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What do the 1990s mean to you?
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The answer, of course, depends on context – where you were during those years, what
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your experiences were like at the time, the kind of music and books and films you consumed
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– and some of you may not even have been born then.
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My last episode, where J. Arjun Singh and Subruk Mohanty was about cinema, and though
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none of us would call the 90s our favourite decade in terms of films, it was pleasant
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enough, Kieslowski, Tarantino, David Dhawan, what's not to like.
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But think about the 1990s from the point of view of a Kashmiri child growing up in Kashmir
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in a time of constant curfew, occasional raids, army bunkers in residential neighbourhoods
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and the fear, every time a loved one left home, that they may not return.
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For you had seen this before, and death was both normal and normalised.
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How do you grow up in a world like that?
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How do you process it and make sense of it?
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What do the 1990s mean to you?
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Welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Farah Bashir, who studied psychology in college, worked as a photojournalist
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for Reuters and then chose to walk away from that life and try and write about her past.
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Farah grew up in Kashmir in the 1990s, took years to come to terms with that childhood
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and has now brought it to us in a deeply moving book called Rumours of Spring.
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Rumours of Spring is narrated from the point of view of the adolescent Farah, before she
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comes to adulthood and gains the frames to make sense of that world.
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It's impressionistic and detailed and gives us such a clear view of that young girl's
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interior life, which mirrors both the starkness and turmoil of her exterior world.
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It's a powerful book that has stayed with me after I read it and I was delighted to
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have Farah on this show to talk about her experiences as a child in Kashmir and about
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the experience of reliving that childhood and writing this book.
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Before we begin our conversation though, let's go to a unique kind of commercial break,
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Capital Gyan by Deepak Shanoi.
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This is like a show within a commercial from the kind sponsors of this episode, Capital
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And today's show within a commercial is like a commercial for this show, which is
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too meta for me, but what to do, Deepak is like that only.
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It's a strange thing, this Amit Varma's podcast.
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Who would have thought that so many of us would love five plus hour podcasts.
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There's a quality to the seen and the unseen.
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That beats all stereotypes, right?
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If you can say it in five words, don't use 50.
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Sometimes it takes 50 to tell you what those five words really mean.
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The attention span of the average user is eight minutes, they say.
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Well, here's a podcast that does what?
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400 minutes and still keeps people's attention and makes them want even more.
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All these sayings, they may be right in their own way, but the truth is, there's great value
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The world of business is similarly crazy.
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Who would have thought the biggest payment company in India, or two of them, would not
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like Google Pay and a company that sells groceries and cheap towels like PhonePay, which is owned
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Who would have thought that an oil refiner that makes petrol and diesel like Reliance
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would revolutionize telecom to a point where all calls are free and India has the cheapest
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Who would have thought that a company that financed three-wheeler autos from Bajaj Auto
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would then go on to become India's largest or second largest non-banking lender worth
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more than three times what Bajaj Auto is?
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Investing is not intuitive.
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Sometimes you have to stop predicting and start reacting.
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Let the market tell you what's happening and change your view accordingly.
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As my friend, Joy Bhattacharya, has said, angels can fly because they take themselves
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Talk to us and we'll tell you more about our investing process.
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We're at cm.social slash scene unseen.
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Be prepared for change and be prepared to change.
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cm.social slash scene unseen.
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Farah, welcome to the scene unseen.
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It's a pleasure being here.
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Yeah, I was in Delhi three or four months ago, I'm just saying this for the benefit
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of my listeners and I invited Farah and she said yes, but then there was a little mishap
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and I think you had your leg in a cast.
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So I have to say, I love reading your book.
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It is as we were discussing before we started, so moving.
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But apart from the book, I've realized that I don't know much about you at all, unlike
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most of my other guests who will have 50 YouTube videos, six other books and all of that.
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So I'm keen to find out more about you and of course a book and a lot of what we'll talk
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about today is about your early childhood growing up in Kashmir and all of that.
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But give me a sort of a broader sense of what do you do and so on and so forth.
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Well, firstly, thanks for having me on this show.
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I mean, I've been listening to your episodes and they're really engaging and now to be
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here is an absolute pleasure.
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So well, the book, the period where the book, which the book sort of tackles is between
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And I'm going to give you an idea of what I did after 94.
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After 94, I did my college and then I did a year at the university in Kashmir.
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And then after which I went to Singapore to study.
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So I did my masters there and joined Reuters there.
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I was a sub editor there.
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And that's when things changed in me, when I joined Reuters and you deep dive into news
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Earlier you've been watching and reading and hearing it.
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And I started, news started coming in from Kashmir from this is 2005, six, seven, eight.
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And I was looking at editing Basra and Iraq invasion and Palestine and also then Kashmir.
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And that's when I realized the way other conflicts get spoken about, there was nothing on Kashmir
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So it was always someone else talking, someone else writing.
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And this is around the time when Basharat Bir's book, Curfew Night also came out.
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Until then, he and I are almost the same age and we're the same batch.
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I hadn't really read anything by a woman or a man, Kashmiri's perspective.
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So I started thinking about writing.
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I started thinking about telling that story.
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And this is exactly 2008 when the governments were toppled.
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And then after that, it was pretty restive till about 2017, every year, every summer
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used to be a bloody summer.
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And then there was a clause in the contract of Reuters that if you were to write a book,
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you had to take permissions.
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And at that point, I think it was in my head that if I have to write, I cannot be in journalism.
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And also I was very passionate about being in journalism.
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So I thought two things can't take the same amount of energy from me.
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I'll have to work on the book and the story that I was thinking of as a girl growing up
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So then I took up jobs, sometimes in advertising, sometimes in strategy, sometimes in marketing,
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just to basically pay my bills because I was living in Singapore and it's a very expensive
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But I would come back and I would write till mornings.
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And I did that for about seven, eight years.
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I lived in Singapore for about 12 years.
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I came back so that I could be closer home.
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I tend to, you know, when I'm in Kashmir and I'm writing there, the writing is very different.
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A, I feel extremely overwhelmed by whatever is happening around.
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So I feel like what's ever going to change by writing.
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It feels a bit crass at times.
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You're like, kids are dying on the streets.
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And this is around that time when I was thinking and writing and framing the story.
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And then you have a little bit of distance and the normal life and the freedoms that
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you experience outside.
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The contrast is so stark.
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You feel like, oh, you know, this story needs to be told.
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So apart from writing, also trying to understand different realities, trying to navigate life.
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And then of course life happens to you and things happen.
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But the focus has always been the story.
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And I wrote about two manuscripts, which I discarded on my own.
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I was trying to write fiction and probably trying to create that emotional and physical
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distance from the story.
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But there were some dreams that I used to have, I used to have reckoning dreams, which
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then I examined and I started writing these four, five, I used to call them fillers.
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And I thought these would propel my story.
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These would fill the gaps in the big story once the penny drops and I'd be able to write
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But then I realized that these were not the fillers or the passages that were intended
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to sort of put in the narrative or to furthering of plot.
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It was really, you know, I spoke to someone at one of the universities, I went to deliver
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a talk and they said, there was a Kashmiri girl then and she said, when I read the book,
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I realized that we can actually talk about these things, like how you feel if you take
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a step that's a little too loud because in old houses, the staircases are wooden and
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it might attract undue attention from outside on the road.
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She said, I can still feel that fear, that paranoia that it creates, but I didn't think
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it was important to write about those things.
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So when you grow up in a situation like that, in a conflict zone like that, you start normalizing
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a lot of things which are not supposed to be normal at all, but that's the reality you
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So I know I've digressed from the original question, but it was just generally to give
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you an idea of, I have always been thinking about the book after graduating and kept various
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other jobs to pay my bills, tried to sometimes write for the newspapers back home, but again,
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the focus was what was I going to write about, because there's so much that's been written
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on Kashmir and that will be written on Kashmir from various points of view, from whether
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it's, but what wasn't really there, what I had been looking for so many years was a girl's
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story, a young girl's story and how, and I don't really see things changing in a drastic
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My 11 year old niece, what I experienced at the age of 11, she's seen that from the age
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of one or two, they live in this particularly restive area and she's almost grown up on
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tear gas and power spray, so she has respiratory issues and she's 11 and every time there used
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to be that power spray, pepper spray outside and she would be crying and asking her mother
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So seeing things like this and then it gets normalized and the next day she goes to school
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and it's forgotten, but also it's a small society, everyone knows everyone.
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So people don't overtly talk about their experiences either, the way I've written in the book,
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whether it was my obsession to pull out my hair, for example, and then again, when I
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was studying in Singapore, I read this book, Good Women of China and that is where I realized
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there's this girl in that book in the first chapter or first or second chapter who gets
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molested at home and then she has an accident and she has to be hospitalized.
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So as she's healing at the hospital, she starts poking her wound again so that the healing
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or the treatment is delayed and she doesn't have to return to that site of fear and violence.
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So I realized when there's so much happening around women, they start turning against their
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own bodies because that's where you have the control.
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So if you are living in a conservative society, patriarchal society, on top of that, there
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is this kind of militarization and there is a proper conflict brewing ongoing, then what
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do women do at that point?
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So they're almost like dual recipients of violence and at that point, and it's something
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when after I wrote about it, I've spoken to some journalists who also said, spoke about
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when they lose control, how they sort of engage in self-harm.
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So I feel like even though it's not palatable, but these are things which I'm sure we fever
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to speak to other women and girls and my sample size wasn't really big.
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I spoke about, in my book, I talk about 14 women, including myself, and their ways to
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cope or not cope with war or an ongoing conflict and there was a cousin's wife who actually
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She jumped into the river and then her body was fished out a couple of days later.
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And if you met her, if you looked at her, she had the most calming presence and she
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looked very, she was quiet and clearly there was agitation within her, which wasn't visible
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to anyone until she took the drastic step.
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And so, yeah, my aunt who was 60 and she used to salute the patrolling parties.
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So how do different, and it also takes you back to what Svetlana Aleksevich talks about.
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She says women experience war and conflict insurgency very differently.
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And I realized no two women have the same experience.
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You might be in caught in a cross firing or a bomb blast or a crackdown and your experience
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could be very different and you could be sisters and the way you would deal with that moment.
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And I just feel not enough gets spoken about because there's a, you know how gender is
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It's also used to silence a community and horrible things are done to women in a particular
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society if they have to be subjugated, if that community has to be subjugated.
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So as a result, you're always treading very carefully and we don't get to hear things
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which should be spoken about to get a complete picture of a particular society's.
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I mean, you see whatever is happening on the street that doesn't, that gets documented
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by the journalists, killings or stone pelting or cross firing or a bomb blast.
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But what women bear and carry with them, that doesn't really get as much spoken about as
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And it was also writing about this book was also to, you know, it was, I was 13 and when
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things changed that night, when I went to get a haircut and by the time we came out
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of the salon, things had completely changed outside.
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There was a first incident of firing outside and it's a particular fracture which sort
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of remains in your life and, you know, we talk about mental health issues.
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We talk about statistics again in classified terms.
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I was a student of psychology back home.
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So I used to go for field work to the institution there and we would come back with the findings
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from the field work and we would tell our professors that what we study and what we
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read in the books is very different from what we see there and how people like someone who
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has schizophrenia would change or split personality disorder, would change their personality or
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their tone in a matter of like 10 seconds.
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So again, when we talk about mental health issues, there's a certain generalization,
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but I don't think like, for example, that I also talk about it in the book, you have
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PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder.
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But what happens when it's perennial and it doesn't stop?
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So I feel there are also limitations there and one, there are many things that one could
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write about and one hopefully will write about, but also from other cultures who have experienced
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I remember reading this Turkish book by Irfan Orga, a lesser known novelist from Turkey,
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and he'd written about his mother and during the war, many, many decades ago, and towards
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the end, how his mother loses her mind during the war.
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So again, it's from a male perspective, a woman telling her story, it's actually, I
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think it's a memoir, portrait of a young Turkish family, or a Turkish family, sorry, may not
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So that was what I've been doing.
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That is how the idea of writing a book came about.
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But I think it's this irrepressible, not desire, but this need to tell your story.
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You feel stifled the whole time.
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But some people just, I mean, my cousin, I mentioned her briefly in the book, she had
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a lot of gusto and a lot of courage and she would be like, oh, let's go to the UN office
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and let's take the memo with us and memorandum and we can actually sit outside the office.
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And my aunt used to be like, she was all 14.
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And I remember at that point, whatever was happening around me was an out of body experience.
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So I wouldn't engage with anything at that point, till I said, till Reuters happened.
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But now you see her, she's completely blocked everything around her.
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All she's focused on is her kids going to school and so, yeah, I mean, it's also like
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how people then just accept it as fate, which is really sad because I mean, like I said,
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I keep looking at my niece and I wonder like, what would someone like, what would her counterpart
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and some other part of the world, what would her upbringing be?
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Because when August 5, 2019 happened and article was de-operationalized, this is a year before
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pandemic schools were already shut.
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And there was a certain similarity, two things which struck me as almost like my childhood
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having been repeated again, she started blocking school completely in her mind.
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She was in grade two and she started painting a lot and I used to do the same thing.
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I used to keep sketching the whole time and my grandmother used to get really upset and
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she started doing that and then there used to be periods where she would really get ready
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and ask my father, her grandfather to take her to meet her friends because she would
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And I remember craving the company of my friends and going to school.
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So some things, like I said, it's a repeat of, it's almost like a life which is templatized
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and you keep, it's been set for you and your generations will sort of live the same life
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all over again and again.
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And yeah, trying to, this was to gather those experiences, but writing about those four
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years was also like, I particularly chose that because 94 is when my grandmother passed
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away and I was very close to her.
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And I saw something which I realized later that her existence became extremely decimated.
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She was a starving personality, she would give career advice to people and suddenly
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you saw whatever was happening around us.
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She had no idea of what it was and what was going to happen, no experience there.
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So as a result, her space started shrinking and she spent a lot of time on the prayer
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mat, which I didn't really see her doing that before.
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Like she would pray five times a day, but not spend extended amounts of time.
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She would spend a lot of time sitting by the window, but those were shut for years because
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we had this house which was on the street and we didn't open windows for many, many
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years and only it was just the winter.
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But even in winter she was asthmatic, so she would keep a bit of window open to let the
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So her existence was completely decimated and seeing her make sense of a world that
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she was thrown into or that was thrust upon her was something that I think when I wrote
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the book or wrote about these memories and these chapters is what came to me that I had
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that trauma, I couldn't articulate it then.
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And she then becomes the spine of the book and her funeral becomes the spine.
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And it also shows that how natural death at that point was such a blessing, dying of natural
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causes and because every time you came back, it was either in cross firing, someone was
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being assassinated or had been assassinated.
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Like this friend of mine, I remember making that call particularly to school that morning
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and I couldn't get through, then I called a friend of mine and she's like, there's no
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My father has been killed and then that friend died, but she died of a heart attack.
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So it was, you know, suddenly entered like a nightmare and that becomes your adolescence
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and your teenage years.
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So again, there was this urgency to talk about that and a lot of people block it, but I don't
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know how much can it really be blocked subconsciously.
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One of the things that makes a book particularly powerful for me is a choice that you made
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to tell it from the viewpoint of that adolescent girl, you know, and not come at it from a
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distance and talk about it like a third person looking back and all of that, but it's pretty
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much the viewpoint of that girl.
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And therefore there are so many things that are normalized and minimized, both on the
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inside and the outside, you know.
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So on the outside there are, you know, and I'd love to talk about each of these as we
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go along, but things like the constant curfews, the bunkers, the militarized gaze, the raids
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and crackdowns, even little things like we're not using courtyards the same way, there's
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no spice grinding, we're not going to attics as a place of comfort.
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So many things are just normalized, not just on the outside, but also on the inside in
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terms of, you know, just the little girl pulling her hair out and the self-harm that she's
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doing there, or sort of not eating palak kukur, for example, because that particular dish
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is associated with, you know, something bad that happened, or even the fantasy life of
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that young girl where she takes that cassette, young Tarang, and she's dancing to songs
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inside her room, right?
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And I'll talk about each of those and I want to double click on each of those, but first
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the larger question here is that in that narrative voice, it's all normalized, it's all minimized,
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that's what it is, but you mentioned that when you came to writers, you learned to look
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at the world with a journalistic gaze, as it were, and I'm interested in that gaze,
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and one need not even call it a journalistic gaze, it could just be a gaze that leads you
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to look at yourself, perhaps, and see things that you did not see before, not just see
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the what, but also go a little further back, see the why, and sometimes, you know, you
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don't even know the why, but just, you know, take that one step back and be able to look
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at yourself, and I'm guessing that pretty much everything in the book, or pretty much
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everything in my own memories when I think about my past, or any of my guests when they
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talk about their past, a lot of it is a construction and hindsight, you're looking back at events,
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and you're figuring it out, you know, those layers fall, you're seeing things you didn't
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see before, and they were always in front of you, but you're sort of seeing them now.
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So before we actually get into the book and all of these individual things, I want to
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sort of get to understand a little bit better how this process worked for you, of self-examination,
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and obviously, when you're looking at yourself, you're not just looking at yourself, you're
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not just looking at your family, you're looking at the world as it is, you're looking at society
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as it is, you're looking at everything, right?
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What is that process for you then as a writer, because I'm guessing part of the spur for
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that is a distance, you're in Singapore, you're far away, you can look back, part of the spur
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for that is the analogues that you can see in other conflicts like Palestine or wherever,
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and you know, just looking at the same things playing out in different contexts, I guess
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could help you see this more clearly.
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And so what was that process like, of turning your gaze inwards in this way, and is the
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act of writing itself something that helped you with that, like, you know, I've had guests
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on the show who talk to me about the importance of journaling, because every time you kind
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of journal, you are not just examining the self, you're shaping the self, right?
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So, I want to kind of know a little bit about that, because that's that led to the book,
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but it's not in the book.
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And it's really fascinating to me that sort of process of being able to look back, examine
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your memories, you know, how hard is it, how, you know.
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See, 90s was a decade that nobody will forget, whoever witnessed it.
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So inadvertently, unwittingly, you will talk about something that happened in the 90s,
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it could be someone who just died of natural causes.
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So there's this brother-in-law of mine who passed away many years ago in 99 of a heart
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But you remember how he survived the Havel massacre, for example.
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So that is the association.
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So there is nothing that you, there aren't many, like there are associations with the
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So people, relatives, every time you get together, it comes up, A, it doesn't leave you.
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Second, to your point, journaling is extremely important.
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This is something that I started when I was 13.
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So we wouldn't go to school, and our school diaries had these one page broken into two.
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So there was a partition.
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I thought I had two fears, that I was going to forget things, and someone was going to
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die or something was going to happen, and I wouldn't be able to remember or record.
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I don't know, there was this strange thing of losing memory.
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I don't know what that really, I haven't examined that though, but probably it's your existence
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or it's your identity that you don't want to, like what, you're going through such a
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I mean, you may not be able to articulate it then.
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So I started writing every little detail I would recognize and remember, and it almost
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So sometimes later when I was studying in Singapore, if we would go for a movie, a bunch
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of us, and I would, when we would come out and discuss some things, and I would talk
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about things which everyone else had missed.
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So people started thinking I was some kind of a strange person, like looking at details,
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or I would remember things like, or you, things people said a year ago, or what were they
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even wearing during that particular time.
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So I started realizing that I had started registering or engaging with memory in a very
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And on top of that, when you have everyone around you still speaking of the nineties
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as if it hasn't really passed, it then doesn't really leave your being.
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It's there and it's a part of you.
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So I didn't really need a lot of looking back to do because it's ever present.
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What I did really see was how, I mean, there is this book by a Palestinian author called,
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that I read after I wrote my first draft, I sent my first draft, actually a few chapters
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And he said, you should really read this book because it's similar to what you're writing.
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And it's Suad Amiri's, Sharon and my mother-in-law, it's about 40 days that they get stuck in
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curfew and little things that happen in the neighborhood.
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And there was this particular thing, activity that they do at night, they bang pots and
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And that's what we used to do in the nineties where there was this metallic monster who
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used to come and attack people in their houses and we used to do exactly the same thing.
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And anyone you tell from whoever has lived through the nineties will tell you the details.
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So there was no, one hadn't really stepped away to look back.
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And then I read literature from other conflict zones to see what their experiences had been.
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And it's not really, I think politicians also just don't want to innovate.
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They follow what's happening around the world.
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And you see almost like a shared existence in how people, for example, when the book
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came out and there was a journalist who spoke to me and she said it reminded her of Derry
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Girls, the Irish, the coming of age series, or there is an Irish woman in Kashmir, married
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to a Kashmiri, she's lived there for 30 odd years.
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She said she couldn't read my book because it just reminded her of her childhood.
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So you see then there is much something bigger than your own experiences where people have
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also lived these experiences.
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So I read those books to process almost what we had, what my childhood or especially our
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generation had been through.
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Because we did see pre-89 and then we also saw post-89.
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And you keep wondering what, like for example, there was, my grandmother really wanted me
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And it was only because she was really fond of Lakshmi Shri, this Kashmiri Pandit neighbor
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we had, and she used to respect her a lot because she'd be like, you know, she works
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so hard, she's up the whole night.
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So even after they left or they had to flee.
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So for many years, my life was sort of informed or the choices I was making by Lakshmi Shri's
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And then I didn't have a moment to think, why would I want to become a doctor?
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And my grandmother decided it.
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And then eventually I, I mean, I did take a couple of entrance tests, I clearly didn't
#
And I realized that I was far more interested in stories, that I loved literature.
#
But there are certain things, I mean, a lot of things, almost like you lose agency.
#
And everything happens around you where you don't even take a moment to think, why am
#
I taking this decision?
#
So you try and see what's best for you.
#
And again, then you find little things, like dancing, for example, or listening to Nazi
#
husband songs, but doing it away from everyone else, otherwise, now, I mean, you'll have
#
kids engaging in, you know, like, it's not a sin, it's not a crime.
#
But as then at that point, maybe it was guilt, there was also this particular, a cousin of
#
mine who was caught in cross firing, unfortunately, and he died on his way to the hospital.
#
As a result, I can never celebrate Eid, and I couldn't really understand it again till
#
I started thinking about it actively.
#
And why was it that I was so uncomfortable around Eid and it's considered to be so inauspicious
#
if you don't wear clean clothes and dress up on that day.
#
And then you realize like, how little, I mean, how life has really taken away from you.
#
You know, and it's really up to you.
#
How do you then out of sheer will, some people just give up and then they fall ill.
#
I mean, there are so many relatives, almost everyone who has a medicine box literally
#
Every aunt of mine, including my own mother, have been on antidepressants for as long as
#
I remember, over 18, 19 years.
#
So some people move towards religion, some people try and remember what happened, some
#
would just give up and then the body deteriorates.
#
So again, different people trying to navigate life because at the end of the day, I mean,
#
I lost two years, for example, when I was studying because by the time I would, my results
#
would come out, it would be like half the academic year would have passed.
#
So I lost two years like that and it's not something to you in question, like what would
#
I mean, it feels strange, but you would just go with the flow and try and see what you
#
So trying to find semblance of, like I told you, my niece has completely taken to art
#
now and I don't know if it's really what she wants to do with her life, but where are these
#
escape routes to escape the larger reality around you?
#
And that becomes your existence.
#
And I remember again, going back to what I was telling you earlier about this institution,
#
mental institution, I used to go for field work, there used to be a doctor who used to
#
be in one of the corners there and with attendance they would say, he's been there like that
#
for the last eight years and he's now worse than his patients.
#
So it's like 90s where the surreal was a surreal decade that, like I said, it was almost like
#
stepping into a nightmare and you didn't know how to process it.
#
So distance only from, I didn't have distance from it, but it was really trying different
#
ways to understand it and process it.
#
I would paint and I would go on this painting spree for weeks and I would think of other
#
ways to process it because when things happen around you at that magnitude and when I moved
#
to Singapore to study, for example, it took me a year and a half to get my sleeping pattern
#
I wouldn't sleep with something that had eluded me since that night, 89, and I would be up
#
till four, five and then sleep for a few hours and take a nap in between maybe during the
#
So insomnia, not because of insomnia, but there was also this fear, not fear, but maybe
#
subconsciously slipping into these dreams that you saw over and over again and then
#
you woke up equally disturbed as insomnia would leave you.
#
So trying to make sense of life, which I think I'm still like the next book that I'm working
#
on, it's again about its loose adaptation of little women.
#
So it's setting again, those four girls and how do, so these are far more elaborate characters
#
and plotters, a little more spread out.
#
But in the current book, Rumors of Spring, it's really giving you a glimpse of a time
#
which doesn't exist anymore.
#
But again, I find this writing about that particular age group or even why I chose to
#
write about my life of those years is it's a period which it's capturing a time in Kashmir
#
which doesn't exist anymore, A is that, but that's got, that doesn't have much to do with
#
the fact that girls that age don't have a voice and it's, and if you sustain that feeling
#
and if it stays with you, then maybe someday you'll be able to write about it.
#
Things are different now.
#
I mean, there are photojournalists, there are journalists from Kashmir who are telling
#
But again, they're reporting on the place, about the place, very few, it's like an open
#
wound that you're trying to sort of let it heal.
#
But if you keep going back and poking it, it's going to fester for a long time.
#
I remember when I wrote first eight chapters, I used to have panic attacks and sleep, something
#
that I had never had before.
#
But again, it was not only about me, it was also about what one had seen.
#
So I don't know if I answered your question about the distance.
#
It's very, no, it's very illuminating.
#
I mean, questions don't always have answers, they can lead to other questions or answers
#
I was struck by, you know, you mentioned your eye for detail where you'll randomly notice
#
something no one else does.
#
And I was sort of surprised at one point of your book where you speak as a little girl
#
of going to watch Nikah and you remembered that you were, quote, dressed in one of the
#
best frocks that I had at that time.
#
It was a sea green organza dress with tiny paisley motifs at the white hem, stop quote,
#
which is again, you know, and I'm always sort of marveling at this eye for detail because
#
if you ask me what I'm wearing now, I'd like have to look down and kind of notice it.
#
You mentioned how that was a time that doesn't exist anymore.
#
And there are sort of glimpses of this through the book.
#
Like at one point, you talk about the music system that's brought to your house.
#
And I'll read out your description of it where you say, quote, before the big music system
#
arrived at our house, we used to have a small stereo with two basic functions.
#
It had a cavity to insert a tape into and an inbuilt radio.
#
The new one had two spaces for tapes and integrated compact display at the top and also a radio.
#
Its edges were rounded and smooth, not boxy like the old one.
#
It also had detachable speakers.
#
All in all, it took up a fair bit of space.
#
It stood out as one of the very few modern items in our traditional household, stop quote.
#
And I think I'm just a little older than you.
#
So we've grown up in the same years and I remember the transition from exactly that
#
kind of old system to this kind of new one.
#
And it makes me nostalgic because it just makes me realize that so much of that past,
#
so many physical things of the past are artifacts and our ways of life have sort of changed
#
Like my father passed last year and we sold his house and I was there to clear everything
#
Most of the stuff we kind of had to just give away.
#
And there were so many of these artifacts, you know, you'd come across Walkmans, you'd
#
come across those old cassette players where the lid has broken off and all of that.
#
And many, many, many physical books which are also fast becoming artifacts.
#
And I was just thinking about changing ways of life and how this can reflect, for example,
#
in the interior life, like in the interior lives of people, like the little girl who's
#
She's finding escape, right, but she's even the ways that she can escape are kind of constrained.
#
So she can, you know, take the music system into this other room with this cassette and
#
she can dance alone and that's one escape and other escapes can involve, you know, messing
#
with the hair or just drawing a lot.
#
Today kids can just look into the smartphone and there's endless escape.
#
And I feel that there's both a pro and a con to this.
#
And the pro of course is the escape is endless.
#
And a lot of that escape can also be illumination where you can realize you're not alone, you
#
can contextualize what you're going through and make sense of it, you know, all that is
#
But at the same time, there's a danger that you enter this abstract world where you become
#
You know, you go to a cafe today, you'll have four people on a table, they're all looking
#
They're all lost in the abstract worlds of their phones and not in the concrete experience
#
of looking each other in the eye and actually having a conversation.
#
And that's a con, right?
#
And so, you know, I mean, what's your sense of all of this?
#
Because you've taken the process of examining this past, a time that no longer exists.
#
You know, does it fill you with a certain kind of sadness that it's all gone or because
#
a lot of that time was so unpleasant and you're like, okay, we are in a better place today.
#
And as a writer, you know, are you trying to preserve that memory of the past?
#
You know, and you've also spoken about the importance of therapy in your life.
#
Is it also about getting past it?
#
You know, how do, for example, therapy and writing play into each other?
#
Another question, I know I'm just throwing a lot at you, but just kind of thinking aloud
#
on these issues, you know, how does one relate to the past and the way our lives have changed
#
See, regarding the phones, we didn't have mobile phones in Kashmir till, I think, 2003
#
And when the mobile phones came in, it was almost like telling the other person, see,
#
you left home for the whole of 90s and you didn't know whether you were going to come
#
But this is finally a gadget that allowed you to be accessible.
#
And it took away a lot of anxiety and paranoia about, let's say, if there was a blast somewhere,
#
there was something, you could phone the person, you could call them and check if they were
#
So for me, accessing phone was like that.
#
And even when I'm home, I rarely check internet.
#
I almost regress back into that time.
#
I'll either read and my phone is always in the other room on charge or somewhere.
#
Personally, I just feel like there's a use for it.
#
And for some reason, maybe I'm stuck in that time.
#
I just use it for that particular, wherever I am, if I'm in Delhi or outside Kashmir,
#
Srinagar or somewhere else, I'll use it for that particular, whatever I needed to use
#
it for, whether for work or to access social media.
#
But when I'm home, it's almost like I want to preserve that because so much was lost
#
I don't want to deviate too much from that time.
#
It's trying to hold on to certain things because I think other than people, culture and these
#
artifacts that you spoke about, and you spoke about your own experience, they also anchor
#
They're very important.
#
We may not realize it because they might just look very mundane and like coated in stuff
#
in the house, but they're also objects of comfort.
#
They're also objects of sometimes good memories.
#
So in fact, when you were talking, I was trying to remember the brand for that newer one,
#
which doesn't register because it was like a modern item which came home.
#
The older one was Panasonic.
#
So it was almost suddenly, there's this comfort with that particular, but there is with that
#
brand, but there is also, I mean, of course that's a completely different subject, like
#
what being on phones constantly is doing to us and our lives and our brains.
#
But back home, I also feel like, especially when I look at my parents, they're on their
#
They'll be constantly on Facebook or watching something or YouTube, and they're constantly
#
So while I may have some distance sometimes by travel or work from what's happened during
#
those years, it's sometimes maybe like a respite for them to break away from memories, which
#
are not always pleasant.
#
So again, like I said, it's debatable, especially when you're in areas which have had such histories.
#
It sometimes does work in your favor.
#
I remember recently, I keep talking about my niece, it's almost like I watch her and
#
observe how her life is panning out.
#
She watches a lot of DIY videos on YouTube.
#
Sometimes she'll look at music videos, so she tries to look at that.
#
And I remember a few months ago, there was this, during one of those horrible periods
#
of target killings, there was this Sikh teacher who was killed, I think it was Supinder Kaur.
#
And I was video calling my sister and my niece was behind her and she kept saying, tell her,
#
I said, what does she, I mean, does she want something?
#
And she's like, no, you read about that killing.
#
She was her friend's mother.
#
So for a child to process that and only that would have been, I don't know what her mental
#
state would be later, but to have something to deviate or distract from, it's sometimes,
#
to be honest, a blessing in such situations.
#
I mean, in urban reality, it's completely a different subject, but for her to even have
#
that respite, but she wanted to share that information with me, she did.
#
And then to see something, look at something else, for her own sanity, I'm sure it'll
#
all come out somewhere at some point in her life.
#
It's not something that she'll be able to deal with by looking at a video, but you feel
#
sad for that young kid, 10 year old, to have to deal with this kind of world as well.
#
Sometimes also like, before mobile phones came in, phones were a constant source of
#
anxiety, like those wired phones, because you didn't know what news phones brought.
#
And phones were, I think the relationship with phones has always been like, you want
#
to get some information or you're given unpleasant information.
#
And most of the times, phones just didn't work.
#
Those phones, and you would always see a lineman walking on those walls and trying to fix things.
#
So it was a funny memory, but phones just didn't work.
#
And in fact, in the book I mentioned about my first crush, and he used to study in Bangalore.
#
And sometimes they were allowed once a week calls, but there was no way he could phone
#
me from his hostel because they'd hardly worked.
#
So there's a strange relationship with technology.
#
And to be honest, most societies see this as a part of modernity or being, or modernity
#
being introduced to them, technology and other gadgets coming into being.
#
In our, like when I examine and when I look back, we were introduced to modernity by the
#
most sophisticated weapons being used around.
#
So one doesn't even associate modernity with phones or technology or development or evolution.
#
We always now, or for the book also, when I had to research what kind of different vehicles
#
were there, what kind of guns were used, you just read things which no child should have
#
ever been subjected to.
#
So yeah, these are like little, little derring devices.
#
I enjoyed that chapter where you spoke about that crush and the boy Wasim and, and there
#
also an artifact is involved, like the reason it all falls apart is a post office burns
#
down and you have no way of communicating with each other.
#
And the post office also is such an artifact and also, you know, so resonant in different
#
Did you ever meet Wasim again?
#
I mean, because we were distant relatives.
#
So yeah, he's married with two children now, but yeah, again, there were lots of letters
#
which I couldn't post, but I kept writing for the longest time.
#
And I think it's that extension of the journal of maybe a different way of writing.
#
So it was always almost like, and a lot of boys were sent out to study at that point.
#
So I don't know, when I look back and think it's almost like telling someone who is a
#
part of your community, your society, your life, it's like those letters almost like
#
telling them that we also existed because it was a media dark decade and phones not
#
working with post office burning down.
#
How do you then communicate and then you then write those letters?
#
And a lot of times letters used to, I clearly remember, it used to take about 22 days to
#
And I think there were some letters which would reach me after he would come for a...
#
You mentioned that happened once.
#
And there was this, and I remember when a couple of times he came and there was curfew.
#
I recently remember speaking to a much younger friend of mine, I think he was just 30.
#
And he said, how did you keep in touch?
#
Their phones didn't work or when, let's say he was around, I said, it was expected.
#
There would be 30 minute deal, curfew, like basically relaxation of curfew for 30 minutes.
#
And I'd be like, yeah, I would be at a particular place and I knew he would come on his father's
#
So today's generation, it's like some kind of telepathy.
#
And to be honest, it's not very long ago either.
#
It's not like we're talking about 70s, but that place, yeah, it has changed, it hasn't
#
changed, it has changed in some strange way sometimes.
#
There are also like markers of childhood, which no longer exist.
#
They used to be, I remember coming back from school, there used to be a snacks person,
#
matar chole used to be, like shout on top of his voice.
#
And I don't remember seeing him after that.
#
There was a guy in the mornings, because it was completely replaced by curfew, he used
#
to carry this, he used to carry water in sheepskin, this huge bag.
#
And when I read Chinnawachi Abay's Things Fall Apart, and they have that bag where they
#
actually store wine in that, and it reminded me of that guy.
#
And it's like, where did he go?
#
And he used to just sprinkle the roads with water.
#
That was his job in the morning.
#
I don't remember seeing him, that completely has changed.
#
There was a shehnai wala who used to come on Eid.
#
Don't remember him, seeing him for like 20-25 years.
#
So they become a part of your memory, and then they become these, I don't know, these
#
markers of your identity, and you just don't know what to do with them, because one day
#
they were there, and then they just suddenly disappeared.
#
So I don't know, it does something to your being, and you're trying to, while processing
#
what happened, also trying to construct pieces of yourself together, and hence therapy.
#
Because I did study psychology, so I used to think, oh, I'm going to learn from the
#
books, and I don't need it, until you actually get into one, and then you realize how important.
#
I had knee pain in my left knee, which turned out, after many sessions, it was psychosomatic,
#
more than it was anything to do with the knee.
#
And I'd had it for 17-18 years.
#
So there was an incident during firing, like I was caught in it, so we were in a market,
#
it was in 98, there was a blast, and my family was exactly near the spot of the blast, outside
#
I was slightly further away, and I couldn't, my knees became extremely shaky, I couldn't
#
walk, they started trembling, I couldn't walk properly for like two weeks.
#
And then left knee sort of retained that trauma, and every time I would walk fast or take stairs,
#
it would hurt, till I spoke about it at length, and I broke down in therapy, and I haven't
#
had any knee issues in my left knee ever since.
#
So yeah, like psychosomatic.
#
Then you realize what therapy can actually do to your body, because you don't know which
#
part of your body traps trauma.
#
So it was just not psychological, it was actually physiological.
#
I mean, I have a couple of, this might be TMI, but congenital heart conditions.
#
And before writing this book, I used to struggle with breathing all the time.
#
And even at Reuters, I was hospitalized a couple of times from work.
#
But after writing and tying a lot of knots in terms of reliving those memories, writing
#
about them, that has sent record in the last three, four years also.
#
So how your mental, psychological well-being or lack of it can impact how you are on the
#
whole is something that we, again, don't talk about enough.
#
You mentioned letters sometimes taking 22 days to reach and so on and so forth.
#
And what that would do, and I'm thinking aloud here, is that would force you to write a different
#
kind of letter than the terse instrumental emails we would send today.
#
You know it's going to reach 22 days later, so you're not going to talk about something
#
that is current like, oh, I have a headache or whatever, or oh, can you do this for me?
#
Because obviously 22 days is too late.
#
And instead, there would be like, one, the letters would be longer, they'd be properly
#
Just looking back on the letters I wrote to my parents and to friends and all of that
#
when, you know, in the letter writing days, you know, you'd be putting more of yourself
#
It would be more of a considered act.
#
And I think, and I'm wondering if that can have two kinds of impact in the sense that
#
today, most of our communication is instrumental, right?
#
Because if I'm writing to a friend, I can write to them anytime.
#
I can send them a WhatsApp message, you know, I can, if I'm busy, I'll just like put a,
#
you know, a thumbs up on a mark to indicate, leave me alone, I've read it, and all of that.
#
But earlier, there was different, and it was different, one, with regard to what it did
#
for yourself, because a longer letter means you're thinking more, you're putting more
#
thought into it, you're examining yourself more, as it were, kind of like journaling,
#
you know, you can also shape yourself with it.
#
And the other is that there is something more than to those relationships, when two people
#
are writing to each other, whether it's a romantic relationship or otherwise, you are,
#
you know, just the act of writing a long letter like that to someone is just saying, I care
#
about you, I want your attention, right?
#
And you're putting more of yourself out there, it's a deeper connection.
#
Today, a couple wooing or meeting on Tinder or whatever, might be performing at a shallow
#
But that kind of sharing over an extended period of time doesn't really happen.
#
So again, I don't know if you've sort of, you know, thought about this, but how do you
#
feel this aspect of modern life, you know, how do you feel it affects us?
#
Can it produce a different kind of person, because it is requiring a different kind of
#
interaction, a different kind of connection?
#
See, it's two things essentially.
#
So now, with the advent of internet, we've seen our behaviors change, right?
#
So having worked in advertising, freelancing, you know, and if you capture the attention
#
of people or the target audience, as they're called, in the first three seconds is when
#
So the task is to really say something or grab the attention in three seconds.
#
And this we've seen, it wasn't there till, I remember seeing this from 2009 onwards.
#
And I was in Singapore, and I remember I had a French boss, and he and I, we were having
#
lunch and he said, it'd be interesting to see 10 years later, where we reach.
#
And sometimes he and I joke, and we're like, we are actually completely different beings,
#
do you remember having that conversation?
#
And he's still that laid back guy who would, you know, have that two hour lunch and sit
#
and have a glass of wine with it.
#
So now, like people who, you know, how you have classifications like digital natives
#
So now we are seeing the generation of digital natives from whom this is, Tinder is the normal
#
And investing in relationships is all, it's not only on Tinder or on dating sites, but
#
overall, like their relationship with anything in their lives is as, I wouldn't say superficial,
#
but compared to what we had, we just put in a lot of ourselves in how, in those letter
#
So this is a completely different thing with, which has to do with more with technology
#
and what internet has done.
#
I feel like, let's say if I didn't grow up in Srinagar in Kashmir during those years
#
that I grew up in, would I write those kind of letters to someone or would I sort of hold
#
You know, you don't know whether the person you're writing to would come back and find
#
So there is that always, I mean, if you've grown up there in the nineties, this was a
#
chief concern that you may or may not see, come back home alive, everyone who left in
#
And there used to be curfew at 5.30 and you had to come home before that.
#
So for the longest time again, I had this anxiety about around dusk and it was that
#
coming home and being somewhere safe.
#
It's almost like, I don't know, recording or telling them that you existed and what,
#
like you rightly said, there was no immediate detail in that, but it was, I wrote a lot
#
of amateur poems at that point, I think, which I thankfully don't do anymore, but trying
#
to convey feelings in different ways, I feel.
#
And also telling them of like larger plans or things or events, rather than like you
#
rightly said, you can't just talk about immediate stuff around you, but you want to lose a lot
#
of people around that period.
#
So I mean, I don't have access to that particular note.
#
I remember looking at it because I did look at those letters much later.
#
We had floods in 2014 in Kashmir and I remember Vasim's house was impacted by the floods quite
#
They lost their house and apparently the only things that he saved were those letters.
#
So he actually, and he's happily married with children right now, but it's like a part of
#
your being from that time, you sort of, because again, like I said, things could have gone
#
To sort of being grateful that they still survived and the person you were with survived.
#
I feel that act of preserving those letters and letting them dry in a hall upstairs was
#
almost like being grateful for having survived those years.
#
I remember I was telling you this cousin of mine who was killed during Eid and he was
#
caught in cross firing.
#
I mean, that must have produced a survivor guilt in me as a child that I probably wasn't
#
aware of till much later, till I actually read and knew what survivor guilt even meant.
#
So it's almost like, I don't know, I see that now as not as like some mad love or passion
#
that he had, but it was almost like that gratitude that he was able to save something from a
#
time which changed so with such rapidity and we lost so much.
#
So those letters were more than just the letters.
#
It's like a part of the time, a part of you, a part of a record that you existed and lived
#
And again, if thinking of, if I were to grow up, if I had grown up, let's say in Singapore
#
and rather than having studied there, would I have, would they mean so much then?
#
But I think it's a particular time and place, I feel.
#
So let's take a quick commercial break and on the other side of the break, we'll dive
#
in a little deeper into your book and your childhood.
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it?
#
Well, I'd love to help you.
#
Since April 2020, I've taught 20 cohorts of my online course, The Art of Clear Writing.
#
An online community has now sprung up of all my past students.
#
We have workshops, a newsletter to showcase a work of students and vibrant community in
#
In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends, I share all I know
#
about the craft and practice of clear writing.
#
There are many exercises, much interaction, a lovely and lively community at the end of
#
The course costs rupees 10,000 plus GST or about $150 and is a monthly thing.
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So if you're interested, head on over to register at indiancut.com slash clear writing.
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That's indiancut.com slash clear writing.
#
Being a good writer doesn't require God given talent, just the willingness to work hard
#
and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills.
#
Welcome back to the Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Farah Bashir and during the break, you went on Instagram and you found
#
this excellent letter that you wrote to your crush when you were 17 years old and you volunteered
#
to kind of read out that little bit for us, you know, as an extension of my earlier question
#
about whether, you know, the nature of our communication has changed the things we say.
#
Yeah, it was now when I had access to those letters because I had lost mine.
#
We spoke about, he had preserved his and he rescued them during the floods.
#
There was this one particular that struck me and I Instagrammed it last year.
#
The note says, the story of love is not important.
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What is important is that one is capable of love.
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It is perhaps the only glimpse we are permitted at eternity.
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Beautiful and you were 17 when you wrote this.
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I was 17 and again, it makes me think of what your question was earlier, like what you asked.
#
If that communication was really not about the letters, but was to capture something
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bigger than just what was happening around oneself, it's almost like you, your childhood
#
gets truncated, you're swiftly forced into adulthood and your adolescence is gone.
#
It's almost like you have to sound or you have to just embrace that the reality of life,
#
that this is how it's going to be and you can't afford to be playful.
#
Otherwise a 17 year old to think about things like what love is and what life is and what
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eternity is, I don't really know if that's normal.
#
I like that little bit.
#
I mean, I was also writing about lofty things at that age, but in terribly pretentious flowery
#
language from what little I can remember.
#
So there's a certain amount of maturity in that little bit, which I was surprised by.
#
I didn't think I was, I thought maybe I, I mean, I used to study books, read books and
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because that's what one did when there was long curfew nights.
#
And I thought maybe I just, that's how I used to write that poetry.
#
At one time, I mean, I used to get like obsessed with writing and there was once I was reading
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Shakespeare sonnets and I found, now you know the term misogyny, but at that point I got
#
angry of how he had described the girls of a woman.
#
So I started writing a rebuttal to Shakespeare.
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So I thought I probably was writing useless, mindless things like that, but this gives
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you a glimpse into something, the sentiment from that decade was rather dark.
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Rebuttal to Shakespeare would be most excellent.
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You know, and I'm just thinking aloud, you spoke of childhood being truncated and you
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know, earlier you spoke about how if you left home, you didn't know whether you'd come back.
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That's your tension every morning, right?
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And that can grow you up really fast.
#
And I wonder, you know, looking back in the past, you will see people who've done incredibly
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great things when they're like 20, 25, like, and I'm looking back at myself at 20, 25 and
#
thinking kaha yaar, you know, but a possible reason for that is that life expectancy until
#
very recently was pretty low.
#
If you're expected to die at 40, 45, you basically have to force yourself to be a full adult.
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By the time you're 20, you're having kids really younger than what would be legal right
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And I've also heard that like so many of the America's founders were so young.
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I think Hamilton and all were like 21, 22 when they were, you know, doing the stuff
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Or aaj ke bachche abhi, you know, but anyway.
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I think they say the same thing about Sikandar, Alexander the Great.
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He died pretty young, I think in early thirties or, but you know, that's one thing, life expectancy
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is a different subject.
#
Like you know, by 40, 45 still, but here, I mean, I remember once coming back, it was
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we were going for, I think one of the exams, it was around October and three of us, three
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friends used to go together to take that exam.
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And on our way back, the third friend's father had been killed in a cross firing.
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So you're talking about, like she came back to her dead father.
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They all had left in the morning.
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She'd gone to take her exams.
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He'd gone to office for work.
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And by the time he came back, he was just crossing the road to pick up something.
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He was caught in a crossfire.
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The current vice chancellor of Kashmir University, her father was killed in a grenade blast while
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So these were, your existence was, life was dotted with these things.
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So it just makes you think about things very differently.
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There's also a chapter in the book where I talk about how my sister who was pregnant,
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eight months pregnant and our parents got caught in cross firing.
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And there was a particular place where I, in their residency road in Kashmir, they were
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caught and one wouldn't usually dare to, you know, once after a blast, everything is cordoned
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Nobody in their right frame of mind would actually walk that stretch.
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And I remember my sister was like crying and on the floor of the shop.
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And I just like went out to look for them, just to see if they had, because it was such
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an expected thing that they could have died there and they could have been killed there.
#
So you almost go and like want to embrace or deal with the reality as soon as you can.
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And it's another thing, like I said, I mean, what it did later was it helps you sort of
#
process those years, but when you're in it, you have no time to even for a second process.
#
I think that again takes us back to the letter.
#
So it's like, what was that time?
#
Any reminder of that period, any reminder of the time helps you make sense of who you
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are and what became of you today.
#
And what struck me about the book, because you've chosen the voice of the adolescent
#
girl at that point in time, is that she's mentioning all these different deaths so casually,
#
but it's almost as if it's almost sometimes in a matter of fact way, whether it's a second
#
cousin in 1989 during Eid or whether it's, you know, Afi, you know, your cousin who,
#
you know, who drops you home and Af, when he's dropped you home from a wedding that
#
you've gone for, you write, he smiled his usual effusive smile, his green eyes shone
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I look back and remember him riding away in his denim jacket.
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That was the last time I saw him, he was killed a week later.
#
And then, you know, the narrator talks about how, you know, after Afi died, his mother
#
was found missing one morning, a couple of mornings, and where was she in the family
#
went looking for him, and she was at his grave trying to dig him out.
#
And then her father, you know, the mother was then kept at home after that and her father,
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his father would look after her.
#
And one day he mistook a window for a door and plunged to his death.
#
And all this said in such a matter of fact way, you also speak about your aunt Nilufar,
#
and you know, a colleague of hers called Tanvir has his younger sister and she kind of blesses
#
his younger sister who's going to get married.
#
And she goes and she leaves the thing and there's a blast and she's gone and they can't
#
even find her body, they identify her by the clothes.
#
You know, and what you've kind of done is that your narrator is not articulating her
#
You can see it through all these other things that she does.
#
You sense a loneliness when she dances alone to Nazia and Zoib.
#
You sense that reservoir of pain when she's, you know, plucking her hair out and all of
#
But the question is that looking back, do people then have no choice but to steel themselves
#
against the inevitable deaths around them, that when they know that if my parents are
#
leaving in the morning, they may not come back in the evening, you know, does it then
#
become part of your psychological makeup that you just shut off that part of you?
#
Yeah, it's the same thing which where one actually thought that my parents probably
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were killed in that shootout that day.
#
And I just walked to that site, usually you would not and you would, normal people would
#
probably have a reaction to it.
#
And I was here, I was just like walking completely stone faced.
#
It's how you accept that this is going to happen.
#
What strikes you, I think death is something that everyone has accepted or had accepted
#
It was going to come at some point in the day, forget about waiting for a few years.
#
But small little joys of life, like you rightly pointed out, when they were taken away, I
#
think that gave more pain.
#
Death was almost seen as this inevitability.
#
You had no control over you could be caught, you could be unfortunately, I mean that cousin,
#
not cousin, this friend of mine, whose grandmother was killed in front of him, she was opening
#
the window and a stray bullet comes in and she just dies.
#
And I had no, I lost touch with that friend of mine after that.
#
And I had put up a review of the book on Facebook, her neighbor had read that and had read the
#
book and he gave the whole description of how she was killed and what happened.
#
So it's like, it's how, you know, how death can be personal and everyone has a way to
#
grieve and mourn the loss.
#
But it almost became like a collective thing, collective mourning, every time someone died
#
or was killed or was caught in cross firing or blasts.
#
It was like different deaths started resembling each other.
#
And then there was this collective loss and you knew as time passed, it just felt like
#
it was one, it was like time loop.
#
I honestly think of 89 as the year of time loop.
#
This year happens over and over and over again in certain cases.
#
So there were other things, which even the book that I'm like, the manuscript I'm currently
#
working on and this is something that happened then we had this transgender help who was
#
humiliated during a crackdown.
#
And it was his humiliation, he had a lot of pride otherwise and he conducted himself in
#
And it was that humiliation which makes me cry more than let's say if he had died, dead,
#
because it's like the dignity, losing dignity and losing that respect and then being turned
#
I think that is like a bigger death.
#
And the other one is it's almost like people have just like accepted, I mean it's not even
#
a now if there are many cases of cancer is on the rise in Kashmir.
#
Almost every death now that you hear about has one person or the other.
#
In the last three months, Hina that's in the book, my sister, she survived a stage four
#
cancer recently and so it's become so prevalent.
#
And it's again what keeps you on is the treatment, but if you sort of die, that's sort of accepted
#
as a fact that you can't do much about it.
#
And it's a strange relationship with death and life, I think it essentially boils down
#
Lesser pain, it's almost seen as a blessing if it were to go and just go like that rather
#
than being subjected to other things which can happen to you.
#
There could be enforced disappearance, you wouldn't know where your family member was.
#
So death is a blessing sometimes, at least the body is home, you're seeing it, you're
#
carrying it with dignity.
#
It also impacts your life later in terms of how you're not afraid to lose people.
#
When you interact with people in general and I remember talking about this with my therapist
#
quite a bit, the loss can be abrupt, you will not talk to the other person for the rest
#
of your life, let's say if you were to lose someone for whatever reasons.
#
So it stems from that, that endings are so abrupt and sudden.
#
It again, you know, it boils down to the same question of mental health, like how it changes
#
you as a person, how growing up or living in war, you can never be the same person and
#
that you were before it.
#
One of the saddest stories in your book, at least for me, was not really about a death,
#
death per se, though it no doubt involved a death, but it was about this lady called
#
Rajya Maas, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, Raj Maas, who basically, she had three daughters,
#
she wanted a son really badly, she prayed and she did whatever to this Baba Rishi person
#
and was deeply grateful when she was blessed with a son called Javed and of course he was
#
the apple of her eye, so to say, and then when he was 16 years old, he just vanished,
#
taken away by security forces and then she does all kinds of things, but she never finds
#
him obviously because we can guess what happened and that feels worse than a death because
#
if there is a death, if someone, you know, dies in an incident, you can at least say
#
that okay, the bomb exploded, but they would not have felt any pain, there would have been
#
no suffering, but one, when there's suffering, it's, you know, you can vicariously feel it
#
too and two, just not knowing must be such a torture and my, so I, you know, at one
#
level thinking aloud, I think this is sort of a very concentrated, amplified version
#
of something that we do anyway in our lives, right, we know we're going to die, we are
#
all going to die, but we live in denial of it, we live as if we are going to live forever,
#
which is why I had those carbs for lunch and we manage our memory and our responses to
#
just deal with this thing and in a very concentrated and amplified way, it seems that those qualities
#
kind of come to the fore, but my question is this and this is a question that, for example,
#
I've asked someone like Hussain Haidari when he was on the show in a larger context of
#
what is happening in India today, that, you know, these deaths aren't deaths, they're
#
murders, right, and when this is happening to you, I can understand how you deal with
#
the grief and you've spoken about some of that, how do you deal with the anger, right,
#
like the question I asked Hussain specifically was how the hell and, you know, we are painting
#
with broad strokes here, but how the hell have the Muslims of India been so tolerant
#
when there is so much anti-Muslim hatred all around them, expressing itself every day and
#
really just getting worse every week, right, it's almost reached boiling point and yet
#
there has been barring stray incidents, there hasn't been that kind of response, like what
#
I imagine is that if I was in Kashmir and my brother vanished one day and I don't know
#
what happened to him or my sister was blinded by a pellet or worse, right, I would be filled
#
with rage, but I don't see that rage and is the absence of that rage or the suppressing
#
of that rage coming from some kind of a practical understanding that we have to live in this
#
world and the odds are against us, what is the point of rage or I don't understand what
#
is going on here and in a similar context, you know, earlier you said you spoke about
#
horrible things being done to some women, you know, every episode I've done on women
#
in India, it just strikes me that horrible things are done to all women, you know, the
#
kind of things, the kind of lives that women lead in India, again I don't get that, why
#
I think I asked both Niranjana Roy and Urvashi Bhutalia this in the episodes I did with them
#
and they gave, you know, different kinds of insights on this, but just in a broader question,
#
whether you're a Muslim minority, whether you are a resident in a place which is occupied
#
by the military in the sort of way that Kashmir has been or whether you are facing this kind
#
of social violence and otherization, you know, how do you deal with the rage?
#
See, this is something that was in the 90s, again, going back in Kashmir, especially in
#
the first four years, you thought anything was possible, the way, you know, I'm talking
#
about when Ruba Yasaid was kidnapped and then she was released and the militants were released
#
and the government of India sort of allowed that at that point and I remember we had this
#
India Today at home and my dad had it and there were some neighbors, etc, who had come
#
in and they said they were locating themselves on the cover page, so you thought anything
#
was possible in that time and then the intelligence and the strategy of the state started getting
#
more and more robust and you realized the sentiment at that point didn't last for too
#
long and then there was insertion of Ikhwan, which is countenance insurgent militia, which
#
broke Kashmiri society, I mean, brother couldn't trust his or her own brother.
#
So rage only gets you, it's a long battle, you know, right now, whether women, I mean,
#
forget about whether in a conflict zone or not, the men of South Asia or the men overall,
#
I mean, I was a few months ago doing a project for gender equality and you see, I mean, you
#
think of all the West and you think of probably women having better lives.
#
One, like there are three murders committed or three women are killed by their intimate
#
partners in the UK every week.
#
So we're even talking about all the women at large, but it's and now in the last few
#
years there has been some kind of solidarity, some kind of sisterhood, far more prominent
#
than it used to be earlier, which feels rage.
#
How far will rage get you?
#
I mean, rage has to be within rather than as it being an expression because then you
#
are just giving everything away and you can be easily targeted and that's what we've
#
seen what's happening on social media as well.
#
Sometimes people get arrested for tweets, people get, so it's like giving an excuse.
#
So you just find ways, it's far more important to sort of survive that moment.
#
I used to sometimes tweet quite a bit and tweet completely opposite to what government
#
was doing back home and I had friends like literally if something would happen and they
#
would be like, do not, because you know, it's like you are giving them evidence on a platter
#
So then how do you, there are, people are finding different ways to express that like
#
Shaheen Bagh, for example, went on for as long as it did as a, this proper protest and
#
you will remember that moment in history rather than one person acting on it or a bunch of
#
people working, acting on it and it turning into, so that's become like a movement of
#
And hopefully to fight violence, to fight the aggressions of the state, there'll be,
#
I know it's difficult, but it's when you are talking about this point, when you were making
#
this point, I kept thinking of how sabr or patience is such an extolled virtue.
#
And I think back home, it was really that I used to go, I often go to shrines.
#
That's how I've been brought up.
#
I may not be a worldly religious, but I do, I find a lot of peace just, just sitting in
#
a dargah and just not even praying and sometimes, I mean, not sometimes, often I would find
#
myself in a shrine on Sunvar in Srinagar and all I would do there was just cry and nothing
#
And it was almost like, you know, you just have to be patient and things will become
#
So I think that's what's happening in, I mean, Muslims in India, they have their own
#
I think it's, it's probably gaining some strength from that.
#
But I, from my experience, the nineties was a lot of that, or for example, where there's
#
this chapter I talk about tiny knots of faith, that's also buying that time, not losing your
#
mind that is father going to come back alive or not.
#
So tying that knot so that you, you sort of negotiate a little more space for you to not
#
And you know, there's always this hope that things will get better, I feel.
#
Structurally in your book, you've kind of structured it around your grandmother's death
#
But the pivotal point in that whole narrative is of course, the day of heath in 1989 and
#
So tell me a little bit about that.
#
That was, you know, it was, I mean, it sort of boils down to the title of the book, Rumors
#
You're 13 and you're imagining a life for yourself and you're going to get a haircut
#
for the first time at a proper salon and not getting it from your father's barber.
#
So it was, it was, it turned out to be a big rumor.
#
Like if you were, I mean, I was drawn to this phrase by Agha Shahid Ali's poem, from Agha
#
But it was essentially that, you know, sometimes something, I mean, I told you, like I was
#
telling you earlier, I discarded two manuscripts before this, but the title stayed.
#
So it was that and in an hour when your life changes, you've managed a bargain and you're
#
going for a haircut and by the time you come out, you're extremely fearful and your entire
#
personality changes, your reality changes.
#
It just does damage at levels that which sort of you realize much later what it has done
#
and everything changes, right?
#
So I had a Kashmiri Pandit friend, Renuka Bazaar, I've still not been able to find
#
her on social media, nowhere.
#
She and I used to have this tug in the classroom about who was going to get the highest marks.
#
And I didn't see her in, I only saw her in the winter of 89.
#
I didn't see her from 90s onwards.
#
I didn't know, and my parents didn't know what was going on.
#
So I lost interest in studies, I didn't care about it and then something or the other would
#
happen and I mean, I remember I used to get like good percentage and my report card used
#
to be sort of circulated amongst our, we lived in a nuclear family, but it was a part of
#
a joint setup, like cluster of houses.
#
And I remember my report card used to leave home in the morning and then go to every household,
#
but then there was nothing really to, I mean, from 97% I've straightaway dropped to 65.
#
So I mean, it just hits you at multiple levels from psychologically to emotional to, and
#
then, and most of the things you can't even articulate at that age.
#
And yeah, and the specific events that you described, of course, is you walk, you're
#
walking home after the haircut and there's been that violence, there are shards of glass
#
and plastic on the road, you describe your fear so well and just the relief everybody
#
feels when you get home because you're alive.
#
Because there were rumors that a 12 year old girl from the school had been killed.
#
And yeah, that's what ends up after that being what we would today in our cliched jargon
#
Because through the book, I found all of these things which have been normalized.
#
So they're taken for granted and yes, yet you get a sense of what they are doing to
#
For example, there is the constant curfew that is going on and it's a curfew that is
#
technically, it's a curfew outside the house, but in some ways it is also a curfew inside
#
And it just changes the texture of life completely.
#
So tell me a little bit about that.
#
Was it, did you think of it as something normal or was the fact that you had lived through
#
non curfew times, you know, something that made it just seem like this horrible nightmare
#
So, you know, in that continuum kind of where was this?
#
So curfews were sort of part of even before 89.
#
So we had that election rigging, which led eventually led to insurgency.
#
In fact, we had this chief minister called Ghulam Ahmed Shah, we used to call him Gulshah.
#
And he, in his time, there was, I think curfew around the clock and he earned this epithet
#
Gul Karfi, which is curfew.
#
So in fact, there is a senior journalist, I wouldn't like to name her, but so she talks
#
about, she writes about Kashmir and I don't know who has played this prank, but someone
#
has translated Gul Karfi, Gul meaning flower and he translated Gul Karfi as the flower
#
So someone has really been cheeky and gave her the wrong translation, but he was like,
#
his name is Ghulam Ahmed Shah.
#
So Gul Karfi sort of in my consciousness, we were indoors the whole time.
#
It was again, this thing about things will change and you were always hearing what was
#
going on and there was something or the other happening.
#
There were demonstrations, there were killings.
#
So you felt sort of safe at home, but you were also, it was a, it was literally, if
#
I were to explain it, it was like you were holding your breath for longer chunks till
#
one day gets over, then another day gets over and then it becomes your life before you know
#
And some behaviors during the lockdown actually came back, which was, I just like naturally
#
So like not even, I mean, during the curfew, I used to just sit in one spot and just be
#
I won't even get up and that sort of came back during the lockdown again.
#
So it was, it's like, you're always waiting, it's an endless wait and you can't do anything
#
And you're always hyper alert, especially in curfew, but sometimes let's say the troops
#
would run after young boys, mischievous, I mean, they would just like try to sneak out
#
of the house and they would catch them and they would just run after them, even if there's
#
You know, you're like constantly, you know, when this curfew, as we've seen in the lockdown
#
as well, this is eerie silence that sets on, on the day as well.
#
And that's not normal at all and your body can sense that.
#
So you're constantly in a, in a state of uncertainty, anxiety, like on the edge, which I mean, you,
#
something I still can't get used to.
#
I mean, I don't know about others, but when I was home, I mean, I just came back in the
#
summer, there were a couple of, a couple of weeks where there was curfew for two, three
#
I think there was once during Yasin Malik's hearing, it was always like, you were watching
#
news, you were listening to news, hoping that it'll get over some, there's something that,
#
that's suffocating about it.
#
And you feel like, yeah, it's claustrophobic and you just, I don't know if I'll ever get
#
used to certain things like curfew or, or, or constantly being under the shadow of gun.
#
And like you, you, you're walking, you're driving past and suddenly you have like this
#
nice breeze on your face and suddenly you see a big bunker and then that's it.
#
You just forget what you were, I mean, you've suddenly hyper alert and you're like suddenly
#
in a very different zone and in a very different reality altogether.
#
Yeah, I mean, it's a dream sometimes one would even like enjoy home the way it's, it's shown
#
to be enjoyed, you know, this paradise, but it doesn't happen really.
#
Yeah, one of the, one of the powerful passages in your book is about how you have periods
#
and you've run out of your anti-spasmodic medicine, but you're terrified because there's curfew
#
outside and you know, even if you go on tiptoe, the floor will creak because wooden and all
#
And you're just scared to go for medicine inside your own house.
#
And so you just lie on that bed and endure the pain, which seems the whole thing seems
#
like such a powerful sort of metaphor for what's going on.
#
And it's not even paranoia, like you pointed out, your grandmother of your friend opens
#
a bedroom window, bam, bullet in the bunkers are another thing that, you know, a person
#
like me, when I was growing up, privileged childhood, I never felt anything when I saw
#
And it was sort of illuminating to read in your book about what a bunker can do, what
#
a bunker can, just a site of a bunker can do to a person.
#
Like there is this brilliant, you know, stretch, which is, you know, almost like a short story
#
You talk about a lady called Halima and these people put a bunker outside her house and
#
she's absolutely terrified because her daughter Anjum is, you know, young, she's more or less
#
your age, she's terrified, the girl isn't allowed to go out anywhere.
#
You know, the husband who's an elderly man who's most of the time home because his grocery
#
shop is, you know, can't really operate in curfew.
#
He has to accompany any time she has to do and there is this constant fear.
#
And the ending of this is where one day at night she hears a gunshot and she's scared
#
And somebody in the bunker shot himself.
#
And this is such an incredible story because in that moment where I was inside the head
#
of Halima and empathizing with Anjum and Anjum's dad and all that, you suddenly catch a glimpse
#
of a human being on the other side also.
#
And I found that so powerful.
#
And you also spoke about how bunkers became landmarks, like people will say, hey, there's
#
a house, they live in the house next to the small bunker or, you know, the lane before
#
the large bunker and all of that.
#
And is it, did it remain constant like that through the years?
#
Was it only that there are periods when there were sort of bunkers and all of that was happening?
#
Did they remain constant like that?
#
And was the threat more in the fear of what could happen?
#
The sort of the mythical fear that a bunker would have aroused rather than stuff that
#
I mean, how was all that playing out?
#
It was the, I mean, now there are fewer bunkers because then there was, I can't remember whether
#
it was Mehbooba Mufti's time or Umar Abdullah's time that they removed some.
#
But my point at that piece of news was it, the troops are still as many in number, which
#
So that hasn't come down, which means these bunkers can spring up again.
#
And in the nineties, they were like one every few hundred meters, maybe, and quite a few.
#
And when you're walking past a bunker, you, as a woman, you feel like you didn't exist.
#
So there is the gaze, there is, of course, there is fear, there's this fear of what if
#
a grenade is lobbed in my direction, and I remember there was this particular instance
#
where me and my cousin were walking back from our high secondary school, we were in Lalchowk,
#
and we were walking next to a bunker, near a bunker, and she like held my hand and she
#
was like, she's like some, I don't know, there's something at the back.
#
So we didn't know what it was, turned out it was a cow at her shoulder.
#
But those five seconds, we were both like, are we going to get killed?
#
Did someone grab us from behind near the bunker?
#
Were we supposed to be, are we where we are not supposed to be?
#
So real fear attached to them, extreme anxiety.
#
And I'm like a child forever looking at, even now when I'm home, just looking at, at least
#
now I can look at a bunker, there was a time, especially after Bob was like, why do you
#
know what a bunker looks like?
#
She thought that this is something that you wouldn't look at.
#
And I remember initially, like maybe in early 2000s, I had a couple of friends who had gone
#
to Kashmir, or maybe 2004, and this friend was in Delhi, and he was like, he almost had
#
a fight with someone in the bunker, because he said like the gun was like pointed at me
#
and it just triggered me.
#
He's like, how do you guys live with it?
#
And this was something that, you know, you think that this is not something that you
#
So you don't, you become fearful.
#
That's a way of like subjugating you without touching you.
#
It's the way it works on your psyche.
#
Because it's not an armored vehicle.
#
It's not a patrolling party.
#
It doesn't come and go, it doesn't viz past you, it's there, the structure.
#
And it's intimidating at the same time, it's like a, I think it's designed to be made that
#
It's very, very intimidating, and also like you don't cast a second glance in that direction
#
on what you want to see.
#
You've also spoken at different parts of the book about how as a young girl, you became
#
more and more aware of what you call the militaristic gaze, though you've used the phrase elsewhere,
#
not in the book, because I'm guessing the girl wouldn't know the phrase, but you kind
#
And at one point, you write quote, to an extent, and you're writing about how you'd all
#
be, you know, wear the scarf and all that.
#
And at one point, you write quote, to an extent, the scarf made me feel protected.
#
And yet that feeling of unease never quite left me completely.
#
And so I began to ignore caring for my skin.
#
I thought maybe if I looked ugly and less pleasant, the men would not look at me and
#
I wouldn't wash my face for days.
#
I didn't want to look attractive in any way at all, lest it invite undue attention and
#
that indescribable guilt.
#
I wanted to somehow become invisible.
#
And later you talk about how at a particular point in time, your gait changed, where you
#
became hunched back because you're passing by in the space and you're holding your school
#
bag or whatever in front of you.
#
And you know, and for a young girl, it's like it's one thing to become aware of the male
#
gaze at a certain point in time.
#
But this is sort of another level of it, you know, the militaristic gaze, as you've called
#
So what was this phase like and how does one then snap out of it, you know?
#
What was that process like of coming to terms with what was going on and achieving a kind
#
of psychological normalcy to say if such a thing is possible later in time, I'm saying
#
as you kind of move on, like when you look back at that girl, you know, it's...
#
I think that girls just comes to the fore every now and then.
#
Even when I'm home, let's say even if I'm dressed as normally as I do now, but I'll
#
still wear each other, even now, I just feel more comfortable like that.
#
It's that otherwise I'll be like very, very anxious.
#
And this is something that I've tried to do away with, but I just feel far more relaxed
#
if I have each other or like a big dupatta around me.
#
I may or may not necessarily don't cover my head, but it's the body.
#
I was actually recently talking to this friend of mine, he and I were the same batch and
#
he's now a well-known orthopedic back home.
#
And he said, it's also a very gendered thing.
#
He said, you know, but we also had fairly, we were probably luckier of the lot and we
#
had like protected parents, protective parents, and we had that kind of childhood.
#
And I said, did we really like, have you thought about it from your sister's point of view?
#
And suddenly he tells me, oh, you know what, she doesn't answer the phone and her phone
#
is always on the silent because, and there was also this particular time where she survived
#
a grenade attack, but the shrapnel and the shell is still lodged in a temple and it doesn't
#
have to be operated upon.
#
If you actually get it, you can, unless it's like somewhere's lodged in your vitals, you
#
Otherwise it can just, I said, exactly that.
#
Have you thought about it from your sister's perspective?
#
Because he then went out and he studied in Manipal or somewhere.
#
So again, these are things which you A, can't discuss with your family members.
#
Like what are you going to, how are you going to come back home and what are you going to
#
Like I was gazed at or bledged at or looked at by a cop or a trooper or even a militant
#
Like what are they going to do?
#
Parents are supposed to protect you and that's not something they can do at that point.
#
So you absorb that and you feel this heaviness with you all the times, which you have to
#
And you have to put up a brave face because that's where you have to live.
#
So, and I think giving, talking about this brother and sister, for him to even empathize,
#
it's because it's not spoken.
#
So it's very difficult even within the society for other members to imagine what a young
#
girl probably goes through and feels.
#
So that never leaves you.
#
I mean, we also saw that after August 5, 2019, there was this fashion brand that put out
#
this particular campaign about Kashmiri women and promoted.
#
And it was, and I had flown the same afternoon from Delhi, from Kashmir to Delhi.
#
And I remember seeing that and it was just like mind boggling.
#
Sorry, I didn't, don't recall seeing it.
#
It was a brand called Raw Mango.
#
And then they had put out this particular campaign, Zuni, where a girl, Kashmiri girls
#
were on Shikara posing.
#
They probably had shot it before August 25, August 5.
#
But I had just come back and I remember taking a photo of two troopers at the back and two
#
women walking with their heads, et cetera, covered.
#
And this is the time when everyone was like, we'll get Kashmiri brides now and we'll have,
#
so you had ministers go on record saying, talking about that, you know, now we can marry
#
So that kind of vulnerability is a very, and I think I just took to social media and I
#
found it extremely offensive, not even otherization, but it's like women and women doing this to
#
It's almost, you suddenly question feminism in South Asia then at that point.
#
And you're like, is there actual solidarity there?
#
It's something, it's such a big blind spot.
#
This gendered aspect of how women deal with some things.
#
You see someone getting killed, we have been speaking about those things, but these little
#
things which are not articulated, are not spoken about, and then, but you feel them
#
and they're as visible.
#
And that's far more damaging and then you have to almost prove that and you have to
#
I mean, I think one of the reasons why I wrote this book as well was when I used to talk
#
to my friends about these incidents, they used to have, I used to have their attention
#
and they would listen and there was, but again, something else would happen back home and
#
then they would ask the same question again, like what led to it?
#
So it gets extremely, I think I'm sort of even feeling that heaviness right now when
#
From a woman's point of view, you're like, how do I even, I think it creates now when
#
I talk about it, it creates a sense of such vulnerability, it doesn't sort of leave you
#
and you know you're the only protector.
#
Nobody else can save you.
#
I mean, nobody will speak about you.
#
Nobody will understand the Spain.
#
And it's also, I don't know this, I remember reading Franz Fanon many, many years later
#
and then in Wretched of the Earth, he talks about how French used to basically demoralize
#
Algerians by attacking their women.
#
And they might not even have done anything bad to them, but just to whisper something
#
in a guy's ear and to seed that doubt there would break families.
#
So a woman is also conscious of that kind of punishment to the society.
#
So then you, I think you keep just holding it inside until it becomes this another being
#
within you that you have to carry with you all the time.
#
I just, you know, when you just said that, I remembered this absolutely execrable film,
#
terrible film, which came out a few years ago, starring Hrithik Roshan, where he and
#
the heroine, I forget who was playing it, were both blind.
#
And it's essentially a kind of a revenge story, like a blind person taking revenge for what
#
happened to his wife and they were both blind and she was like raped once.
#
And he felt very bad about it and she was raped again.
#
And then eventually she killed herself, leaving a note to the effect of, if I remember correctly,
#
saying something like that, I'm killing myself because I know that I will be raped again
#
and again and I feel terrible about what it will do to you, which is almost such a typical
#
Bollywood male centric way of, you know, coming at it.
#
One of my favorite novelists, George Seminon once said, once like thought aloud and said,
#
is it possible for any person to ever truly understand any other person?
#
And what he was saying kind of takes me there, like even when I read the book, I thought
#
that if I meet this person as an adult, and at this point I'm not thinking of you, I'm
#
thinking of the narrator.
#
But if I meet this person as an adult, would I ever really know her?
#
I don't even think it's possible because there is just so much subterranean stuff.
#
Like recently I did an episode with Warren Grover and I rewatched his, the great film
#
he wrote, Massan, where you have these two parallel lives of people who have loved and
#
lost and they meet at the end and you think that, okay, even if they have a happily ever
#
after thing, they'll never truly know one another because what happened at the background
#
is sort of just, you know, there are so many depths to it.
#
You can only kind of go so far.
#
So I have a question, which is again me thinking aloud, that when you pointed out that as a
#
defensive reaction, as a girl you would wear the scarf, you would want to be invisible.
#
And when you pointed out that sometimes you have that same instinct today.
#
And I'm just wondering that if in some societies, in some contexts, you can have a sort of a
#
vicious circle in which to get away from the oppressive male gaze, if the society is that
#
repressive and that regressive, women can cover themselves more and more and therefore
#
that gaze can get even harsher and sharper and more aggressive and it's kind of a race
#
And then eventually you could have an equilibrium where the men are what they are, incredibly
#
toxic and all of that, and the women are just covering themselves all the time.
#
And that vicious circle is something that societies perhaps need to watch out for.
#
And there is, of course, at the other end, a virtuous cycle, which is possible.
#
You know, so just thinking aloud here, what are your sort of thoughts on this?
#
See, we know that that's not the solution, right?
#
I mean, that it can't work like that, but for women, just like I said earlier, maybe
#
that was my defense mechanism, maybe other girls did something else.
#
So I think it's too generalized that everyone would do that is too much of a generalization.
#
I mean, there was a time when there was this moral diktat prescribed for Kashmiri women
#
that you have to cover up and you have to basically wear a bhaiya and have a modest
#
dress code, but that didn't really last for long.
#
Because I think it's it was the that was really not the answer.
#
That was really not the answer.
#
It's different women will have different ways to cope with it.
#
And what happens like you're always thinking what's happening to you is probably not of
#
as great consequence or importance as what's happening on the street.
#
So whether it's it's essentially the woman who is decimating her own self in the process
#
and who thinks that the more, you know, the less visible she is, it's better for herself.
#
So you try to make yourself scarce in whichever ways you can.
#
I remember when I went to when I was studying in Singapore and I used to have these flatmates
#
and there was a couple of I think on weekends I just wouldn't wash my face.
#
I mean, I know it sounds very unhygienic right now, but and it was that initial behaviors
#
that I had that I had to sort of work on to get rid of.
#
And this friend of mine was studying computing from Delhi.
#
And he was like, you behave like you could be in a war zone.
#
So I would just like look at him and say, yeah, that's exactly where I come from.
#
So to your point that is it even possible to even know what's going on with other person?
#
And despite, I mean, it's just like takes one hour to fly from Srinagar to Delhi.
#
But he's like, he I remember used to be like, you should have just grown up in a war zone.
#
You just so it's I mean, there is a brilliant book by Raffia Zakaria, where she talks about
#
how feminism in brown women is looked at in the realm of being instructional, something
#
to learn from something to but but it's not that the solidarity isn't extended.
#
And I could connect with it as a Kashmiri where you look at the whole of South Asia
#
and then there are cases which are picked.
#
I mean, I was recently I was telling I was working on this project on gender equality.
#
And of course, there's this argument if women if girls don't go to school, they drop out.
#
Then of course, it's going to impact the economy.
#
I personally know some women in the outskirts of Srinagar who dropped out because they had
#
to walk past camps, army camps.
#
And I was like, who has done the study?
#
Nobody so again, it's a huge question mark, then how do we pick and choose what we want
#
And yeah, that's a separate debate in my head.
#
And that really, when I was growing up, you know, I would always have this excuse that
#
89 was a particularly bad year.
#
You had Tiananmen Square, you had not bad year, but a year of significant happenings
#
And as the Lai Lama won his Nobel Prize, there was the tearing down a Berlin Wall, there
#
And you wonder, and my excuse, the naive excuse to myself was, there was too much happening
#
in the world and world didn't care about us.
#
Otherwise, people would have, you know, raised their voice and turned their gaze at us and
#
spoken about us, till you realize that it's your own fight, a fight, and it's a battle
#
that you will have to sort of fight and nobody else, even sometimes within the society, within
#
the community, not everyone is going to have that kind of stamina to plough it through.
#
One of the points which you make in your book, and you know, there are so many sort of illustrations
#
of that, is how women process all of this differently.
#
And just as an illustration of this, I was struck by the story of Nasir and Nasreen,
#
you know, two of the characters you mentioned, and Nasir, I think, was a cousin, but slightly,
#
I mean, he had mental health issues and he wasn't quite all there.
#
And the family used to worry about, okay, what's going to happen to him and blah, blah,
#
blah, and the idea was you get him married to someone nice, this will sort itself out.
#
They find this nice girl, Nasreen, who marries him, they get along well, everything's fine.
#
But then one day he forgets his ID card, like he was, it was in the pocket of a shirt, something
#
spilled on the shirt, he changed his shirt, I think he gets caught in a bus and, you know,
#
And when he gets back home, he becomes a different person in the sense that he deals with this
#
by resorting to violence and beating her up.
#
And she deals with it by eventually drowning herself.
#
And throughout the book, you've not just written about yourself, you've written about so many
#
women in this book, and they're all dealing with it differently than men would.
#
And they're also dealing with it differently than each other.
#
You know, you wrote about your grandmother and pointed out that to her it must have been
#
so bewildering that the entire world has changed around her.
#
She's trapped in this house while the world is not what it used to be.
#
And the house is like a prison.
#
And the question is, how do you even process what is going on, right?
#
So tell me a little bit about this, about women processing it differently and dealing
#
with it in different ways.
#
So there was a particular night when I went to my aunt's house and I was missing her.
#
And their house is at the banks of Nagin Lake.
#
And there used to be night patrol, which I was unaware of at that point, because we were
#
in downtown Srinagar, so there was no aquatic patrol near our house.
#
So I've witnessed for the first time, and I remember the way they used to shine light,
#
which was like a bright, really bright light in the middle of the night, and then it would
#
And I remember this cousin of mine, I think she was seven, six or seven at that point,
#
and she was holding her amulet around her neck, and she would start sobbing at that
#
And it was only much later, it made me concerned at that point, it was only much later that
#
I processed that, you know, as kids we're scared of darkness, and she was scared of
#
It was really heartbreaking later.
#
And so she was like, I remember her sister would say, yeh taaviz har jaghe leke jatiye
#
that mom has got for her because she starts shivering and I keep telling her, don't take
#
Like the sister is like completely nonchalant about it, but that six year old kid was really
#
So from her to my aunt saluting, thinking that if she salutes the patrolling party or
#
the troops, they would be lenient, like the word she said was, they'll have mercy on us.
#
So for a 60 year old to seek mercy, for a six year old to sort of be unnaturally scared
#
of light, or for a 16 year old me wanting to disappear or vanish, it just tells you
#
how everyone is sort of dealing and suffering silently, they're not sharing it with anyone.
#
If we wouldn't have got that aunt of ours saluting the troops, if I wouldn't have been
#
aware of how I walked during the first crackdown that I walked through, or how this cousin
#
of mine reacted, I mean, it's a very personal thing and they wouldn't get up in the morning
#
and say, well, this is what happened and I held on to my taaviz and it's a very personal
#
You're constantly dealing with things you can't even imagine can happen to you.
#
And you behave in a very, you behave in such unique ways that the other person, I mean,
#
it's a big joke in our family till date, actually, this aunt saluting the troops, nobody, everyone
#
laughs and she used to have a particular, I think there was once towards when she started
#
growing really old, these cousins of mine recount this particular incident where once
#
after firing, she started saying, oh, there were big flowers on this carpet.
#
And they laugh about it, but it's not something that you, I mean, I don't know what that gun
#
fire, those gunshots did to her at that point and they're like, yeah, you do remember, she's
#
like, I'll tell her brother that there were flowers here, where did they go?
#
Or there is Nasreen who killed herself, I mean, that is probably the most, that's a
#
rare or that was the rare statement of protest to kill herself and say, I don't want to deal
#
But everyone deals with or had or did deal with it with so much of, with suffering silently
#
So there was a lot of, I think the kind of sisterhood and unspoken and unstated sisterhood
#
you see in conflict zones, et cetera.
#
The power of that is something else and it's only later that you realize what that did
#
and how actually women sort of keep those communities going on.
#
If they were to collapse, these societies won't last at all.
#
It's like extreme resilience, it's that resilience of and that heroic courage to just get through
#
from one day to another and not talk about it and not even think that anything unusual
#
Tell me more about those sisterhoods.
#
It's just that, for example, these cousins of mine, which I've not mentioned in the book
#
because it happened much later.
#
So there is a certain decorum associated with what you buy and how you shop and the way
#
you deal with the shopkeepers, et cetera.
#
So these cousins of mine, they used to send us kids to buy undergarments for them.
#
So they would keep a cut out of, let's say a bra or whatever.
#
And then they would just give it to us and say, just go to this particular shop and just
#
buy it and it would have all the details.
#
For them, for that cut out not to be discovered during a crackdown, used to be, and because
#
during the crackdown, the father or brother would be assisting the troops.
#
And that to come out of a cupboard and then to deal with that embarrassment and shame,
#
it's just heartbreaking at a level which now one tries to understand.
#
And then the sisterhood was also about, I think women were kinder to each other in that
#
And also there were no public places.
#
So there was a lot of being there for each other.
#
You see a lot of probably some extent of hostility amongst men.
#
But women, I think the kind of support and the care that you get, the capacity to accommodate
#
is far greater, I feel, in conflict zones amongst women especially than you see anywhere
#
Rest, you actually see, you can see through the superficiality and you know you'll never
#
be able to replicate what was there.
#
And again, it's that time, may not be true now.
#
But I mean there was a phrase that my aunt used to use, if you saw something happen somewhere
#
and she would say, which is basically try and cover people's mistakes and be kind.
#
Which is, you know, let's say you wanted to like bitch about someone, you wanted to
#
So again, the ways you accommodated, I think because their experiences probably were as
#
So you sort of give that leeway to the other person and think, okay, I think it just becomes
#
like it sort of expands your being, if I were to call it like that.
#
Just sort of accommodate a little extra from the other person.
#
And yeah, and people will help, they will, no questions asked, especially women.
#
There was this young girl I spoke to after the book came out and she was in this hijab.
#
She was a part of a bunch of journalists I was talking to.
#
And she had never spoken to her colleagues before that and then she just opened up about
#
how she was nearly raped.
#
And that's what led to her covering up completely.
#
Again, she just opened up for the first time.
#
I mean, I feel like it took a woman from that time, which is that girl that the book talks
#
about, for her to open up finally about an experience, which if you looked at her, you
#
would probably think, oh, she's this extreme, a woman who observes religion and the codes
#
very seriously, but her motivation was very different.
#
And she just opened up to that woman from that time, probably thinking that the pain
#
really was collective, it gets heavy.
#
And would it then be the case at the risk of simplifying and the risk of generalizing,
#
but I'm just kind of thinking aloud, that sisterhoods that form in this way, you know,
#
recognize something, recognize a deeper truth about what women go through, recognize interior
#
lives, kind of, you know, shine a light on each other without, you know, being explicit
#
And there's something, therefore, very strong about that.
#
Whereas the connections that men make are far shallower and far weaker, like, first
#
of all, men don't even express their emotions, forget to each other, even to themselves.
#
You never have those kinds of connections really forming, it's kind of rare.
#
So all your, all the typical male connections, and I don't want to stereotype my own gender,
#
but the typical connections will be ki chal, football dekhte hai saath mein, or let's have
#
a beer together and all of that, but without a necessary recognition of the other person's
#
interior life and what you're going through and all of that.
#
And there isn't, of course, that shared backdrop of continuous pain.
#
It is not that men don't suffer in different ways, you know, you have that guy in the bank
#
blowing his brains out, but, you know, it's without, so it just seems to me that one kind
#
of solidarity and network is just really deep and under the surface and really strong.
#
And the other one is kind of the opposite.
#
And am I, I mean, am I generalizing too much?
#
Am I essentializing too much or, you know, what are your thoughts?
#
See, when I was growing up, the biggest anxiety or fear was like forgetting your identity
#
card at home and then you could have been picked up or slapped or, or men not coming
#
back after a crackdown, not coming back home.
#
And to be honest, what, when men were out at the crackdown, assembled in a, in a ground
#
somewhere, school ground, I mean, in a school or some open ground, you know, it was like
#
women like automatically turned into these like soldiers of the house, really protecting
#
everything, whether it was the honor, whether it was their lives or the house or putting
#
up that brave face, which gets, their courage is not played up as much.
#
But what the anxiety that the guy goes through, the focus is on, on him.
#
It's like that, what the movie you were talking about earlier, that the woman getting raped
#
and then saying what it could do to you.
#
But the way women sort of do, and it was not something that was, that we gradually were
#
It was thrust upon us as much as it was on men.
#
But for some reason, and we recognize, and it's imagine like we are in a court, we are
#
in a, we're living in this cluster of, we're part of the cluster of the houses and there
#
are about 60 family members in 10 houses.
#
Men are out and then there are just women there.
#
So it's like, like that subliminal subconscious force that you see around you.
#
Even now today, if something happens, I just go back and like tap into that, like I'll
#
connect with an aunt or I'll connect with a cousin.
#
It's that the life, the energy that you get or the safety, the protection you get is lifelong.
#
But like I said, in men, one could see, because I think I'm also attributing it to the counter
#
insurgency, Kwan, because that really broke that, that brotherhood.
#
There were instances where women also suffered.
#
I remember there was this girl who was considered to be an informer and they didn't shoot her,
#
but they just cut her hair or chopped her braid off and hung it from a pole.
#
And as a 17, 18 year old girl, you see the humiliation of that young girl and, and it's,
#
it's, I mean, we never heard of her again.
#
So it's the punishment, the sufferings, the ordeals of women and I think they don't even
#
speak about it, but they almost recognize it in each other.
#
And it's not something that you overtly talk about or see what happened that day.
#
It's like a very quiet strength that you give each other, which is, which, which is what
#
you had, I don't know, look for in other relationships as you, as you grow up and which is rare and
#
one you sort of understand that that can't be replicated because, yeah.
#
And men will always sort of, especially in our type of traditional society, see themselves
#
And in this kind of conflict zone, when you're at the receiving end of everything, you can't
#
protect nothing, right?
#
You are in a sense pretty helpless and yet the tendency, the male tendency would not
#
be to sort of, you know, share in the practicality that the women might show and, you know, recognize
#
it as a shared suffering and let's get through this, but instead it would perhaps, I imagine,
#
be an anger at not being able to find a solution, at being not man enough as it were to do something
#
Tell me a little bit about how you have seen men react in these kind of circumstances because
#
I imagine it must be so crippling to the ego and the ego is central to being male, right?
#
Well, emasculation is real for sure in such geographies.
#
It's also that there was this friend of mine, she and her friend, she and her sister, they
#
had gone to this tailor and they'd left home and they couldn't reach the tailor.
#
It was like a 25 minute drive and there was a crackdown in the middle of, on the road,
#
I mean, during their commute and they got stuck there for five hours and they couldn't,
#
they could neither move forward nor come back and eventually the crackdown got over, they
#
made it back and I remember we laughed about it and they said our father was actually waiting
#
with a meat cleaver saying, I'm going to kill you.
#
It's like, obviously he wouldn't have done that, but it's that a father feels so helpless
#
that they could have been taken away, whatever could have happened to them.
#
I mean, he wouldn't have had any control, he wouldn't have been able to retrieve them.
#
So it was like, it's better that I kill my own children rather than see bad things happen
#
It's the same thing which struck me later when you read Toni Morrison's Beloved and
#
she'd actually picked it up from one of the newspaper clippings where the woman had killed
#
her own child rather than give it to a slave catcher.
#
It was such a stark thing, like, you know, when she would talk about her father had this
#
meat cleaver in her hand and we would laugh about it, but it's, you see, you hear increasing
#
incidents of domestic violence, which basically earlier it was hush-hush and, but now it's,
#
For me, the first incident was when Rubaiya Saeed was kidnapped.
#
Her father was the Home Minister of India at that point.
#
So that as a child gives you a glimpse of what you're up against as a woman and what
#
Like someone as powerful as a father couldn't protect her.
#
I mean, you know that anything can happen.
#
So for, I remember someone asked me this question once, like, were you okay talking about the
#
most intimate details and things in your book?
#
I was like, you don't feel, you don't have a sense of privacy back home.
#
You know, it's like your lives are open and everyone knows everything and you just, you
#
just feel you can't protect anything.
#
So emasculation definitely at one level, but also at, everyone has this, I mean, probably
#
the fact that I couldn't come back and, or anyone can't come back and say someone, a
#
uniformed person or someone, like even a militant looked at me and passed a comment.
#
You're ordinary civilians.
#
What are you going to do?
#
You don't have the wherewithal to fight them back.
#
So you just, I mean, then I think that was also initially people were accepting of it
#
and saying, this is another thing on women and another burden that you must carry.
#
But now I think women are pushing back, but yeah, not at the level that they suffer.
#
I mean, that's what I was telling you earlier, that they are the dual recipients of violence.
#
It's just not, you know, one, I mean, men for men, it's just one thing getting arrested
#
or killed or disappeared, but for women it's, they can be used against their own people.
#
I think that's the knowledge, which is, which lets you sort of last two years ago, I had
#
this friend who had come from UK and she wanted to see Gulmarg and Gondola and we went together.
#
I hadn't seen it till then.
#
So we, so there are two levels.
#
So one goes up to 4,000, another goes up to 14,000.
#
She wanted to go to upper world.
#
So I went with her to 4,000 because I can't take heights and I have breathing issues.
#
So there was a blizzard in that moment.
#
Mum was waiting downstairs and the Gondola just went from 14,000 straight down.
#
It didn't stop at between.
#
And then once the blizzard cleared up and then we were brought down from the 4,000 feet
#
that particular height.
#
And mum was a sight to behold when I came downstairs and she was like, she, I haven't
#
seen that kind of panic in a long time in her.
#
And we had this driver who was a Kashmiri and he said, how do you deal with them staying
#
by themselves and traveling?
#
He's like, no, you can't understand.
#
She can just disappear and I'll never get to see her again.
#
So the mothers being aware of that, that reality about their daughters, daughters feeling that
#
kind of vulnerability and yet trying to live their lives as best as they can.
#
And she knows, she knew in that moment that even her father, like my father wouldn't be
#
Who would he go and ask for?
#
And that kind of awareness about how you will not be able to protect your own child, forget
#
about it being a thing about between genders is crippling for parents to have this knowledge
#
that we may not be able to.
#
And then, and then women sort of try and subdue themselves and, you know, try and not come
#
in the way of not be a matter of concern for their parents or become, I mean, it's a strange
#
existence which the more you think about it, it's like, how did one even survive those
#
years or even now sometimes?
#
Looking back and writing your book was obviously an act of self-examination, but also what
#
you're doing is you're looking at everybody else with kind of new eyes, at your grandmother,
#
at your parents, at your sister, everyone around you.
#
And like has that led to the feeling that you understand them better today?
#
That is there more empathy, is there more sympathy?
#
Is there a sense that you saw just one aspect of this, perhaps a way they related to you
#
and that's it and you missed everything else that might have been happening to them.
#
You know, has that changed the way you look at them and equally, you know, what is, what
#
do they feel now when they read the book and they perhaps see a side of you that they never
#
My mom cried when she read the book.
#
She read it twice and she was like, is that what you went through when you had your period?
#
And she was almost like, how did you not tell me?
#
And she actually cried.
#
And I think the biggest revelation was for my father.
#
He looked at my mother and said, oh, your mother smoked?
#
So it was, I was filled with the rage that you were talking about earlier.
#
When I, I think it was only possible that I studied in Singapore and Singapore is known
#
to be extremely safe for women, right?
#
So you can be, I remember when I used to work with Reuters, I used to do night shifts and
#
Reuters has this office in Science Park and Science Park is known to be this foresty,
#
very secluded spot in Singapore.
#
And I used to walk down at four in the morning, five in the morning alone by myself to the
#
There is NUH right next door, about a kilometer and get myself a snack and go back without
#
a worry in my head, like anything was going to happen to me.
#
If I were to like, I don't know, live in soon after Srinagar, live in Delhi or South Asia,
#
it would probably have been very different experience because then you're seeing degrees
#
of women going through what they're going through, right?
#
But Singapore just made me extremely angry and I was like, oh, so dignity and freedom
#
is possible in the world.
#
It's only just denied to a bunch of people.
#
So that really made me angry and yeah, so I actually had like angry thirties.
#
I was like, I used to be, and then you sort of look at, you don't only look at your family.
#
I mean, one has used one's family to show like what, how many different ways is a conflict
#
And if you were to go to different families, let's say who have someone missing in the
#
In my aunt's case, when she used to dig her son's grave, she doesn't talk about him anymore.
#
I mean, that changed her personality.
#
She talks incessantly, but she never utters even by mistake anything about her son.
#
So I'm only talking about my immediate family and them and saying that this is just like
#
really like the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg and how the men whose fathers
#
are missing, brothers are missing, sons are missing.
#
Like what is going on with them who have had no closures or there was this, my mother's
#
orthopedic, Dr. Farooq Ashai.
#
So my mother is acute osteoarthritis and osteoporosis.
#
When her orthopedic was killed, she just didn't go to an orthopedic for like 15 years till
#
her bones reached a spot.
#
I think it was her way of sort of escaping that, that she couldn't deal with him being
#
killed in such a manner.
#
But I also know the orthopedic's daughter, who was my senior in school.
#
So now their story would be something else and how it impacted my mother and then how
#
So I think each household will have stories that one can't even imagine or their realities
#
So it's just, when you think of that, and then instead of empathy, I mean, you're all
#
How do you feel it for the other person?
#
You're like, I think you feel a sense of grave injustice.
#
You're like, for what really?
#
What's the human cost of this deterioration of people and their psyches and their lives
#
Honestly, I mean, I think that's the only question.
#
Has a book changed the way you talk with your mother, talk with your family and the things
#
I think now my mother trusts me with discussing Farooq Farooqzad's poetry.
#
So I wish you should think I wasn't really mentally up there.
#
And she also trusts me with writing a thank you note to someone that she has to thank.
#
Yeah, that has changed, but some people now like talk about their experiences more.
#
It's almost like she's going to chronicle them.
#
You know, I just want to like see what comes naturally.
#
But yeah, maybe some family members.
#
But this has been a huge thing that my mother now feels I'm ready to talk about.
#
Some poetry, which earlier she thought I wouldn't get.
#
So Nadine Gautama speaks about what she calls witness literature.
#
Tell me a little bit about your thoughts of this, that when you set out to write the book,
#
was it just a sense of you are writing your story?
#
Or was it also a sense of that there are other layers to this?
#
I'm not just writing a story where it's one event after another, but I'm taking a deeper
#
look at what lies behind those.
#
So tell me a little bit about, you know, you know, was there a deeper sense in your writing
#
that it's not just I'm not just writing a memoir, there's something more to it than
#
And is that intent and is that kind of writing part of a bigger tradition out there which
#
you've taken inspiration from?
#
And if so, who are the writers you sort of looked at who've done this kind of writing?
#
I think Nadine Gautama was, I stopped reading men.
#
I have been struggling to write, right, for the last, what was since 2008, 2009.
#
And I consciously stopped reading men.
#
And I, the book that actually propelled me to write was Nadine Gautama's The Late Bozwa
#
So every time I would get stuck, I would just read a page or two and I would just come back
#
So her witness literature is something that I read after writing the book.
#
I think I was once reading about like prep, I had to talk to someone and I was reading
#
up, there's this book of hers, a collection of essays called Telling Tales of Time.
#
So that's when I, she talks, specifically talks about how journalists, chronicle days
#
and events and how, you know, then you may sit and make sense of it.
#
But it was not something that I knew of when I was writing it.
#
But when I was writing, it was about, I didn't even, I mean, I just had like a very ordinary
#
But I think there was like a few things which bothered me that night of coming back from
#
And then because I had like really lush hair, I think that was like loss.
#
And then for like a couple of years, I had no hair at the crown, I had plucked it all.
#
And those changes, which, and then you, when you see what other things are happening to
#
other women, then you forget about these things.
#
So it was really to capture that time of what was happening to that little world around
#
So it was, I never thought that I would like, I mean, when you think of memoirs, et cetera,
#
you think of Obama and you think of people who've led that kind of bureaucratic political
#
It was more of a, I think, see in Kashmir, there were three, four main incidents which
#
So there was Treaty of Amritsar where we were sold along with our land and people by the
#
British to Dogras and for 75,000 Nanak Shahi rupees, a few goats and a few Pashmina shawls.
#
Then the second was, and then there is, of course, there is before that, there is Yusuf
#
Shahchak being, he was the last Kashmiri emperor being taken.
#
He was jailed by Akbar and he died in exile.
#
And we have his, we had his wife, her bhaxatun, and her ballots are famous and they have passed
#
on from like to us from generations.
#
Then we had Treaty of Amritsar.
#
Then we had 1931 Weaver's Uprising where there were 22 workers who were killed, unarmed workers.
#
And we used to sell, like sort of commemorate 13 July.
#
Now there is no such thing.
#
It has been taken off the calendars.
#
And then there was accession.
#
Then there was a couple more incidents, but three main incidents, Treaty of Amritsar, 31
#
And we have no social history of the previous two.
#
And this was also, I think once I finished the first draft and I had written largely
#
about the memories that I had, but then I made a conscious decision to include culture
#
and a way of living in it and incorporate that into it because it doesn't exist anymore
#
So if we were to really look at what happened, how did people live then, you'll find nothing.
#
And the part of Srinagar I grew up in, there was just like Shahamdan Shrine, Khan Kaimullah
#
is like three, four minutes away.
#
And you have Badshah's tomb that he made for his, so it's like historically a very rich,
#
And it was an economic hub.
#
So sort of keeping that alive in witness literature, part of it, but also social history, part
#
And which is where I think that is something that I did consciously, witness literature,
#
of course there are memories that you sort of have of yours and some are associated with
#
your family members and friends.
#
But yeah, the culture part was a deliberate choice to include that in.
#
And there's also like recently I went to this particular university and I opened that session
#
by saying, when I say Kashmir Ki Kali, what comes to your mind?
#
So some of them were too young to even know it was Sharmila Tagore, right?
#
So I said, no, she's Bengali.
#
She's not Kashmir Ki Kali.
#
So for the longest time, I mean, for a lot of people who would see me outside Kashmir
#
would say, well, but you don't look Kashmiri.
#
And I'd be like, what is your definition of Kashmiri, Sharmila Tagore?
#
Definitely I don't look like her.
#
So sometimes you're also made to look at yourself in a very strange way.
#
You know, you are like the whole time you have to look a certain way or for example,
#
someone really beautiful, everyone will have a beautiful aunt in their clan and she'd look
#
So not being able to look at yourself as who you are, I mean, there is this book by Ananya
#
Jahangara Kabir, she is called a territory of desire.
#
So it's almost like, or the way Kashmir is depicted at Roja for that matter, depopulated
#
landscape and beautiful landscape.
#
And then you also have a benchmark of how you should look.
#
So what does that do to your identity and your being?
#
So that's where there are like a lot of references to the way my grandmother would take care
#
And it's a very different way.
#
Like I haven't heard many cultures where they use mercury, semab and ghee.
#
So retaining those advances and almost constructing a little girl's or young girl's world and
#
who she is and the way she looks was another level of, I don't know, reclaiming identity.
#
Yeah, the bit about mercury and ghee was fascinating because I'd never imagined those two things
#
could go together or indeed that you could do anything with mercury, right?
#
I thought you got to...
#
She had this insane patience, she would just keep doing that to her hand the whole time.
#
And she'd also had this particular potion, which I now read is poisonous, but it's worked.
#
I don't know what else did she put in it.
#
She would soak quince seeds, quince apple seeds, and they emitted...
#
Like there was a sap that would come out, a gluey kind of texture.
#
And then she would apply that also.
#
So Vichya Kashmir Ki Kali wouldn't.
#
So question about identity now, because this is very interesting where you spoke about...
#
And I see two different kinds of conflicting sort of impulses here.
#
And the one impulse that I think young people have and everyone should have is of asserting
#
their own individuality as separate from everything around them.
#
You don't want to be put in a box and we contain multitudes, we want to express them all.
#
But the other urge or the other temptation might well also be of asserting yourself as
#
part of a group identity.
#
And this can come in two ways, especially when you're in a conflict zone or a besieged
#
It can come number one as a kind of assertion against the oppressor, where you embrace that
#
very thing you're being oppressed for and as a kind of defense mechanism.
#
And the other is to seek solidarity within your community and to say that, okay, we are
#
all together in this, we are part of this.
#
So I mean, question not just with regard to you, but with all the people that you see
#
around, that how do these conflicting urges play out?
#
Because on one hand, you want to be defined and say that I am this and I'm proud of it.
#
And you want to show solidarity with your people and say, I'm just like you and we have
#
an aunt who looks like Sarah Bano and we're all together in this.
#
But you're also much more than that.
#
And you also want to strike out on your own.
#
And you also might want to say that, yes, we have a shared past, but I want to transcend
#
So, you know, how does that play out?
#
You say conflict society or not, women, girls especially are impacted by how they're perceived.
#
So to start rebellious in that vein, sometimes works, sometimes doesn't.
#
I was an extremely fearful teenager, but I then just one fine day something, I think
#
I also write it in the book, that too much fear can catapult into fearlessness.
#
So then I became like, I'm going to do what I want to do and what I want to pursue.
#
And otherwise, for me to convince my parents to actually let me study in Singapore is unthinkable.
#
But you also see how I recently met this journalist who's been harassed, like she was also on
#
that extremely offensive app that bully by also Levi.
#
So, but she's doing her thing and that hasn't stopped her.
#
And she is freelancing.
#
And I met her recently at home and she was, you could see an undeterred determination
#
on her face and she was going to do what she could in her capacity.
#
So that's identity at one level.
#
But then there is also like, like I said, conflict or no conflict.
#
Every society will have these little biases and how you should look and how you shouldn't.
#
But initially, I think when you're young, you sort of fall into that trap.
#
And then later, if you're lucky enough and brave enough to find your own, then you sort
#
of want to do what you want to do.
#
But again, it's not that easy for girls, I feel.
#
But younger girls, younger women, especially, are now at least quite a few of them doing
#
Like it's as simple as there is this girl who designed to wear Peran in Kashmir, right?
#
And there's this embroidered patch right on the chest.
#
Somebody just created this very original design of that Kashmir map because it was bifurcated
#
and she designed it on the Peran.
#
And that just sold quite a bit, that design, that pattern.
#
Recently I was in Polo View looking for a gift for a friend's daughter.
#
And he showed me a really beautiful necklace again, Kashmir map.
#
This is not something that you saw.
#
I mean, you would see chenar motifs and you would see something else.
#
And now these things, which means that if people are making it, there's definitely a
#
So yeah, jewelry, clothing.
#
I remember when I was growing up again, a Peran was seen as something very regressive.
#
Like if you came from good families and educated people, then you didn't wear Peran, Peran
#
Again, it's like how within your own society you made to otherize your own people and also
#
like, I think, create class differences.
#
But now I just see like everyone, the minute it starts getting cold, and now it's the state
#
who bans Peran every few years because they feel that you could be carrying something
#
But now people are taking pride slowly in our culture and then creating that larger
#
identity or being a part of that.
#
And also being, I think younger generation, even in Kashmir is pursuing music, reinventing
#
old songs by Mahjoor or Haba Khatun in a new way, like Ali Saifuddin, you have Parvaaz,
#
you have Ahmed, you have Faraz, quite a few of them.
#
And girls also, painting, like creating art, which earlier, which nobody did earlier.
#
So there's awareness and acceptance and I think also a lot of pride now.
#
At one point in the book, you mentioned how one of the ways that you coped with a young
#
person was reciting the surafil, I hope I'm pronouncing it right, which is a religious
#
verse and that got me to thinking about the role that religion can play firstly as consolation
#
for whatever is happening, secondly as an anchor where you can locate yourself in the
#
world and there is a sense of solidity to it.
#
But also I wonder, you know, the kind of role that it can play in a besieged society where
#
you can almost then express it more overtly as a show of defiance, right?
#
And there are different ways in which this could manifest itself, that if you feel persecuted,
#
you could react to this either by completely suppressing whatever you're being persecuted
#
for or you could go in the other direction and say, I'll wear it on my sleeve, I am who
#
I am and that's a kind of defiance.
#
And it can also then go in, it can go in all kinds of interesting directions, like we were
#
chatting out in the break and you said how you noticed that many Kashmiris now when they
#
are doing interior decoration or they're building their houses are more ostentatious than they
#
used to be, whereas earlier it used to be much more subdued and so on and so forth.
#
And obviously I'm not inviting you to do any kind of pop socializing, I know you won't
#
But in general, do you think that there is then a natural tendency that if you have suppressed
#
in this domain, then I will express it in this domain?
#
I mean, that's just natural, right?
#
So religion and I mean, there are two different things.
#
So religion, I remember at my point, it was, I mean, I remember in the house, we had a
#
Morbi Sahib who would come and help us with Quranic lessons and there was flexibility.
#
If you couldn't fast, then nobody pressurized you.
#
You were asked to pray, but whether you did or not again was sort of left up to you.
#
I mean, my mum would always say that I would get asked as a parent, did you ask them?
#
Then it's your own thing and then you will get asked on the day of judgment.
#
So she would remind us, but she would never say, like thrust it on us, upon us.
#
So religion became, there were very few seeds of stability which were left in the nineties.
#
Everything was changing.
#
Everything had changed overnight, but shrines remained, but there was Saar Sharif, which
#
was, there was a massifier there.
#
But these were seen as seeds of stability, as places which not only were about religion,
#
but which gave you a lot of solace and a lot of peace and which is what they even do now.
#
And shrines that you go to, much to the popular perception that, you know, whenever there's
#
conflict and it has to be religiously motivated, or it's a communal thing.
#
So there were two points to religion and these shrines was, I had my tutor, Gopinath Kaul,
#
who would first go to Kali's Mandir in Zanakadal and then drop by at Khanka, Shahamdhan's shrine.
#
So you saw harmony in that.
#
So again, that was like a continuation from those times.
#
And then there was another thing where there was no, so to speak, strict gender segregation.
#
You could be in the courtyard and there could be 10 other men standing there.
#
So you just like walk in and there are certain spaces which are reserved for men, but there
#
was no such strong gender segregation which made you feel like you were unwanted.
#
So the way I've seen religion there and how one is engaged with it has been very different
#
It's largely shown as communal as, and people, I mean, because, I mean, we've seen after
#
9-11 how sort of the narrative around Islam.
#
But you really found that syncretism and you found that harmony, you saw continuity in
#
And but it also gives you the protection, especially for women, for men it works against.
#
If you are seen observing overtly visible symbols of Islam, whether you have a beard
#
or you're wearing your pajamas above your above your ankles, that could get you arrested.
#
But it gives women some sort of like, don't mess with me, that kind of power because it's
#
like this might just invite trouble.
#
So again, I think there's like a gender thing there.
#
Like if you see a woman wearing an abaya, which is what happened.
#
Our generation tried to resist it or they resisted, we didn't wear.
#
But increasingly you saw more and more women sort of wearing it.
#
And then it was really like, I mean, I could completely understand it was not overnight
#
gravitational pull towards a different kind of school of thought in Islam.
#
But it was, it was also like safety as I mean, possibly, I mean, I don't want to again generalize
#
it's a sensitive thing to each their own.
#
But again, drawing from that conversation, I had that with that reporter who had that
#
And then she was like, she basically wanted, she said, I blush very fast.
#
And if I see someone and if it reminds me of something horrible, and I'll, it shows
#
on my face and I can't hide it.
#
So you all you see is our eyes.
#
So again, very different approach.
#
Some might purely do it for religious reasons, but some also do it for other reasons too.
#
So again, religion very much like generalized in that sense there.
#
And when you talk about these things, and suddenly, you know, it's like a different
#
So let's sort of talk about the evolution of the book, because one thing that you mentioned
#
was that the original form of the book is not how it ended up, there were multiple drafts
#
and so on and so forth.
#
So how did you start thinking about it?
#
And how did you arrive here?
#
Because one of the things that strikes me on reading this book, which I love so much,
#
it's impressionistic and it's, you know, it feels really perfect as it is.
#
But it's also, there's a certain kind of bravery here in terms of form, because it is not the
#
conventional memoir, it doesn't have a conventional kind of structure.
#
You are avoiding many temptations that might otherwise have been there to take a broader
#
look to give your grand theory as a history, as a context.
#
But instead, you've kept it a very personal and intimate look.
#
And I think it's all the more powerful for it, where you chose to zoom in, rather than
#
And I think that really works.
#
But how did you arrive at this?
#
And were there any models?
#
Like, were there any books that you looked at and said that, you know, I want to do something
#
I'm going to answer, I mean, I'm going to talk about the second one, first, there were
#
no models, because I really didn't, I wanted to write it, I wasn't sure it was going to
#
get published, to be honest.
#
I was like the political climate that we're in.
#
And in fact, when HarperCollins called me to give him my author copies, a day before
#
the actual date of publishing, I thought, I got a text from them.
#
And they said, let's meet for coffee tomorrow.
#
So I was like, okay, they're meeting me basically to tell me, we can't go ahead, sorry, we had
#
to drop it for some reason.
#
And this is after August 5, 2019, right?
#
So I thought, okay, so I was ready for that as well.
#
But to the first part, it was, like I said, I was writing the memories and I was writing
#
this to have a broader, a big narrative that these would sort of help me push the narrative
#
But as I started writing, what I realized was everything had been written about on Kashmir
#
and from a journalistic point of view, and I definitely didn't want that.
#
So if you see, there are events mentioned and there is citation at the book.
#
So if anyone wants to see that particular event or a political historical event, they
#
have the notes at the back.
#
But it was a deliberate choice.
#
I just feel people connect.
#
I mean, if the goal is to, I remember when I used to write, I used to tell my friends,
#
if it changes one person's heart or outlook towards Kashmir, my job here is done.
#
I think we humans connect to human stories.
#
We've heard enough about journalistic statistics, and that was also one of the main points of
#
anguish that I had that we have always been converted into statistics by everyone.
#
I was not going to do that.
#
So I think I was trying to impart some dignity to our lives, which we have been robbed off
#
So that's why that little bit of telling it like, and I think I've always connected with
#
books which talk about humans.
#
I mean, I know I wrote nonfiction, but I rarely read nonfiction.
#
I just like love stories and I just want to read about people and their resilience and
#
their quest for whatever they're looking for.
#
And I think if you live through a particularly turbulent period in history or time, you don't
#
look at yourself as how journalists would come and report on you.
#
You remember incidents and you remember stories and you remember who did what.
#
So it was to be closer to my own experience than just do what everyone else was doing.
#
And also I find that I somehow couldn't write about Kashmiris.
#
I had to write as one because you in nonfiction, you expect a certain amount of that kind of
#
distance that you will write about subject.
#
You will write, but I somehow, I was like, that's already been done.
#
And I remember that last chapter was the first chapter.
#
It was a weird habit I had of attesting the dead.
#
And it was also then like self-examining my own behaviors.
#
So I used to like sign it and at that point I thought it was power because my aunt was
#
this professor and every time I had to get my documents attested, I would go to her.
#
But then later it was like, it was almost also like imparting the dignity to people
#
who had died of natural causes because all along you heard of mass graves and people
#
dying in hordes, whether it was Havel or Tangpora or Bishbehara.
#
And then suddenly you have people who were dying the way again, I think it's like holding
#
on to that continuity, which kept eroding increasingly.
#
A question about your journey.
#
One way of looking at your journey would be that you grew up in Kashmir, you went out,
#
you became a journalist and you realized that what you wanted to do was you wanted to tell
#
the story about your childhood and about Kashmir and that's what you did.
#
And that leads us to an event or an action that you're sitting and writing the book.
#
And another way is that in the course of doing that job and then reflecting on where you
#
came from and wanting to write this book, it changed the way you kind of viewed yourself.
#
So this book wasn't just an isolated action.
#
It was part of the person that you were and it was a continuous part of a coherent narrative.
#
So what's a way to then understand that?
#
What is your conception of yourself?
#
Was this book an isolated project to scratch one particular itch or are you this kind of
#
Are you a writer who is doing this kind of examination?
#
And if so, what kind of writer are you?
#
What are your interests now?
#
What are you working on?
#
Where do you see yourself going?
#
Like I said, stories, people, they just fascinate me and I'm only moved by them.
#
Because I think we've been like victims of too much of being like statistics everywhere.
#
So definitely, I mean, I looked at myself, I think more than myself, it was really, oh,
#
what happened to that person?
#
Like he couldn't talk and he only had one word, which is Malay and he lost that as well.
#
So you think of that and you think of other things that happened to other people.
#
And then you just think about those events and stories and there's a lot of this.
#
It's not sadness, but it's like melancholy that you're filled with.
#
And I think that moves me far more than anything else.
#
But there's also like, like the next book that I'm working on, which is a loose adaptation
#
of Little Women, it's about a story about four girls, right?
#
And they, now it's about 94 onwards and they've sort of learned to navigate the conflict and
#
And they just do the craziest stuff, you know, which we did while growing up, which you can't
#
All you can imagine is Kashmir war, 90s, but we also went to school.
#
We also gossiped, we also spoke to boys at night.
#
We also did, but of course then there is the backdrop of what was happening and it gets
#
impacted by everything.
#
But it's also about how there's a certain kind of erasure you're trying to resist, which
#
news reports, which when others write about you is very palpable, like you, it's again,
#
the thing is it's resisting that kind of erasure and by not, I mean, even in this nonfiction,
#
it is narrative nonfiction, you're still talking, you know, in a story like manner.
#
So it's, it's still that, that I'm interested in that we are not only about what happened
#
We can't just be defined by that.
#
We have thousands of years of culture, history, we're regular, ordinary people.
#
And that is what the fight is about, right?
#
It's about your living with dignity and, and, but what we've also endured and, and especially
#
and again, then the focus is especially on women who just don't, I mean, what has surprised
#
me, of course, the book is, the readers have been extremely kind and it has had the kind
#
of reception that it did, but Kashmiri young girls connecting to it and writing papers
#
in their courses about it and Ashoka and DU and Kashmir, I wasn't really expecting that.
#
But for again, it's like they're relating to your experiences.
#
This is like, I don't know, it's, it's, it's for me, that's like big, bigger than any,
#
any review or anything that could come this book's way for young girls or 20 years, it's
#
saddening at one level because they can relate to what's happening.
#
They almost like say, Oh, if I felt like it was my story, I mean, why should they also
#
What I, I mean, what our generation did, the privations that war brings, but for them to
#
engage with this book, it's, it's like, you know, they finally feel like they can talk
#
They can write, they can tell their stories and it's not that I did some heroic thing,
#
but it was just like, I don't know.
#
I just, you know, I mean, I remember there was this male journalist back home who would
#
tell me once he told me, what are you going to write about?
#
Everything has been written about Kashmir, I was like, not my story, not the way we grew
#
up and he's like, yeah, this, everything is written.
#
I remember when Basharat, we read the book and I sent it to him and he was like, I was
#
very sure that I had read everything on Kashmir.
#
I just didn't think of the experiences that women had in this context.
#
So it was like, in that sense, it was just trying to tell how you grew up and nothing
#
else and it also tells you how heartbreaking, how women get sidelined if something of this
#
So yeah, I think I'm always going to write stories about people, I, politics, everyone
#
writes about that, but yeah.
#
I mean, the inward look really worked for me and I think sometimes what books can do
#
is they can give you permission to think differently about the world, like I can imagine young
#
girls reading this book and allowing themselves that self-reflection and allowing themselves
#
to divert that inward look towards themselves and not feel that it is self-indulgent or
#
why should I have value in my feelings or whatever, but, and I think it can, I, you
#
know, certainly play that part, however, I must call you out because you said you have
#
done crazy things and example you gave was you spoke to boys at night, listen, first
#
of all, there was curfew, secondly, there were no smartphones, so, you know, there was
#
sometimes in the phones would work and you would like have a, have a, have a couple of
#
friends over and then, you know, I'm kidding, but what's the craziest thing you did?
#
I actually, I didn't do anything, but well, it actually doesn't seem crazy.
#
I mean, I would, I was meeting Wasim once and there was like a bunch of us meeting in
#
a restaurant, you know, you think of Kashmir as a patriarchal society and then conflict
#
And I remember there were three of us meeting Wasim, two of my friends and a couple of militants
#
saw us and they basically took him away and they were like, you know, how are you, I mean,
#
that wasn't allowed, right, for a period.
#
So they saw him and they took him away.
#
So I just called his brother up, I said, we were meeting and he has been taken away and
#
can you please like make sure he comes back?
#
I mean, that, that was a very like heroic gesture at that point.
#
And telling him that, you know, he's been taken away and, I mean, it could get into
#
like, he could have gotten into serious trouble.
#
That was like the force for someone who was really timid at that point.
#
I think that's one thing that strikes me as having done something.
#
Well, you know, more power to you and I can't wait to read your adaptation of Little Women
#
because you know, on the evidence of this, it will be sort of something I'm looking forward
#
So the final question, which I always ask guests who come on the show is why don't you
#
By art, I mean books, films, music, whatever that means a lot to you and that you want
#
to share with me and my listeners and not necessarily on this subject or that subject,
#
but stuff that's dear to you.
#
I mean, Nadine Gordimer's book again, I think it's just because how this energy in her.
#
I've watched a lot of Toni Morrison videos.
#
I wish I had, I could have met her at some point.
#
I love this film called The Patient Stone by the, who is it by, I can't remember the
#
director, but it's the actress and it is Golshifte Farhani, it's about by this Afghan woman again.
#
And it's, it's, I think it was on Mubi.
#
It's one of the most fascinating films, Little Women, like how all of us sort of saw a glimpse
#
of us, ourselves in Joe.
#
I love Elena Ferrante and I also really like the Nadine Gordimer I talked about.
#
There is this Irish writer, I quite, I read, I think if I'm not reading Raja Shahid or
#
Palestinian writers sometimes, I love Irish literature.
#
I mean, even the contemporary ones, right?
#
So Anna Burns, Milkman.
#
I find that, I think I've been, I remember when I used to study literature, I used to
#
basically, that was my way to bond with my mother.
#
I used to basically tell her stories from Paradise Lost and Macbeth and so yeah, just
#
stories and I, I don't know, last few years it's literally largely been about women.
#
Like so I'll pick a woman and I'll just watch everything that she's worked on.
#
Greta Gerwig, I was pretty fascinated with her for a bit, but I think, I sometimes feel
#
it's unfortunate because that you can't, you know, the way you are bringing husband,
#
it has a shadow on your preference.
#
I mean, it casts a shadow on your preferences, like, you know, you almost feel guilty if
#
you haven't, if you don't, if you let's say watch comedy for the longest time or read
#
And if you don't read what's sort of relevant to your experiences, I don't know, it's something
#
that one has to work on.
#
But Hishamatar I really love, yeah, and Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence, I thought was
#
I mean, I remember reading Snow, but I think this has a far better, and of course, like
#
bell hooks and, and all the iconic women or even re, I like love watching documentaries
#
on like feminist women.
#
It's just that, that how did they do it when, when things were really difficult.
#
I remember like some readers would tell me, oh wow, you know, you're writing from Kashmir
#
and like, to be honest, I don't have myself to thank for.
#
It's my grandmother who hid from my grandfather that my mother was actually going to the university
#
and there was go ahead there.
#
So her only condition was come back before sunset or a certain time.
#
So it was really the work that my grandmother did.
#
So yeah, I love seeing what women have done in the past and we're really reaping the benefits
#
of what they've done for us.
#
Sorry, I'm not including your gender too much into it, but
#
But yeah, not that I have anything against, but it's just that it sort of helps me right
#
And you were naming a bunch of men in a row.
#
I was wondering what's happening, Matar and Pamuk and all that.
#
I think that it comes a bit of culture, a bit of storytelling, Sibald, I read for the
#
longest time, but I just feel that there is a certain element of that self-assuredness
#
and that you missed in women's writing and therefore they try even harder and then they
#
My big discovery as far as a memoir goes this year is Vivian Gornik.
#
Shriyana Bhattacharya in her episode with me, which you said you've heard, sort of recommended
#
So sometimes even I will buy books from my own show notes and I will just blown away.
#
She's got this great book called The Odd Woman in the City, Fierce Attachments.
#
But I've heard a name though, but I haven't read.
#
In fact, I mean, that name struck me because we were talking about her.
#
I was talking to a friend about her this morning.
#
I mean, he again recommended another book.
#
There is also this memoir called Shame on Me, which I did this year by Tessa McWatt.
#
It's again, the form is so different.
#
It's presented as a research paper to deconstruct a race and show it as a construct.
#
It's beautifully done and I really liked what Kamila Shamsi did with Home Fire and how she
#
really took Antigone and transformed the whole thing in the last 10 pages.
#
And of course, you know, one grew up reading Didion and everything by Jane Austen.
#
But yeah, but if I were to like, if I get stuck, it's only Nadine Gautamarat.
#
She just pushes me into writing.
#
And again, like if you were to sort of analyze it, she's writing about apartheid and post
#
apartheid literature and you wouldn't really read it probably now, you would much rather
#
But again, I think there's so much of emotional integrity and integrity generally in her work,
#
which I think one aspires to.
#
And I'll cheat and ask a final question after saying that was a final question, but it strikes
#
me that it might be helpful.
#
If there are young people listening to this, who are trapped in oppressive situations and
#
they don't know how to deal with it, what would your advice to them be?
#
Mainly women, but I don't want to leave men out.
#
There might well be, but obviously mainly women.
#
I think it's the I mean, I know it might just sound a little cliched and also, I don't know,
#
it's just one life, to be honest, and you can't and we all also have like limited time.
#
I think I'm so conscious of this because I feel like I've lost a lot of time while growing
#
up a with what was going on in the nineties, secondly, with then dealing with it.
#
And there'll never be a perfect time to sort of pursue what you want to do.
#
And it's I think it's that I mean, I know it sounds really maybe arrogant, but I always
#
used to say this when I was growing up, if you put society above me, I'll put myself
#
above society or something, some juvenile thinking, but it's actually true.
#
I mean, it's like if there's something you want to do and if you're passionate about
#
and you I mean, oppressive society, we all are like men are equally oppressive situations,
#
you know, some, I mean, there are different motivations, self-awareness, I mean, I honestly,
#
I'm like resisting terms, which could make it sound like pop psychology, but I don't
#
know men checking a to be honest, just competing with your own self and thinking about how
#
you will better your own self in getting what you where you want to get that really takes
#
care of a lot of toxicity.
#
You don't indulge in that and then there is you're focused on one goal if you have one
#
and people who even don't have that just believing and just doing things that they feel is right
#
Gosh, this has been like the toughest question of this whole session.
#
Farah, thank you so much for coming on the show.
#
I loved your book and I love this conversation.
#
I mean, it was a pleasure.
#
Honestly, a pleasure to be here.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hop on over to your nearest bookstore online
#
or offline and pick up Rumors of Spring by Farah Bashir.
#
You can follow Farah on Twitter at Farah Bashir.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
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You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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