Violet vipers

STORY

The curfew was lifted two days later. The signal blockade would continue for two more days to ensure peace, the radios announced, but the valley could return to whatever semblance of normalcy it was used to living in.

On the third day of the moonlit night and the metal driveway, Yusuf packed his bag after Fajr and left Makan Taintees, his coat collar turned up to hide his face, the red dupatta wrapped around his neck like a scarf.

He saw Chachi jaan standing on the terrace behind a wall of green leaves. He did not lift his hand to wave at her.

They did not talk about Fateh Deen’s gout in the taxi, or Imam’s many children.

The distance from Chinkral Mohalla to Srinagar airport was covered in absolute silence that was broken only by the whirring of the engine of Imam Deen’s taxi and the honking of the few cars on the road around them.

At the airport, Imam Deen unloaded Yusuf’s suitcase from the back and handed it to him. When Yusuf tried to pay him, Imam Deen closed his hand, his lips thinning into a stubborn line. He stuffed his fisted hand into his pocket.

Yusuf left the money on the bonnet of the car.

It wasn’t until he was about to step into the airport lounge that he heard Imam Deen running after him, shouting his name.

He turned around, preparing himself for a bouquet of insults, knowing he deserved only that from a Kashmiri.

“Yusuf baba.” Imam Deen grabbed his hand. “When will you bring her back?”

Not if. When.

Yusuf’s hand closed over the taxi driver’s. “I don’t know.”

“But you will bring her back.” It was a statement.

“How can I leave myself in the Rashtriya’s cells, Imam Deen?” Yusuf said and there was a world of pain and fear in his voice. The taxi driver blinked back tears, kissed Yusuf’s hand and let it go.

“Aap jao, Sahab. Wapis Aana. (You go on ahead, sir. Do come back )”

“Wapas kesey naa aaun, Imam Deen? (How can I not come back, Imam?)” Yusuf Kashmiri thought as he stepped into the lounge. “I am the Yusuf Shaheer Malik who must return.”

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Chapter 8

Awaz (Voice)

The article first appeared a week later in a small evening daily in Islamabad. Within the night, it had been copied and pasted onto thousands of Facebook profiles and WhatsApp messages, accompanied with the picture of a young Kashmiri girl clad in a black shalwar kameez, her dark skin glistening in the sun, her black curly hair damp with sweat, sitting on an iron porch swing with a thin purple book on her knees. She was looking at the camera with an expression halfway between amusement and annoyance, her mouth half-open, as if she was in the middle of a sentence.

“Wapas kesey naa aaun, Imam Deen?
I am the Yusuf Shaheer Malik who must return.”

It was on social media that Hammad Esfandiari read it and told his secretary to find the original publisher. The next morning, the article appeared in one of Pakistan’s oldest and most distributed newspapers; on the front page was the picture of the girl with the olive skin and black hair with shouts of Akhbar ley lo! (Newspaper’s here!) all over the country.

The day after that, the article, which had by now gathered over two million shares on social media in three days, appeared on the BBC’s official website and that same day, as the op-ed of a leading American daily based in New York City.

When the always panicking, always out-of-breath peon brought it to Major Amit Khatri, the article had already spread across the world like wildfire, a snowball gaining momentum that no signal blockades and no curfews could stop.

When the major saw the face of the girl in the picture, he stiffened. When he read the name of the writer underneath, his face lost all colour.

“Shit.” He said to his peon. “Asal shikar tou hum ney khud hi jaal sey baahir phenk diya, oye! (We threw the real prey out of the net with our own hands!)”

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Violet Vipers

By Yusuf Shaheer Malik

Her office is very small and her printing press is very old, but she works there every day to edit and print the magazine called Awaz (Urdu word for Voice) so it can be distributed by some hawkers (without any payment) on time. Everyone knows that is the only place they will find her if they can’t find her; in that dingy office with a few other Kashmiri students who have banded together to fight for Kashmir with the pens and papers, which an Indian major once told me “cannot win wars”. “But they can fuel revolutions, sir,” I had answered, and it is with that belief still alive in me that I am writing this in my Islamabad home, my ears filled with the sound of evening rain and my back comfortably leaning against a velvet cushion.

Is this a story? Is this an article? A mere narration? I do not know. All I know is that I must write, and I must write about her.

Who is she? She is Jaleelah Taheer Malik, the woman I am going to marry. But she is so much more than that. She is a voice if the word “voice” were a human being. Jaleelah is a voice embodied. Twisting, turning, loud, brash, deep, sharp, soft; she is a walking, talking voice that refuses to be silenced and Jaleelah is being silenced while I am sitting here, writing this and while you will sit in your home, reading it.

She is being silenced by men who do not deserve to be called men. Men who tossed her dupatta out of a jeep with black windows, a beast that has eaten so many of Kashmir’s disappeared, digested them so well we never even got their bodies back. Men who are sepoys and majors and informers and - fathers.

Jaleelah Taheer Malik is being silenced by men and this very thought makes me want to rebel against my gender. It makes me want to wrap her red dupatta around my neck and run out into the streets screaming. No slogans, no threats. Just screaming. On and on and on.

Making an awaz, you could say.

She was picked up in the night (they have traditions, these not-men) and she went without a struggle because sometimes, when you try to struggle, it looks like you are begging for mercy. Voices don’t beg, her stiff, cold lips told me before the (traditional) black bag was slipped over her face.

She was picked up because she had written articles and although what she wrote never even got beyond Srinagar (not a lot of hawkers work for charity, you see) it did get read by Srinagaris and it gave them hope and that hope is what Jaleelah was picked up for. That hope is what needed to be stopped and the best way to stop it was to pick her up, toss her dupatta out of a running car and whisk her away to the maze that so many Kashmiris will traverse before someone finally drives the Minotaur that is orange and green and white out of the burning valley.

I do not know what I must say now. I am not writing to tell you about Kashmir. You already know about Kashmir. I am not writing to tell you about Jaleelah. There are so many Jaleelahs, so many soft and sharp and twisting voices in these mazes that one more tossed in will not hurt anyone except me.

I think I am writing because I actually believe what I said to that Army major, and I am writing to make him believe what I said to him, too.

Major Sahib, (and this is the first time I am calling you by your rank, so hear me with your green-brown uniform on and your boots laced tight) here I serve you the fuel. May you see the revolution with your own eyes!

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To be continued...