Nights in Baramulla: Writing Letters Never Meant to be Sent
By
Daanish Bin Nabi
In the more than one month
of communication clampdown imposed on Kashmir, every aspect of life in the
Valley has suffered. The economy has been shattered, colleges and universities
remain shut, parents are cut off from their children studying outside Kashmir
and children are unable to reach their families in the Valley. There is also a
medical emergency, as international media reports indicate, which the political
dispensation in Delhi has been denying.
Amidst all this gloom,
there is another section of society that is feeling alone and depressed, and
those are the couples of Kashmir. The married, the boyfriends and girlfriends,
those engaged, and those who would have been engaged or married, if not for the
events that unfolded on August 5. On that day, a security lockdown was imposed
that ended communications within the Valley and between the rest of the country
and Jammu and Kashmir (J&K).
Just like the parents from
Kashmir who tried (often in vain) to get in touch with their children during
this breakdown in communications, the young are also trying their very best to
reach out to their loved ones. This story of couples who are finding it
difficult to communicate with each other begins with a revival: The art of
letter-writing is making a comeback now that SMS, phone calls and WhatsApp have
been ruled out by state diktat. The old pen-on-paper love-note is back, and
that is what these couples hope, will keep their love going too.
“From August 4 to August
22, I had no news of her. I went to her home twice but could not meet her.
Finally, I approached one of her close friends who lives close to her house,”
says Harris from Baramulla in North Kashmir. Harris and Sana were supposed to
get married on August 21, but the wedding was put off due to the communication
blockade and the pall of uncertainty and gloom that has descended on the Valley
by the sudden abrogation of J&K’s special status on August 5.
Now Harris could only reach
Sana once, and that was through her friend, who informed Sana that he was
waiting outside her home. Such a meeting is risky in a sense, for Kashmir’s
patriarchal society does not ordinarily allow betrothed couples to meet each other
unsupervised. So, over the past few weeks, Harris has written several letters
to Sana, but here lies a twist. As long as there is a clampdown, he has no
means to have the letters delivered. “When we met for few minutes outside her
residence, the only thing that we exchanged were the letters. She said nothing,
I kept mum. Our eyes talked to each other,” says Harris.
Just like the engaged
couples, married couples are also finding it difficult to contact their
spouses. “I am travelling to Singapore. My wife does not know that I am
travelling to Singapore. I have sent a pen-drive full of my videos for my wife
back home,” says Tahir Masood, an executive from Kashmir.
Masood left his home in
Kashmir on August 17, to finish some work for his office and was supposed to be
back home by August 25. “But I had to suddenly make a trip to Singapore for a
meeting and there was no working phone back home. So, I thought better to make
videos and send those to my wife,” Masood says. While Masood was in Delhi,
where his company’s office is located, he took help from other travelers headed
back to the Valley to send the videos to Sopore, where his wife lives with the
rest of his family.
The government has restored
communication—landlines only—in a phased manner in J&K. While there was
almost 15 days of no connection between the Valley and the world outside, it is
taking still more time to restore mobile connectivity. While other parts of
J&K—now a newly-inaugurated Union Territory, do enjoy cellular phone
connections by now, the Kashmir Valley region has remained cut off.
It is believed that
hundreds, if not thousands of marriages, were cancelled in the Valley after New
Delhi unilaterally revoked the special status of the only Muslim-majority
state, J&K. “My would-be husband, Sameer, is in Delhi. We have not
communicated since the communication was thrown out of gear in Kashmir,” says
Nigeena, from Bijbehara in South Kashmir, who has been desperately trying to
get in touch with her fiancé since August 5.
So out of use were landline
phones in the Valley—as is the case anywhere in India—that Nigeena’s fiancé
does not even have it saved on his mobile, written somewhere or committed to
memory. Therefore, although her family’s landline connection has been restored
of late, he still cannot reach her. “We had never exchanged landline numbers
because we had the Jio cellular network,” Nigeena says. Now, she has been
requesting people to take the landline number to her fiancé. Nigeena and
Sameer, who is from Anantnag, were to get married in September. However, their
wedding has been postponed indefinitely as of now.
The Other Side
Like the common Kashmiris
are suffering, the government forces on the ground that have been deployed to
ensure ‘peace’ in the trouble-torn Union Territory are also cut off from
families and homes. In the Batmaloo area of Srinagar, where there is a
checkpoint where passers-by are stopped for checking, a middle-aged Central
Reserve Police Force (CRPF) officer from Punjab says, “I have not spoken with
my family back in Punjab since August 5,” said an officer. He then explains how
communicating with near and dear ones is a kind of perk for those on the higher
end of the hierarchy in the CRPF. “The phones remain only with the higher-up
officials. I have two daughters. I have no news of them. I have aged parents
and a wife. It seems ages since I have talked to all of them,” the two-star
CRPF officer says.
“I do miss my wife. But I
miss my daughters more. I wish I could reach back home soon. I just want to tell
my daughters that their father misses them a lot,” he says, somberly. The
members of these forces are sailing in the same boat as far as communicating
with their loved ones is concerned.
Published
by Newsclick on 20 September 2019
