid, we had learnt that Burhan Wani had been killed by security forces. The whole of Kashmir poured onto the streets, first in mourning at his funeral and thereafter in anger. Young men would set up barricades on roads to enforce civil curfew. Then the police and paramilitary forces would come rushing in and the stone-pelting would begin. The forces would respond not just with stones but also pellets, tear gas and pepper gas. Sometimes, as if to reassure themselves as to just how much power they held, they would fire bullets too.
I had seen it all with my own eyes. Just outside my house, a barricade had been set up on Day 1, and young men and kids would gather there. By late afternoon, the stone battle would start. Every day, my mother would beg me to move away from the window and shift to some other room downstairs, preferably one without windows. She had heard about a little boy in Shopian who had been shot at with a barrage of pellets while he watched the stone-pelting from his window. It’s all the same Ami, I argued. Whether by accident or design, stones, pepper gas canisters and tear gas canisters would invariably land in our courtyard. And all that gas would make breathing impossible, particularly if you were on the ground floor, forcing you to open the window just to gasp for some air. Ami had also heard about how people choked to death in their own houses from the pepper gas and tear gas. So windows or no windows, it was all the same.
Months later, after most of the young men and children were either blinded or taken away in the dead of night, the streets outside fell into a desolation that was projected as peace. I still spent my day at the window. Ami no longer asked me to stay away. Presumably the windows were as safe as the rest of the house now. But as I watched the leaves falling like butterflies shot in mid-air, I started to feel guilty. I did not confront my guilt, I was afraid of what I would find there. Instead, I chose to float out from my window and roam the desolation that had been enforced throughout my Kashmir, all through its history. My guilt drove me to relive and reclaim the memory and the myth of my wasteland.
“And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on the same Divan or bed;
I who have sat by the Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.”
For the next 3-4 months I wrote furiously what turned out eventually to be my first novel, The Plague Upon Us. It had started out as a Tiresias-like figure roaming through the desolation and wasteland of Kashmir, but soon outgrew this premise. Rather than Tiresias, the protagonist turned into an Oedipus driven into madness by sight and blindness, by guilt and nemesis; by powers and gods that were beyond him. And in the process, I faced the demons of my childhood that had been pushed into the dark corners of my memory. Like the notorious counter-insurgent—an ikhwaen—whose sharp brown eyes have stayed with me all my life; or the unseen Major whose repeated torture had driven a cousin into militancy; or the unidentified gunmen who had abducted and killed my Mother’s cousin one night as a substitute for his uncle who they had come looking for that night.
And as I kept writing, it was not just the personal demons that I was confronting now but our collective demons—the Pathribal fake encounter, the Machil killings, the Gawkadal massacre, the Bijybror massacre—they all started to fill in the pages of my novel. If nothing else, The Plague Upon Us is my testimony, my witnessing of all these horrors.
The author’s debut novel, The Plague Upon Us, is out from Hachette this month.