Image of Poonch Valley from Google Images (http://avik-besttraveldestinations.blogspot.com/)

It serves us well, from time to time, to complicate our ideologies and question the things we love.

Above my desk, there is an obsolete one-rupee note. It bears the face of the founder of my country, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Over time, I have felt different things looking at that face. Pride, wonder, and sometimes confusion. For me, he is the man who gave me my home. A complicated and fallible but visionary leader. A force for change.

My mother’s dadi, her paternal grandmother, spent only the final thirty years of her life being a citizen of Pakistan. She spent all thirty of those years refusing to look at any pictures of Jinnah, and forbidding anyone from putting one up under her roof. For this beautiful and majestic lady, my blood and kin, this was the man who ripped her home apart. The reason she never saw her best friend, her only brother again in this life. A force of destruction.

I was born in Pakistan, a full citizen, in 1994. For me, the ghosts of partition did not have faces. I grew up never challenging the fact that the country I lived in was mine, and I was hers. Part of this is because my father is Punjabi. He’s bone-deep, let’s eat pulao and zarda together with salan on top Punjabi, and very aware and proud of his heritage and ancestry. From him, I inherited a strong sense of place and belonging; I have a deep bond with the land I consider home — ties of kinship and ownership I felt to be immutable for a long time. But today, like every February 5th, I remind myself that I am also my mother’s daughter. I remind myself that my existence is part of a torn history, a ripped and very bloody canvas.

My mother is Kashmiri. She was born on the Pakistan-controlled side of the Line of Control eleven years after partition. She grew up in Muzzaffarabad, has never been to the “other” Kashmir, and her National Identity Card is the same green as mine. Her national identity, however, is very different.

My mother’s mother, my Amma, was in her early teens in the summer of 1947. Sometimes, without much warning, she would launch into stories about Kashmir and I would dutifully listen. About half of her family, originally from the Poonch valley, was spending the summer in what is now Ath Muqam. August came, and brought with it a new country and arbitrary borders that split their family irreversibly into two. For my paternal village in Punjab, far from the border, August 14th meant independence. It meant an exodus of Sikhs and a lot of land and money being up for grabs. They did not have to move, flee or fear for their lives. I don’t begrudge them this, of course. However, for Amma’s family, it meant the end of their world. It meant that my mother’s Dadi never saw her siblings again. She died without setting foot in the home she had built with so much love and care. It meant that Amma, my beloved Nani, never got to breathe the air of her hometown again in her lifetime. It meant that my mother grew up never meeting her aunts, uncles and cousins until some of them bravely made a single trip over in happier times in the late nineties. For seventy years, it meant that my mother’s family — like many families in Kashmir — has remained in the cruelest state of limbo.

I have never been to Indian-occupied Kashmir, so I cannot speak about the experience of living there. From my experience on the Pakistani side, the major issues here are under-representation and a lack of autonomy. In general, from a layperson’s viewpoint, the area is fairly secure and military presence is similar in effect to bases in other parts of the country, and the citizens of the area do not find it intrusive to their daily lives. However, until the Kashmir issue is resolved completely, Kashmir cannot be “Azad” on either side of the border. It is being held hostage by two nations that seem to have conveniently forgotten that its inhabitants are living, breathing human beings who deserve better than what we have given them:silence, oppression, fear and death. Politicians from both India and Pakistan have used it as a vulgar means to get more votes, and nothing more. Every few years, intense violence erupts in Indian-occupied Kashmir that leads to civilian deaths and curfews that bring the area to a standstill for months. As time winds on, the issue has lost international traction and become an inconvenient mess that both countries gladly push under the rug until they need it for their own benefit.

For a long time, I disliked talking about Kashmir. It was too touchy or cliche a subject, especially around friends I made both from Pakistan and India who seemed to know so much more about the intricacies of the conflict. But now, I care less about sensitivity. I care more about having an entire family that is alien to me, lost generations that I will never know, and never even having the option to be a part of a place I have as much claim to as I do to my dusty town in the middle of Punjab. As a civilian, I have no say in how the governments of Pakistan and India arbitrate the future of the people of Kashmir. I also have no tangible idea, apart from various unreliable polls, of what the citizens of both Kashmirs want. I do have a common-sense hunch, however, that they want to be left alone and live their lives without being proxies for our internal conflicts.

February 5th is Kashmir Solidarity Day. It is a holiday in Pakistan, but even by our standards, it has been reduced to mean less than nothing. But it will always remind me of a chilly afternoon in middle school, when I walked into Amma’s room as she watched a Kashmir Day TV broadcast. She didn’t notice me slipping in, and after a few seconds I saw that she was crying quietly. On the TV, a song played in Kashmiri:

Karyo manzr jigras jaye chamno maye mashya ni

I never got to learn much Kashmiri from her, but I understood the next few words in Urdu.

Shaguftagi e gul o nastaraan nahi bhoolay

Haseen phoolon ki woh anjuman nahi bhoolay

Teri bahaaron main phir muskuraayein gay ik din

Meray watan teri Jannat mein aayein gay ik din

Sitam sha’aaron se tujh ko churrayein gay ik din

“We have not forgotten the soft beauty of the dog-rose

We have not forgotten the congregation of beautiful flowers

One day, we will smile in your spring once again

My land, one day we will return to your paradise

One day, we will rid you of all those who oppress you”

Today, to remember and to honor your sacrifices, I sing these words for you, Amma. For the family we lost, and the ones we hope to find. I hope that wherever you are, your valley is once again green and happy, washed of bloodstains and free for you to walk in.

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