Wild Child and Other Stories by Paro Anand

Author:Paro Anand [Anand, Paro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788184755923
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2012-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

Like Smoke

SHE HUMS HER early morning song as she deftly packs the lunch for her mother and father. She’s already pretended to have cooked her own, wrapping a plastic bag around a cloth duster so that it looks like a packet of food. She knows her mother is dead against her plan to diet, but Zeenat knows that she is getting fat. She’s started hating looking at herself in the mirror. She felt her chin was wobbly and her cheeks too round. She sucked her cheeks in to give her that beautiful gaunt look that she loved. Her friend Farida had it. But then she also had that haunted look that came from too much loss. Yes, Farida was used to loss. She’d seen her own father and brother being dragged away in the late evening, never to return.

That way, Zeenat was lucky. Most of her other classmates had had similar violent losses in their families. Zeenat’s family had been spared ‘by god’s grace’, she muttered under her breath as she spooned rice and potato curry into her parents’ tiffin boxes. She missed school. It had been months now that school had been shut by strikes, bandhs and curfews. She missed not going out now. Her parents went out every day, leaving her behind with warnings to lock the door, draw the curtains and pretend no one was home.

She was proud of the fact that her mother went to work too. She was a nursing assistant in a hospital nearby. It was hard work and often not a very rewarding one either. She was supposed to be in the delivery ward, but there weren’t many babies being delivered nowadays. What with all the stress and tension that women lived with, they weren’t conceiving babies. Not to mention that many, many men had been lost in all the violence that rocked their beautiful Kashmir valley at regular intervals, often peace being a very short interlude, between terrifying incidents of violence. So Ammi had been transferred into the Emergency ward. She didn’t like this work. There were always gunshot victims and blast survivors coming in. And this disturbed Ammi a lot. Zeenat could tell what her Ammi’s day was like even before she came home. For Zeenat spent a lot of time in front of the television, listening and listening to the news. There was very rarely good news.

Not much at all after that cute Kashmiri boy had won Indian Idol. Zeenat smiled at the memory. Her Abbu had scolded her when her mobile phone bill came then. Much higher than normal because of all the text messages she’d sent to vote for the boy. He was Kashmiri and besides, he was cute. Of course, Zeenat, being Zeenat, had ignored the stupid fatwas that had been issued by the extremist organizations. Warning Kashmiris not to show support for a traitor who turned his back on his Kashmiriyat by participating in an Indian program. ‘Kashmir is not a part of India,’ they urged.

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