My rating: 5 of 5 stars
“Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what is not there any more.”
----Robin Hobb
Basharat Peer, an Indian author, has penned his poignant memoir, Curfewed Night where he flawlessly captures the conflicted as well as forgotten pain of the pastoral state of India through his childhood days till adulthood and the author has also captivated the strong sense of one's own "home" be it idyllic or broken or tortured. Through this memoir, the author has walked down into the memory lane of his childhood days in Kashmir.
Synopsis:
Basharat Peer was a teenager when the separatist movement exploded in Kashmir in 1989. Over the following years countless young men, seduced by the romance of the militant, fueled by feelings of injustice, crossed over the Line of Control to train in Pakistani army camps. Peer was sent off to boarding school in Aligarh to keep out of trouble. He finished college and became a journalist in Delhi. But Kashmir—angrier, more violent, more hopeless—was never far away.In 2003, the young journalist left his job and returned to his homeland to search out the stories and the people which had haunted him. In Curfewed Night he draws a harrowing portrait of Kashmir and its people. Here are stories of a young man’s initiation into a Pakistani training camp; a mother who watches her son forced to hold an exploding bomb; a poet who finds religion when his entire family is killed. Of politicians living in refurbished torture chambers and former militants dreaming of discotheques; of idyllic villages rigged with landmines, temples which have become army bunkers, and ancient sufi shrines decapitated in bomb blasts. And here is finally the old story of the return home—and the discovery that there may not be any redemption in it.
Very obviously, I was instantly left intrigued and arrested after reading the synopsis of this book, while browsing it at a quaint yet renowned Kashmiri bookshop located at a congested corner on Residency Road, Srinagar. All throughout my stay at Srinagar, I was left appalled with the stories or rather say the history of Kashmir shared by the driver of my hired car, hence I was born with this urge to read and know more about such stories and those forgotten history in depth. And, there's no doubt that Basharat Peer came to my rescue with his memoir where he narrates his childhood glory days turning into a nightmare by the mid eighties as insurgency took birth in the form of militants with Kalashnikov fighting for freedom of Kashmir and the injustice done by the Indian army over the course of so many years.
The author unfolds the honest brutality of the great Indian Army sniffing and raining down bullets if something is slightly amiss because of a possible militants' attack but that is not the painful part, the real shocking revelation is that during those bullet raining, innocent lives including children, brother, sister, husband, felt prey to it. The author captures the change among the landscape as well as among the local people's demeanor when common people started to avenge for what the army did to their and homeland over the years, but mostly because of their demand for plebiscite of Kashmir within its own sovereignty. Azadi! Azadi! slogan was chanted like a holy mantra through the valleys as the author encounters hundreds and thousands of everyday scenes dominated by such slogans.
The author's writing is expressive and is extremely personal thus the readers are bound to feel a connection towards the author's plight. The narrative is appealing yet evocative which will make the readers feel with a sense of longing and nostalgia towards their own childhood days. The pacing is smooth and swift as the author gradually pulls his readers into the depth of his memoir. It seems while penning his memoir, the author has simply poured out all his emotions from his best days to his nightmarish days in Kashmir.
The author's father manages to make his son leave the unrest and struggling valley of paradise so that he can finish his education without any disturbance in Aligarh. After his graduation, Peer takes up a job at a local daily newspaper as a journalist where he learns about the struggling life a fresh journalist out of college by constantly staying on his feet to look out for any kind of breaking story. Although all those while, his thoughts and mind remained occupied with his hometown and the violence happening over there. Hence after a few years, he goes back to his district in Srinagar, where he interviews people who have either lost someone or have lost themselves in the war. And those stories are really powerful and honest enough to bring tear in the eyes of the readers.
The sufficed pain of the common Kashmiri folks is very well arrested by the author with his journey to absolution in the picturesque valley of snow-capped mountains and clear blue streams and the vast green flora. The author's portrayal of Kashmir is enticing and vivid as he paints a charming landscape as well as the culture and religion of Kashmir filled with monuments like decorated mosques, old buildings with traditional architecture overlooking the river Jhelum or its tributary Lidder river or the Dal Lake in the city of Srinagar. Then eventually with the progress of his life story, the author diligently changes the once mesmerizing beauty of Kashmir into something dark filled with army bunkers, streets filled with army patrolling cars, armed personnel guarding a hidden corner of a building and some army soldiers are constantly checking and frisking the common Kashmiri folks thereby disrupting the normalcy in their daily lives.
In a nutshell, this book is a must-read, not because of the fact that this is a non-fictional and a rather true account of the fate and history of Kashmir with the author's own eyes, but rather because it is more real and emotional to experience the author's journey as well as Kashmir's delicate history in the minds of the readers.
Verdict: This compelling yet evocative memoir is a must read as it holds the power to change the perspective of the readers about Kashmir.
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Author Info:
Basharat Peer was born in Kashmir in 1977. He studied journalism and politics at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has worked as an editor at Foreign Affairs and served as a correspondent at Tehelka, India's leading English language weekly. His work has appeared in The Guardian, New Statesman, The Nation, Financial Times Magazine, N+1, and Columbia Journalism Review, among other publications. Curfewed Night, his first book, won one of India's top literary awards, the Vodafone Crossword Book Award for English Non Fiction. Peer is a Fellow at Open Society Institute and lives in New York.
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