Temptations Of The West by Pankaj Mishra

Author:Pankaj Mishra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography
Publisher: Pan Books
Published: 2006-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

For those who live in Kashmir, the expectations of justice, rarely fulfilled in the Indian subcontinent, are more than optimistic: they belong to fantasy. It makes it all the more difficult for the victims to bear their human losses. At Dalal’s house, the once carefully tended plants and hedges were already running wild just a few weeks after his murder, the fish in the pond were mostly dead, and a few men sat slumped on the floor in a bare hall under the Islamic calendar of mourning. His mother, persuaded by her male relatives to emerge from the dark room she had taken to since her son’s death, broke down as soon as she noticed the photos of Dalal I had been studying. The pictures showed a young man in dark glasses and trendy clothes, a happy contented man, someone who had managed to find, amid the relentless violence of the insurgency, a new style and identity for himself. When Dalal’s mother – still crying, while her own mother, Dalal’s grandmother, sat beside her, quietly wiping her tears with the frayed end of her headscarf – asked what was the point of talking to the press, of speaking about her son to me – he was gone, and wouldn’t come back; the people who had killed him were too powerful – it was hard not to feel pierced by the truth of what she was saying; hard not to be moved by her grief, and the pain, amid the great human waste of Kashmir, of her helplessness.

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