In the Valley of Mist: Kashmir: One Family In A Changing World by Justine Hardy

Author:Justine Hardy [Hardy, Justine]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2009-05-20T22:00:00+00:00

WHEN HIGH SUMMER MAKES the plains below unbearable and their air unbreathable, the Valley bottom also sinks into lethargy. The months leading to the July monsoon sit torpid in the heat haze. These people of the Himalayan garden do not enjoy either the harsh cut of midwinter or the weight of summer. During the hot months everything slows, and when there were no more tourists to look after and sell to, it was as though the whole Valley stalled, nothing doing, except for those employed by either side of the insurgency.

Sobra Dar’s nephew Arshad was a boy at that time. He is a young man now, the one who was at school across the lake, near the paramilitary camp. His school was more often closed than open during the worst years of the insurgency, his ability to study paralyzed by fear.

Arshad comes to see me often, clasping books and notes from the English classes that he goes to now.

One time when he came to see me recently he was looking for a very particular word.

“You have to help me. My teacher has asked me to ask you, what is it when someone cannot feel so strongly about a thing?” he asked.

We tried unmotivated, bored.

“No, that’s not it. Say my friends all go off to fight with the militants and when they are talking about it before going they are excited, shouting, full of anger and things, but I cannot feel these things?”

We tried again: pacifist, dispassionate, apolitical.

“There is a word in Urdu for it but we cannot find a translation. Not even my teacher, and he is too good. You have to find one.” Arshad turned the book around and showed me the word on the page.

I stared at its graceful curls.

“Fearful?”

“No, it is not fear. We use it a lot to do with our women. Say I have a very pretty girlfriend and lots of men are flirting with her, and I am not doing anything about it, my friends will ask me why I am like this word?”

“Ambivalent, unmoved?”

“No, no, not these either,” Arshad said, flipping his mobile phone over and over in his hand.

He looked away across the lake and began to talk of a hot night, during the summer of 1994, all the men were away from the Dars’ house, except for one of the four brothers’ uncles, Arshad’s father, and the youngest of the brothers, Yusuf. It was late, sometime just after midnight. Every house had the windows wide, but only those above the first floor. Any entrance that could be reached from the ground was no longer safe. This in itself was a new sorrow for a people who had worked on a system of trust and unlocked doors for most of their lives. Some who could not sleep in the heat still went up to the open top stories of their homes, hoping to catch any movement of air among the spread of drying early summer vegetables and pickle jars. But most people were no longer prepared to risk unprotected exposure anymore.

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