Ijaaz [2020 short fiction story competition]
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An earthquake hit us that night in July. The ground of our beautiful, battered city did not shake, the windows did not rattle, and not a single building collapsed. But its rumblings ripped through the fragile foundations of our lives and left rubble in place of my mother and father.
The earthquake came in the form of IAF soldiers in the blackest part of the night. Even in the darkness I could see their rifles and their leering faces stretched into mocking, awful smiles. I heard the rumbling of their voices, mingled with the pleading of my parents, at first low and measured, later a desperate cacophony.
They had come for my brother. I knew it immediately.
After all, few boys in Srinagar reached adulthood before they were pulled from their beds and thrown in a cell for their “militancy”. The claims were true in part. I had heard the conspirational whispers of boys in the neighbourhood, seen the fires of azaadi spark behind naïve eyes in boys as young as fourteen. Noble dreams fuelled by the misery of occupation and the zeal of youth sent many boys across the border to be “trained”. When they finally returned, their round faces hardened and their chests puffed, with guns as tall as children hidden in their phirens, they would try and light those dormant fires in us all. Delicious words of freedom from our oppressors, reunification and armed struggle spilled excitedly from their careless lips, and then?
More boys missing, more boys killed or tortured in a cell. To most of us, especially us girls who had seen rape and murder in the streets since we were born, these words were pitifully hollow. They killed us for nothing, why would we give them more reason to hurt us?
But I could not stop my brother from tasting those sweet, impossible words. I remember how he looked that night and the nights before. He was not quite a man, but certainly not a child with his tall stature and proud shoulders. Yet his face was still soft with the last touches of boyhood. His sandalwood skin still erupted in pimples and his beard, despite his best efforts, was sparser than my father’s. His eyes still lit up with laughter unlike the older men, whose had hardened with fear and resignation. And when he started talking to Wasim, one of the known militant boys, I saw those same fires of freedom blaze behind his laughing eyes.
Whether my parents knew or not was hard to say. I think like me, my mother knew, but could never ask. It would be too painful to face the inevitable truth. So, when they came, that night, we knew exactly what would happen. Like many boys before, and many after, they pulled him from his bed, shocked and scared, and threw him in a truck to the chorus of my mother’s defeated screams.
Ijaaz…Ijaaz…IJAAAZZ.
Her cries ripped through us like an aftershock and I knew the illusion of normalcy, the fantasy that our lives were worth living had been shattered forever.
A few weeks later, we were told that he had died. As is customary, no reason was given. But Allah’s mercy granted us the gift of his body. At his Janazah I felt numb. I could not cry because somewhere I think I believed he was destined to die as soon as he was born. It felt like the inevitable fate of us all.
“Inaaya, you must not lose hope” my father had said. What empty words they were. I could tell he didn’t believe them himself; he was merely trying to restore the illusion. What hope was left for us now?
Then as if to mock us, mere weeks after his death, another disaster.
In the Indian news we had heard about their plans to remove special status. This news incensed the men, and some of the women. To me, it was another cruel joke. How could life get any worse?
And yet somehow it did.
One day in August army men came to our door again. There was a curfew, we were not to leave the house. The landline wasn’t working. I checked my phone. My messages to school friends and girls from mosque were not going through. I checked again. No Wifi.
My father turned on the TV. No news.
The next morning, no school. I was going to sit my board exams; I had been studying for weeks. Now what?
Overnight we had become prisoners. Well. The world stopped pretending that Kashmir hadn’t always been a prison.
That week hundreds were arrested. Some quietly, some loudly, thrown into trucks and taken away, just like Ijaaz. Boys who barely spoke of militancy, boys who went to school and came home and helped their siblings with their homework were taken and tortured. Old men who’d long forgotten hopes and dreams were beaten in the streets for breaking curfew. Young girls like me with no crime at all, other than appearing attractive to some despicable gunman were raped and discarded like ragdolls. This was another earthquake.
This time though, the ground did shake. The whispers of dissent gained wind and became a hurricane. Aunties, uncles, grandads and school kids burned with anger, and they protested. They flooded in the streets, they chanted Jis Kashmir ko khoon se sencha, wo Kashmir hamara hai!
Their voices erupted, in the way that only those that have been silent for years can, like the tragic and beautiful song of a caged bird. With no internet, no media coverage, complete communications lockdown, the world did not hear us, but how the Kashmiri people screamed!
Khooni lakir tod do aar paar jod do!
Ay jabiron ay zalimon, Kashmir hamara chhod do!
Of course, they were beaten, arrested, tortured. Their voices once again subdued. Boys were killed for the crime of pelting stones. But this final violation had awoken something that could surely not be subdued. The cries of protest may have quietened to whispers, but silence was no longer.
My numbness, resignation that my life was unliveable threatened to fade in those months. This lockdown, this prisoner’s existence awoke a desire, and more surprisingly, a hope for change.
This sick process. Protests, then beatings, protests then beatings carried on for weeks and months. Time had melted into one. Eid came and went. My little sister just 7, grew restless and afraid. With no school to distract her, the sounds of beatings in the street were unavoidable and deafening. Her name was Habba, named by my grandfather for Habba Khatun, a Sufi queen of Kashmir who had ruled many, many years before our beautiful Himalayan home, forest green and pristine white with snow had turned khaki green and morose, barbed wire grey.
My sister Habba was a sweet girl, her face white and red like apples against the snow. She was a great comfort to my parents and to me after Ijaaz was taken. Her sweet voice was so innocent and hopeful, that it was impossible not to forget your worries when you heard her speak.
But her fear made my blood cold. How would I protect her if things were to get worse?
However, I knew that thinking of these things were futile. I tried as much as I could to feel hopeful. Sometimes it worked.
In our prisons, we regained some vestiges of normalcy. Me, Habba and my father would play Ludo some nights. In the days I would study. Maybe we would have exams at some point, and I would have to be prepared. It became something of a routine. It was on one of those new lazy mornings, while I was sat on the lawn of my parent’s house, that I heard those familiar sounds again.
The rumbling of footsteps, an orchestra of laughing voices. I jumped as if struck and ran into the house. The first thing I was aware of was the noise. The screams of my mother that I had become so used to hearing and the cracked protests of my father as the uniformed men pressed his whole frame onto the ground. I became aware of my own screams, and Habba’s joining the chorus of my mother’s. It sounded like Hell. My father’s glasses crunched under the foot of one of the uniforms. I remember thinking how just weeks ago, we were protesting in the streets.
Next, I remember Habba’s face frozen in fear, rivulets of tears flowing down her cheeks. Then I remember boys from the neighbourhood rushing into the house, flitting around like frightened moths.
Hysterical now, I asked the soldiers what he had done. They didn’t bother to answer. With the ageing frame of my father still pressed against the tiled floors with his grotesque, calloused hands, one of them shot their gun.
The bang knocked me off my feet and then I heard the shattering of glass. Two more bullets. I couldn’t see my father anymore. Boys were in my way hitting and screaming at the soldiers.
Maybe five more bullets? They were all firing now. One of the boys had a gun too.
And then I heard the cry, soft and stifled as if it had been stopped in mid-air. I saw the blood, a ghastly maroon splutter, soak the fabric of her shalwar khameez. I had seen blood before of course, but for some reason I had not imagined that her sweet body was made of the same things as the rest of us. Then I saw her face, and everything stopped.
The world had ended.
The firing stopped. I cannot describe the wails of my mother. They were the only sound in the terrible silence.
Soaked in blood. The light behind her cinnamon eyes dimmed forever. Her tiny body completely still.
I cannot remember what happened next. There must have been a burial. My mother must have cried some more. I must have cried too. If so, I cannot remember it. In fact, all I can remember now is her face. Next to Ijaaz’s. It’s all I have thought about for months. Of course, the lockdown continues. They haven’t stopped killing, new people die every day, killed by army or militants. But that doesn’t matter to me. One day they will kill me too, and when they do, I will thank them. I cannot live in this hopeless, empty prison haunted by memories and impossible dreams. I will greet death like a trusted friend, because nothing, not even hell can be worse than this.
Inaaya Khan
16-year-old girl living in Indian Controlled Kashmir
Shiuli Bhattacharyya came 1st in Burnt Roti’s 2020 short fiction story competition. Bhattacharyya retains rights to this story. Please do not reproduce without contacting Burnt Roti.