Publishers : HarperCollins Publishers India
Farah Bashir was born and raised in Kashmir. She was a former photojournalist with Reuters and currently works as a communications consultant. Rumours of Spring is her first book.
Rumours of Spring is the unforgettable account of Farah Bashir’s adolescence spent in Srinagar in the 1990s. As Indian troops and militants battle across the cityscape and violence becomes the new normal, a young schoolgirl finds that ordinary tasks – studying for exams, walking to the bus stop, combing her hair, falling asleep – are riddled with anxiety and fear.
Adolescence is turbulent at its best. The awkward spurts of growth that turn our own bodies into strangers, the pangs of first love, the perpetual conflict between endless curiosity about the world of adults and the restrictions that adults in our lives deem necessary – coming of age is never easy. In her debut book Farah Bashir talks about the pains of growing up, but amidst military occupation and insurgency. Rumours of Spring is an account of how militarisation and violence seep into daily life, and how they manage to mark every milestone in the life of an ordinary teenager. In a conflict zone, all celebrations and daily rituals are riddled with fear and uncertainty. The freedom to grieve and to heal is non-existent.
The narrative of Bashir’s memoir is anchored by the death of her paternal grandmother in 1994, and unfurls in vignettes from 1989 to 1994. The structure is effective, but I wish it had been edited better so that the jumps in time were more seamless, and parts of the narrative had not been blurred by the process. The unassuming simplicity of the writing makes it hard-hitting. The book focuses exclusively on the quotidian, and the horrors of the invasion of domestic spaces – childhood homes – by the war that rages in the land, chill to the bone.
Kashmir is what Indians insist an integral part of India, yet we are unaware of, and indifferent to, people dying because they mistook a window for a door on a midnight trip to the bathroom, tear gas fumes making the elderly and the vulnerable breathless long before the first case of COVID 19 was detected in a human being, or the impossibility of seeking medical attention for serious ailments in the land of never-ending curfews.
One might be tempted to draw parallels between the isolation of pandemic lockdowns and the shut off lives that Kashmiris have been living for decades. But the deliberate cruelty of a man-made conflict inspires a sense of helplessness and despair that we, the privileged, will never understand. This is best exemplified in an incident that Bashir recounts, one that moved me the most. Bashir’s aunt, who had lost her house to a fire after a gun battle between militants and armed forces in her neighbourhood, was staying in their home with them. When Bashir discovers that she was behind the mysteriously opened window (all windows in the house, and all houses in the neighbourhood, would remain firmly bolted come evening), she stops to observe why her aunt would risk being by an open window.
“Slowly, she lifted her hand and dropped it a few times. Her gaze was fixed outdoors, on the street, at something I could not see from where I was standing. But I knew that it was the hour of armed patrol by the troops who marched past our house every evening. She lifted her hand again, meekly this time, to her forehead. Saluting with a fearful face and a half-sprouted smile, she looked like a child trying to appease the playground bully.”
When Bashir later reports the event to her family, her aunt explains, “I thought next time there is a search operation or an encounter in the neighbourhood, the troops will show some mercy. Myeha dop tyim karan raham. Maybe they’ll remember that someone from this house saluted them.”
We might never fully understand this vulnerability and the permanent wounds inflicted on the minds and bodies of citizens, but we can replace our arrogant indifference with active empathy. And the first step towards doing that is to listen. So, pick up this hauntingly beautiful memoir. Listen.