A life devoid of dreams

{ HARINDER BAWEJA } Editor, Special Projects

Imagine growing up to the sound of jackboots, bombs and bullets. Farah Bashir did not have to imagine it. It was part of her everyday; and every night. Bashir tells a poignant, often-harrowing tale of a girlhood in Kashmir in the 1990s. A memoir, Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir, is told through the death and funeral of the protagonist’s grandmother – bobeh in Kashmiri. Bashir inhabits an unpredictable world in which there are two constants: violence and trauma. The child-narrator tells the story of a life devoid of dreams. Windows are kept shut, lest the tear gas creep in. Children are killed by stray bullets and young men disappear. The newspapers are full of obituaries. Cinema halls are shut; Pandit neighbours are fleeing out of the same sense of fear and insecurity, and those who must stay on must also suffer daily humiliation in their own land. Is anything near normal? Music is heard but its beats reverberate in a closed room. Love letters are written but not delivered because the post-office doesn’t escape the cycle of violence either. It is razed to the ground, like Kashmir’s buildings. Life itself is not concrete. The storytelling is fragmented, perhaps deliberately so, because life is fragile and comes with daily heartbreak. The memoir is a must-read really for those who live outside the Valley, so they too can understand the pain and the agony of the people who inhabit that so-called Paradise.