During the summer uprising of 2010, more than 110 people, many among them children, died in police and paramilitary firing on anti-India protesters. New Delhi said the youth were motivated by Pakistan in fomenting trouble and security forces alleged that they were fired upon at times, forcing them to ‘retaliate’.
Among the dead was Sameer Rah, 7, who was allegedly beaten to death by security forces. On August 2, two years ago, he had his last conversation with his father. And then he returned dead…
Shahnaz Bashir
After almost two years of his disturbing death, Sameer Rah continues to haunt me. And because sometimes it is purely narcissistic to pursue your whims against your own wishes, I set off one early evening towards Batamaloo along with one of my students. I drive along the bad roads of Batamaloo’s interior, looking for SD Colony. I don’t know why I have switched to Kishtawari brothers’ Waseem Ul and Naseem Ul Haq’s Kalwaalan chownam daamo… from a meaningless FM song in the dashboard stereo and put it on low volume though.
‘What does “S D” stand for?’ I inquire from my student, accompanying me. ‘I have no idea, sir’
I lower the glass of the car door, stopping simultaneously by a shopfront fraught with gossiping elders who are vividly indicative of the futility of their gossip and also inscrutable about the helplessness to avoid such talk. ‘Return back towards that bunker,’ one of the elders says, pointing with his finger, ‘then turn right, then left.’
From a crossroads I pick a narrow shop-lined linkroad, flanked with dozer-dug furrows, the tyres of my car crunching the loose gravel. I come to a halt near a tin sign tied to a cement pole that says SD Colony, Lane 4. There are some children playing before a shut shop. My student lowers the window on his side, calls on one of the huffing, gum-chomping boys, and enquires about the directions to Sameer’s home. ‘It’s very close to the Ahl-i-Hadees Masjid, there,’ the boy gestures towards his left.
I taxi slowly, keenly, watching ahead. ‘There it’s, the Masjid,’ my student says confidently.
Suddenly, I find myself at the acme of absurdity; vaguely reluctant to enter the single-storey house in front of us. At this instant, for a moment or two, I stay hideously motionless, and utterly confused to find myself desiring pain by knowing about the continual suffering of Sameer’s family. Indecisively, I drop in, with a poetic anxiety. ‘Good that I grew some stubble before coming in here,’ I think, ‘for coming clean-shaved, tidied and being formally dressed is an embarrassment at a place like this.’
Farida, Sameer’s mother, stands leaning her back against the wall of her kitchen. Sameer’s father is not home and might be selling fruits in the bazaar of Batamaloo.
I feel it awkward to strike a conversation. What should be the first words, the first sentence, the first question instead? For some seconds I stand speechless under the canopy of a pomegranate tree in the small enclosed lawn of the house, rolling in my mind, scanning the front veranda for its things: a worn mattress, some back-beaten cushions, a gas cylinder, a fraying broom; and a small girl briefly appearing in the main doorway.
Past an ill-planned mincing of words we manage to get insisted upon to be shown inside.
After purchasing pears from the openly laid fruit grocery in the backyard of a neighbourhood vendor, on that sweltering fateful August afternoon, Sameer had had his lunch, boiled rice and collard greens, and popped a toffee in his mouth. Gauging the trouble in the area, he had chosen a backstreet to his uncle’s, not knowing that behind a turnoff, on the road, death had lain ambush to batter him dead along with the sweet on his tongue; and make him defecate and urinate in his pajamas.
The whole neighbourhood had come alive. People had snowballed. ‘Masked young boys sprouted, as if, from walls, from nowhere,’ recounts Farida, retrospectively. Rest, all of us know.
The poor parents had followed their youngest child of eight to the hospital gurney, got medicine for him, reluctant to believe that he could be dead, till a doctor, attending Sameer, had chewed his pen and send the helpless couple beating their chests and bruising their temples. We sit in a closet-sized stuffy room under a noisily whirring ceiling fan. There are draped large niches sculpted out in unevenly plastered thick walls, painted a shiny peach, for would-be wooden cupboards and wardrobes.
Farida emerges from the kitchen with two steel tumblers of chilled water, the ice cubes still melting on the surfaces. The washing machine beeps in the corridor, wherein a pair of powder-blue electricity lines sags perilously. She calls on a child, probably, her daughter. ‘Unplug it,’ she hollers.
I observe the padded appearance of the shirt around Farida’s waist. She is supporting her failing back with a lumbar belt. When she speaks you can’t discern some things. The last syllables of some of her words fuse with the first syllables of the words that follow. This is what you should expect from many a Kashmiri mother who have become narrating machines of their miseries. I fix my gaze on a picture hanging high on the wall. A young girl and a small boy stand in front of an old woman in it. Being far I mistake the boy for Sameer. ‘No, it is not him,’ says Farida, standing up with difficulty.
She brings two laminated photographs from the other room. ‘Here,’ she shoves the pictures, one in my direction and the other in my student’s. In the one, which is with me, Sameer’s well-dressed cut-out sits photoshopped on a heavenly background of a garden with lush green turf, a humped wooden bridge, a boat in a blue lake and ferns all around. As I study the picture, Farida rummages in a white plastic bag for something. ‘I have some more, passport-size, of him as well,’ she appends and produces a small photo of Sameer that I have often seen in newspapers. She brings out another pixelated one of him, mustering to hold it out before my eyeline. Here in, Sameer sleeps on the stretcher, shortly before he was buried. ‘This is the one…,’ she leaves the sentence unfinished.
‘It must have been hard since then?’ I ask stupidly. For obviously it must have been.
‘I am not well since,’ she sobs.
‘I can understand,’ I want to say but it will be more stupid of me to say it.
‘Only my medicine costs fifteen hundred rupees a month now,’ she snivels. ‘My husband too isn’t well.’
I look at the other picture of Sameer my student has passed on to me. In this one the young boy that he was, Sameer, clad in a cream-coloured Khansuit and matching fancy waistcoat, stands in the crook of his squatting father’s arm in some vast park.
‘Do you know anything about interlocutors?’ I ask Farida, incoherently.
‘Who? Are you talking about angrez people?…Yes, they visited me frequently,’ she responds.
‘No. No. No. I’m talking about the trio that roamed about the valley for a year, in the aftermath of 2010, to know what Kashmiris actually wanted but ended up reporting what it itself actually wanted from Kashmir?’ I say, describing in detail about the three guys. Farida seems listless.
On the way back home I am suddenly reminded of what S D could possibly stand for: Sheikh Dawood. The colony of Batamaloo is named after a saint called Hazrat Sheikh Dawood (RA).
(The author teaches writing to journalism students in the Central University of Kashmir, views are his own)
