Fifth August 2019 was going to be a very special day for Mahak. There was a wedding in her family, and mind you, it wasn’t just any other ceremony. In a family full of daughters, it was the first time in twelve years that a boy had come of age. Mahak’s cousin, one of only three other boys in the family, was getting married. The girl was from Delhi. It was a union of love. The bride’s entire family had descended in Srinagar for the nuptials and were in the process of getting used to the culture and customs of the region and, of course, to Kashmiri zārè pār, emphatic Kashmiri hospitality sometimes bordering on goodnatured smothering.
Mahak was giddily ecstatic about meeting all her cousins who had landed in town just for this. They were all going to be under the same roof after a very long time.
In her early twenties, Mahak was pursuing a BA in English literature in Kashmir and was in her final year. In a few months, she would be graduating. She had lived in downtown Srinagar her whole life; she wasn’t sure if she was ready to leave the nest just yet.
Mahak had known a sheltered school life. Though there weren’t many restrictions, she could sense the subtle constraints that came with being a girl. She couldn’t walk alone to her tuition class or wait for a bus by herself. It was only in college that she truly came into her own. Mahak made friends she knew would anchor her forever. Chief amongst them was Sehrish. Though they had only known each other for three years, theirs was a friendship made in heaven. A bonus was that if she was with Sehrish, she didn’t need to be chaperoned anywhere. Mahak finally knew the freedom that she desired with her friend.
On 4 August, on her cousin’s mạ̄nzirāth, Sehrish called Mahak. She was missing her terribly. There was news of something ghastly happening in Kashmir, and she wanted some reassurance. Mahak calmed her down, assuring her that she would call her back. She had to take the mehandī for the bride. Sehrish cut the call, feeling dejected.
Mahak wanted to comfort her friend, but she was in a hurry to follow the Kashmiri tradition of taking the mehandī to the bride’s house to be applied on her hands and feet. Mahak slipped the phone into her pocket and urged the rest of the mạ̄nzi-kūr – the mehandī girls – to hurry up.
It was dark outside, and the streets were deserted. They had to drive from the house in Bagh-e-Mehtab to where the bride’s family was staying in Hyderpora. There were army vehicles stationed everywhere. An eerie silence surrounded them, and Mahak could sense that the air held panic. Her cousin Farah was driving and Mahak was sitting next to her, clutching the basket of henna in her lap. The car with the men from their family had driven up ahead; their vehicle was now out of sight. A pall of terror descended as the girls reached a secluded bridge.
“Let’s just go back,” Mahak told Farah. They were a short distance away from Hyderpora, but with the army everywhere, the distance seemed to widen. If anything happened to them, no one would hear for miles. Farah shook her head. Mahak whispered, “What if we get raped?” Her cousin gave her a sharp look and then glanced behind to look at the younger girls in the car. With resolve, she hit the gas and zoomed out of there. They reached the venue ten minutes later, their hearts thumping in their chests.
They forgot all about the fear that had gripped them when they saw the gorgeous bride. They sang and danced well into the night. As a group of women beat the tumbakhnạ̄r – an ancient Kashmiri percussion instrument – in jubilance, Mahak didn’t hear the calls she had been receiving from Sehrish.
The girls got back home well after midnight. Mahak finally checked her phone and saw twenty missed calls. She immediately felt a pang of guilt. Though she was tired after the exhilarating night she’d had, she decided to send wedding pictures to Sehrish as a peace offering for being incommunicado. But the pictures wouldn’t go through. There was no Wi-Fi or phone signal. She frowned. This was odd. She tried again and again. She thought something was wrong with her phone, so she turned it off and back on. But the phone network was unresponsive, as was the Wi-Fi.
Exhausted, Mahak put her phone on charge and went to bed. She would talk to Sehrish in the morning, she promised herself.
On the morning of 5 August, she woke up, planning the day in her head. The phone still wasn’t working, but she was unfazed. Maybe the Prime Minister was in town. The authorities often cut off mobile internet connections when he visited. He always left by the end of the day, and the phones would start working again.
She got her shaadi clothes out of the cupboard. While typically Mahak wasn’t interested in fancy clothes or shopping, for this wedding she had splurged on her outfits and make-up. She wanted to see herself dressed to the nines.
As Mahak got ready, she could hear her relatives stirring awake upstairs and the guests pouring into the house downstairs. She caught snippets of traditional Kashmiri wedding songs with a few Bollywood numbers. Her mother popped in to hand her a stack of clothes to iron. Mahak got to work.
A little later, Mahak came down with the freshly ironed clothes for her mother, when she noticed something unusual. All the men in the family had huddled in one room where the TV was blaring. They were watching the news together. As she handed her mother the ironed clothes, her mother gave her a tray of kahwè-filled cups. She told her to offer it to those watching TV. Mahak went into the room to serve kahwè; she was alarmed by the solemnity all around.
She didn’t glance at the TV immediately or listen to what the news anchor was saying; she was much too shocked by the expressions on the men’s faces. Offering a cup of kahwè to her father, Mahak asked what was wrong. He gestured towards the TV. Finally, she looked at it and saw what the others were following. Bold letters screamed the truth: Articles 370 and 35A abrogated in Jammu and Kashmir. The Indian home minister was making a speech in the Parliament. Mahak started shivering. The cups in her tray clattered. Hot kahwè spilled all over her new clothes.
“That day I promised myself that I wouldn’t wear fancy dresses anymore,” Mahak said.
As her mother helped her clean up, Mahak felt angry tears rolling down her cheeks. She stared at her dead phone. She thought of the twenty missed calls from the night before from Sehrish. What if she never got to talk to her friend? What if she didn’t get to reply to her messages? Why had she called twenty times? What if she never found out why?
In a matter of minutes, life shrank for Mahak. Later, she recalled, “You could have been talking to your friend, or your beloved, or a cousin you loved so much, or somebody who had just given birth … and it was all stolen from you. Someone may have said, ‘I’m going to call you after five minutes,’ and cut the call. Five minutes later, their phone would have been dead. The feeling in itself is devastating.”
As the news became bigger and spread like wildfire, for Mahak what was most heartbreaking was this – that hardly anyone could make it to her brother’s wedding. The people who had managed to come, be it from Ganderbal, Tangmarg or Baramulla, were stuck in Srinagar now, with no way of going back. Srinagar was under total lockdown.
A distraught Mahak told her mother, “I waited for this wedding for twelve years, it was supposed to be the best!” Her mother didn’t have the words to comfort her. It was as though something had shattered in all of them.
Mahak changed out of her wedding clothes and refused to dress up. Call it anger, call it hatred, call it angst, but she was adamant. Her mother pleaded with her to get ready at least for her brother’s sake. But Mahak couldn’t get herself to do it. Her favourite day had been ruined by them.
The family had a low-key and sombre wedding. Of the four hundred people invited, only fifty made it. Some relatives who lived a mere ten minutes away couldn’t come due to army barricades blocking the roads. The guests and relatives from the bride’s side who had flown in from Delhi were in a state of shock. Never had they experienced anything like this, never had their basic human rights been denied to them, never had it occurred to them that for Kashmiris this was the norm. While the gracious hosts did everything they could to make the guests comfortable, many were terrified, and a non-Kashmiri friend of the bride ran away on the day of the nikāh; she caught the first flight out she could find.
Mahak felt no sympathy for her. All she could see was her cousin brother’s distressed face. This boy – who had fallen in love with a girl and who had been elated when she had agreed to marry him – had been deprived of his big day. It was unfair. What felt even more unfair was to see him being compelled to maintain a brave front. He smiled at his bride in a bid to ease her anxiety, pressed her hand to soothe her after the nikāh-nama had been read, and stayed strong for both of them.
Excerpted with permission from Lōal Kashmir: Love and Longing in a Torn Land, Mehak Jamal, HarperCollins India.
