At this uncertain time of scarred historicity and the chaotic years I had followed from the beginning of my existence onto the world, memory of my past would often haunt me. I had seen the people of my age suffocated, caught in the hue and cry not finding any sight of peace dawning. I had heard houses have souls and I have beyond statistics to have the quantum of how they razed and murdered, the coffins gnarled, I could hear voices the mute trees in helplessness, golden dust with shades of fear colouring it, but deductive observant in me (that’sstill) seeing it as far thing to hope for since both the sides are grazing each other quietly.
The abyss I am in just makes me wonder how from the timeline of remembrance and the memory of the people who just were in this world just to let people (us) deconstruct as what was coming which is hovering every time over us now and then. The contentment and the beauty (imagined land) from which it got impregnated is no more as the people just think dying is the ultimate meaning of life and living .The birds outside squawking in the quizzical way ask me how can this happen in any nation. Just having the answering glance to the airs out there I could see everything being checked, marked and tagged taking me to the ‘allegory of regional realities’ and ‘heterogeneity of time’. Just mere subjects like in Stanford Prison experiment and I could see the same bird again flying from the cracked window and had the answer- everything was just blood thirsty on us from the Big ‘mainland devil’ to the ‘valley ghosts’
In some sense of it I could just locate the binary of two ‘spaces’ I had travelled in the one I nowhere found/find the cop to frisk, to thrash, to shoot, to makefearful to their own people but that I found on my ‘Other’ place I was startled to concur that it’s the law of day and order of night here which frightened me most. Then I find easy to distinguish between desolation and peace on the subterranean layers of truth and ‘post truth’s that’s being thrust over us.
About to drown further in this terrible dream of sleeping with this nightmarish everyday reality I could hear from outside some people making merry amidst the torn and troubled waves that have been coming against the geographical and historical permits .That humorous and the struggling smiles around just whispered in me a thought why can’t peace be here then?
The resilience and the disasters we have faced yet caring for the neighbours and every human being who’s around us then wakes me up and just far-sighting through my ‘induced’ and ‘disciplined’ myopic shackles to see the morning sun lighting for peace
Let the peace rain and shine on the land/lands
Author hails from north Kashmir’s Baramulla district.