Eighteen years later…
It took eighteen years to locate a friend. Much like a star, the moon, a constellation and an ancient river my friend R has been mercurial, moody and elusive. Hiding one day and emerging the other week, and missing for years.
It is for the technology that enabled me to get reconnected. There is so much to ask and years to tell. A long night of oblivion that was - blissful ignorance but somewhere an image lingered, a memory refused to fade and a star never slept. Our meeting this year will be an unpaid debt to ourselves. We parted in such a hurry and matter-of-fact-ness. Little did I know that it would take eighteen years.
I am amazed at how strongly I have felt in the recent days - it has to do with nostalgia and the slowly diminishing youth..Adulthood has phases that can only be described through experience.
I will be there soon. In the city of neems, pipals and crazy auto-rickshaws.
R, please do not go away..
Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night
Book Review by Sumaira Samad
Curfewed Night is the memoir of young Kashmiri journalist Basharat Peer, recounting his youth in the troubled valley during the '80s and '90s. A harrowing look at the political strife and armed conflict that has torn Kashmir apart over the last 30 years, Curfewed Night is nothing if not personal. The people, places and events Peer describes are ones he encountered and experienced first hand. They are his parents and neighbours and friends. Yet, despite this intimacy, essential to any good memoir, Peer's narrative is refreshingly honest, frank and unbiased. His is no polemic, and sentimentality, self-pity and melodrama take a back seat.
Beginning in the years before the struggle, Curfewed Night invites the reader into a beautiful, peaceful mountain paradise where the regular, slow rhythms of village life make up one's existence. Peer lives a happy, uneventful childhood, surrounded by a loving family and tight knit community. But this apparent serenity, as it turns out, is merely the glassy surface, hiding a quagmire beneath. The shadow of Kashmir's turbulent history and unresolved conflicts never quite goes
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