A Powerful Account of Growing Up in a Conflict-Ridden State: Rumours of Spring | EXCERPT

Rumours of Spring is the coming-of-age memoir of Farah Bashir’s adolescence spent in Srinagar in the 1990s. The author captures moments of vitality and resilience from her girlhood amidst the increasing trauma and turmoil of passing years – secretly dancing to pop songs on banned radio stations; writing her first love letter; going to the cinema for the first time – with haunting simplicity. This deeply affecting account portrays how territorial conflict surreptitiously affects everyday lives in Kashmir. Read an excerpt:

‘Shukur, there is no load-shedding tonight. Even while leaving, she made sure she didn’t cause us any inconvenience. Moaj aes jantich hooer,’ Mother mumbled to herself and then asked me to recite prayers.

I’d heard her, but didn’t pay any heed. I kept my eyes tightly shut. I was drifting away to a state between sleep and wakefulness, where the eyelids may shut the world out, but the ears hear everything. Both perceiving their own realities…

I am a middle-aged, stout woman, seated in the corridor of a dilapidated house. My face is radiant. With resilience, perhaps? My thin lips are firmly pressed against each other, my mouth drooping towards the ends, forming a broad and stretched version of the letter U, albeit inverted. It makes me appear disappointed, maybe intensely sad. The expression deepens as I hear the screams of a teenage boy coming from across a dark and dingy corridor. The clear, persistent sound of torture doesn’t make me wince or tremble, though it ought to.

Amidst his shrieking, I overhear a conversation.

I hear murmurs of a young woman, but my mind is preoccupied with the screams of the teenage boy.

Moa-ji, Moa-ji.

Then the screams fade out and the conversation from next door become clearer.

The young woman says, ‘I really have nothing to give you. What can I give you? I have nothing at home. I have no one to fall back on except Allah T’allah. Please help me find him. At least, tell me which prison he is in? Please.’

‘You are prolonging your own misery. Do as I say and see how your life changes!’

Finally, I turn into a young woman in her teens. The sadness in her eyes makes her look decades older. She looks like someone who has endured years of suffering. Wearing an old pheran embroidered with worn-out tilleh, I am carrying a framed photograph of a young man in my halam. The face in the photograph appears smudged as if it had been recovered from a deluge. Suddenly, the framed photograph clones itself into thousands of photographs all around me, like magic, but in a scary way. There are faces of men, everywhere, but no men.

Next, I find myself sitting in a garden, blooming with long rows of daffodils. How unusual. Daffodils grow wild in graveyards. In this garden, tourists have gathered in large numbers. Men, women and children from the plains donning Kashmiri attire and jewellery, carrying wicker baskets filled with plastic flowers and ornamental bouquets, are getting photographed. They too are carrying photos in frames. Glossy prints, smiling faces. I sit there in the garden for a long time, but no one seems to notice either my presence or the thousands of photographs around me.

I reached out to the copper kandkaer jug to pour myself a glass of water. It stood on a newspaper. According to Father, our newspapers had turned into nothing less than ‘mortuaries laid out on broadsheets’.

For me, they signalled the end of story-time with Bobeh. In the past months, she had become obsessed with newspapers, and instead of telling me folk tales like she used to in the past, she would spend time pointing at photographs that were printed in the dailies. She’d tug at the sleeve of my pheran and say, ‘It is a mayhem! Karbala! Vichi, vichi…’

One night, Bobeh urged me to look at a photograph that had been printed in that day’s papers – that of shoes and slippers scattered all over a street. In uneven pairs. As had become her habit, she inferred what she could from the frame aloud: ‘People seemed to have fled. But why would they leave their chappals and shoes behind? That military voal looks alert. With his hands firmly placed on his loins, he is inspecting the road carefully. He is looking at … something that I cannot see. Can you tell me what he is looking at so keenly? Where were all the people now, whose shoes were left behind? Talay vuch…’

I didn’t respond to her, as I was drifting off to sleep, but my dream then turned out to be an extension of what Bobeh had narrated to me…

Part of the same tableau, I am standing on the other side of the road in a congregation of women. I can see myself, as if I am behind the frame as well as in it… There is a long streak of blood on my forehead, emerging from my hairline. I look shocked and angry. I feel scared looking at my own face.

I woke up and touched my face. Bobeh had left my side, but the newspaper lay there, with the photograph of the abandoned footwear.

The vivid dream caused by it had been too real and that gave me a headache. I wanted to stay away from the swathes of photographs published in the newspapers of unarmed, dead civilians. I wanted some physical distance from those pages, lest I dreamt of them again. But the more I wanted to peel myself away, the stronger their hold on me became.

Thankfully, the newspaper underneath the jug beside Bobeh’s dead body was different. There was a sense of relief because it was not ours. I mean not from Kashmir. So, the chances of death smeared on it were minimal. I examined the coloured advertisement in one of the corners of the front page. It featured a woman next to a mattress with the words ‘Guaranteed Comfort’ floating above her head. Encouraged by the dreamy smile on the model’s face, I opened the newspaper. I found an entire page filled with comics, a crossword puzzle, film releases, and half a page dedicated to weekly and monthly horoscope readings. My forecast said:

You will feel the urge to expand your horizons, try new things, bigger and better things. You may have some luck with finances and possession, growing your net worth. You will be fortunate in romance as you appear mysterious to many!