Siege / noun
- A military operation in which enemy forces surround a town or building, cutting off essential supplies, with the aim of compelling those inside to surrender
How much silence makes a siege?
And how much sound ends it?
What makes a siege a siege?
When do we stop calling it so?
For how long does a siege last?
Does the siege interrupt [our] life or is [our] life merely in the way of an undying siege?
What is a siege in a [perpetual] siege called?
What is more persistent — Life or Siege?
Each night, I traced the position of a star — sometimes near and sometimes farther away — shining in the line of sight of the moon, almost perpendicular.
Each morning I found my bedside clock fallen on its face.
Mother and I are walking on the street. A bus, crammed with a horde of eyes darting furtive glances at everything around them as if they had landed into an extraterrestrial space, stops at our feet. I struggle to count and define the eyes I see: nineteen hundred eighty-nine eyes, nineteen hundred and forty-seven eyes, nineteen hundred and eighty-four eyes, nineteen hundred and thirty eyes, two thousand and ten eyes, two thousand and sixteen eyes, three hundred and seventy eyes, armed-eyes, razor-sharp eyes, automated eyes, seven hundred thousand eyes plus thirty-eight thousand eyes, eye-less eyes…
Two elderly women conversing on the roadside looking toward the skies, the passersby, the earth for possible clues: What is going to happen? Are they going to bomb us? Will there be a war? Will there be a massacre once again? Should we stock food and medicines? Are they going to cut off electricity and water too? And then reassuring themselves: What can happen? Well, this is not new; ma bhariv gham (don’t worry), we will survive.
Military-scapes: Streets turning into disorienting cul-de-sacs, guarded by troopers. Helicopters and drones hovering in the skies. Barricades, check-posts, razor-wired neighborhoods, new entry and exits emerging and reemerging. Homes turned into prison cells. Landlines, cell phones, internet, postal services, cable TV networks — suspended. Public assemblies, disallowed. An indefinite, undeclared curfew.
“It’s normal. Only rumor-mongering is going on. It’s a very routine thing here. If you sneeze at Lal Chowk, it becomes an explosion when it comes here… As far as I know, there is no inclination that something is going to happen here. I don’t know about tomorrow. That’s not in my hands. But till today there’s nothing to worry.”
“It was prime minister Narendra Modi with a fifty-six-inch chest who showed the courage to abrogate Article 370.”
In the siege I noted for the first time how slowly and persistently a nail grows: emerging from its roots under the skin, rising quietly and finally transcending the boundary of the skin. The older cells die as newer cells emerge at the base of the nail. I was suddenly overwhelmed by this process of regeneration, the process of life.
Weeks before the siege, I was visiting Rukhsana and her grandfather in Pahaldeg, about eighty-five kilometers north of Srinagar. On one of the nights when the moon shone upon the newly transplanted rice saplings, I recalled Rukhsana’s wedding in 2013 when the courtyard had resonated with women singing, ceaselessly.
Rukhsana’s mother Rafiqa, her sister Sabreena, and I were sitting in the kitchen where a hazy mirror is mudded in, into the wall. We spoke deep into the moonlit night. Both Rafiqa’s and Sabreena’s fingernails were henna-stained. They told me how they prepare henna at home using tea leaves and sugar. Sabreena quickly fetched the leftovers of her homemade henna and asked me to extend my hand. I asked her to apply it on one of my nails. Instructing me to keep it overnight, she dabbed the wet brownish-green henna on my thumbnail, like a stamp, as if it was to be a marker of something significant. Rafiqa brought out a photograph from one of the trunks in the attic; this is the only photo she has of her husband Fateh, subjected to enforced disappearance. Against the studio backdrop — a little hut surrounded by trees — Fateh is sitting on a chair holding little Rukhsana in his lap. We slept in the attic, listening to the sound of cicadas and the summer breeze rumbling through the pines. Strong gusts of a certain absence furtively crept in, wanting to build a small home, in my heart. I closed my eyes, struggling, in my imagination, to erase the haze off the photo Rafiqa had shown me. Instead, what emerged was a picture I had seen years ago — Rukhsana holding her father’s photo as a placard during a protest in New Delhi, demanding his whereabouts.
In the morning, it seemed like a sunset had been embossed on my thumbnail — an orange sky had revealed itself from amidst the dense forest of the wet henna. Rafiqa and her friends invited me to a wedding in the village and we promised to meet again in August. I left Pahaldeg, accompanied by the sound of cicadas.
“How will I die in these times?” asked my grandmother, who has been on a perennial oxygen supply, weeks before the siege, and has her days and nights lacerated by visions of death. There are pangs of death and then there are pangs of death amid a siege. “What will you do? Where will you go? Will you be able to give me a proper burial?”
Crossing several barricades and empty streets resembling memento mori, my brother and I went to see grandmother. As soon as we entered the room where she lay, watching from the window, the withering rosebush in the courtyard, she gasped, “Vaen kya gasie? Yem kya karan?” (What will happen now? What will they do?). I touched her face and traced my fingers along the arch of her eyebrows. She summoned the memories of namath (the nineties) until dusk engulfed her face in shadows. “Will this be written down too, as history?” she asked.
I kept myself from asking her: How does one go on living in these times?
Father gathered all the important documents in a bag, as if preparing for an emergency evacuation. Refusing to part from the radio, he listened to the same news broadcast in Kashur, English, and Urdu.
Every day “normalcy” was announced to us in the confines of our home-prisons. Once, Radio Kashmir’s news broadcast, Shaher Been, had nothing to say: “We regret to cut our broadcast short as we have no access to communication networks.”
Strangers brought news of loved ones away from home.
On the morning of the Eid of sacrifice, at the local mosque, as women stood in rows and began their prayers, several cries coalesced into a unisonant sound. After the prayers, greetings were cut short; women spoke about the night raids in their neighborhoods and the crisis that is unfolding and encompassing us. “Yesterday there was a night raid in our neighborhood. They took away some boys. Who knows what is awaiting us all…Khodaya… This is no Eid.” “They don’t want any voice out. They have muted us.”
Mother and I managed to find a landline to make a few urgent calls.
A man had walked for about two hours to make a call to his daughter in Delhi.
Conversations while waiting in the queue:
“Why do you want to come back to Kashmir?”
“There is nothing here.”
“Kashmir is a volcano.”
“This is not the city I had known as a young man…”
“India is unsafe.”
“Your generation saw nothing; just ruins and debris.”
“We were sold while we were asleep.”
“Silence doesn’t mean absence. It is a strong presence. Silence is resistance too.”
“See, we don’t even grow our own rice.”
“Where are our rivers?”
“Universe began in a total chaos.”
“Have you heard of the butterfly effect.”
“We have such a strong sense of survival.”
“By Time, Humankind is in Loss.” “There is nothing here.”
“Best of luck.”
In the light of dawn, on an empty street, Father’s beard appears like snow which has forgotten how to thaw. I plant a kiss on this frozenness and before the first light would dissolve in his tears, I break the embrace and walk away from him, once again. One summer afternoon, in the mid-nineties, as Father and I were returning from the bazaar where he bought me a doll with blue eyes, our walk was interrupted by a crackdown close to home. Father joined a group of men squatting on the road. I stood there, unable to find my place in the space of this sudden interruption. Presuming that I, being a child, would be allowed to enter my home, Father encouraged me to walk away from him. Clutching the doll and a sense of humiliation that children sense astutely, I made my way through the crowd of stranded and waiting men, and up to a trooper wearing a black bandanna and heavy jackboots. During that walk, even though I was refused entry home, I traversed light years.
The airport looked empty in the morning. A flamboyant, Bollywood-themed selfie booth jarred my eyes.
As my luggage made its way through security, I was asked to open my suitcase twice after passing it through the scanner. The sound recorder in which I had recorded the humdrum sounds and silence of the days and nights of the siege — sometimes pointing the recorder towards the starless skies, or a moonlit empty courtyard, or the alleys robbed of their life — and a metallic tremolo invited curious gazes. They were taken out as a trophies, passed from hand to hand, as I was barraged with questions. My books were flipped through cover to cover — Notes from the Underground, The Vintage Book of Latin American Stories, The Collaborator.
In the aircraft, several troopers, probably on a vacation, were going home.
I stood in a market square in south Delhi. A song from a 1997 Bollywood war film blared from the loudspeakers: Sandese aate hain, hame tadpate hain (messages [ from home] arrive, leave us unsettled), an addition to the usual alert: If you find any unclaimed objects…toys…luggage…dubious… attention…
My phone was buzzing ceaselessly with messages that couldn’t reach me earlier. Until I reached Delhi, I had no words to describe what was happening; on my phone screen I read: twenty-fourth day of siege. In Kashmir, it just felt like our way of life, the normal way of life, an imposed normal life. What I also didn’t know: a boy jumped and drowned in the Jhelum River after he was chased by troopers, the death of a woman due to tear gas, the death of a child in the womb…
The fireflies cluster in the dark, around street lights, like pellets constellated in a skull — an X-ray scan of a boy who cannot see anymore. Little objects from home appear like relics from a world that we can never return to, little presences embodying cosmic absences: a bottle of fresh mint, a photograph of an old bridge arching over inverted reflections of homes, domes and minarets, softly dissolving and reemerging to and from the Jhelum, or tourist-kitsch souvenirs, like a small wooden shikara hanging from a bleak wall at a friend’s rented apartment.
There are perpetual arrivals and departures — medicines, documents, uncertainties, testimonies, stories, quotidian conversations, lost embraces, sighs, greetings. Days and nights become a collage of phone calls to and from home: dialing, redialing, disconnected, repeat, conference calls, two phones on speakers next to each other, bringing two universes together in a third, impervious to the siege.
“I had recorded my mother’s last phone call before the phone lines were snapped and everyday I would listen to her recorded voice.”
“I would call home repeatedly knowing no one would answer and send messages knowing they won’t get through.”
What kind of persistence have we brought upon ourselves?
Seven a.m. I wheel my suitcase against the tarmac and find myself gazing at the empty street littered with a flyer, a broken clothespin, a discarded paint can, and in that precise moment I feel I am in a perpetual transit, not registered by time and history.
Under an old frangipani tree, a torn garment is sewed, stitch by stitch — Nitin, a little boy whose home is the street, sits cross-legged, offers me candies, and we speak about everything that could have been. He shows me the ink on his arm: N + A; A standing for Ajay, his best friend, long lost, left behind, in a village far, far from here, where we are.
I noted the slow fading away of the henna, each day, as my nail grew. Gradually, I could see the pale half moon at the base of my nail. This pale half moon, which I learned is called “lunula,” (literally, “little moon” in Latin), slowly emerging from the henna-embossed sunset, became for me a way of marking time, its ebb and flow, during the languid days and nights of the siege. How many moons before the siege ends? How many moons before the henna mark fades away completely?
In the prison-home, my nail became a magical landscape in which I could travel time: I imagined Rafiqa cradling her land in her hands, nurturing and tending to her vaer — tomatoes, eggplants, rows of corn, and her much loved plum tree. I imagined the rice saplings taller than I had last seen them, Rafiqa crossing the small stream where, one afternoon, the little girls from the neighborhood went for a swim, and walking up to the small hill full of chicory blooms, where she would sit in the shade of her apple trees for a while and then take back a load of grass for her calf. Defying the constriction of space and time, it became a record of our deferred moments, the impending possibilities, waiting, hope, companionship, love. Amid the slow death of the siege, the space of the nail became a symbol of life, holding possibilities of regeneration.
During the siege, my mother began playing Tetris on her phone. Perhaps the imagery of the falling blocks fitting into one another, stacking up quicker and quicker, again and over again, as the game proceeds, mirrored the walled-ness and imposed repetitiveness of our lives. A popular game of the nineties, Tetris was first developed by Alexey Pajitnov, a Russian software engineer, during the Cold War. The logic of the game intrigued me as much as the logic of the siege-craft — Is it possible to play forever? John Brzustowski, a mathematician, first considered this question in his graduate thesis in 1992, proving that it is mathematically impossible to play an infinite game. He concluded that the game is statistically doomed to end.
In an alley walks a little girl with her hair parted into two braids; the late afternoon sunlight falls softly on her shoulders, and she looks pleased with herself as she treads carefully, cradling a solar system in her hands.
Excerpted from Cups of Nun Chai, published in 2020 by Yaarbal Books, New Delhi.
