Thread by @carin__fischer

More "Normalcy" Kashmir style.

Because the news of the same cop again being implicated in something sinister, I think of the day of Guru's hanging. It was just after the first Azan and the internet was still working. Shujaat Bukhari was the only other Kashmiri already online.

He asked me whether I knew why it was curfew. I said I did not know but would try to find out. It was freezing and still almost dark. But like always during such days, a thick pall of gloom seemed to have already descended on the Valley. It is in the air. Then the news broke.

Almost instantly all went dead at the same time. The perfect choreographing of the caging of an entire people. OA had perfected it under his reign of terror. No internet, no cable TV, no cell phone connectivity. I had no landline the only communication still possible. Ten days!,

This curfew was much tougher than the ones in 2010. That was to prevent similar protests from happening and Delhi wanted to make sure. Nobody was allowed to stick their heads out the window. No curfew passes could be obtained. Nobody could speak to each other or meet.

I started retching. For years some of us had tried to talk to people in Delhi not to allow this unjust hanging to happen. But those in the Congress who insisted on it to counter the BJP's claim that the party was weak on terrorism prevailed. India's bloodlust had to be satisfied.

Later that day it began sleeting. The transformer in my neighborhood blew the way it always did during such weather. Water pipes had frozen during the night. For 10 days, the power department could not be reached nor were they allowed to go out and make repairs.

My gas cylinder was low, and one of the three batteries I had hooked up to my converter was already dead. Whenever something horrible happens in Kashmir, one constantly switches between despair and panic over the logistics of every day survival.

I lived alone and because it was winter my landlord like many others. had moved to Jammu to escape the cold I often wonder now how I survived those 10 days. It literally felt like living in a remote cage with no connectivity and no electricity. OA had moved to Delhi as always.

And then when services and electricity are restored, one is so relieved that one often forgets what caused them to be shut down to begin with. But it gets filed away, and the psychological baggage never stops accumulating. Subconsciously one always waits for the volcano to erupt.

As always we survived it all but OA did not during the next elections. It was yet another intense time of state horror that made me go to sleep with my fists clenched every single night. And as always I felt that living in Kashmir prepares one for a post-apocalyptic world.

But I would still go back in a nano second if I could. It was home in every possible way. It was my people. And I did learn how to survive like everybody else despite the psychological baggage still getting heavier every day.

thewire.in/politics/afzal…