In this curated collection, five poets from Kashmir write about their homeland, variously chronicling the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, the communications blockade, the experience of childhood in militarised zones and the difficulty of bequeathing a brutal history to one’s children.

Organising the narrative of their struggle requires acts of imagination: Letters to those who haven’t been conceived yet, transcripts of conversations that will never come to pass, retellings of ancestral memories. One of the poets, Samia Mehraj, asks of school curricula in India: “Where was my history?” These poems are a small step in revising the erasure and denial of these stories in the mainstream.

What name shall you give it?

Omair Bhat

A Phone Call to Kashmir

is so imaginary ( it doesn’t

connect.... )

lines are busy all the time, no one

puts me through to you, no one. No

one recognises the urgency when

I dial long distance, repeatedly,

evading siege. I breathe grief’s ivory.

I want to ask, is your curfew wedding

still on the standby? I wait on my turn:

let the fate’s sorrow spell out a decree

for me. I tremble. I have no voice

to scream. Ascending a guillotine,

I rehearse a lover’s death note. You’re

all I have. I won’t lose you. There’s

no way I can forget your voice. The

cold silence that lingers in between,

gives us no hope. Its deathly whisper

amplifies into a clean whistle, on phone,

so sharp, it rips through the broken heart

of night. If you listen to it to interpret

a meaning. It says, You’re no more within

reach. You’re everything I have lost. What’s,

in the name of god, the use of my name

without you?

Omair Bhat is a Delhi-based poet whose writing appears in Inverse Journal, Kashmir Lit, Café Dissensus, The Sunflower Collective and others. He is working on his first collection of poetry and is currently an editorial intern at Caravan magazine.

The Exodus of a City

Samia Mehraj



It is 1990, I am not born.

Someone peeks through the window of my mother’s house.

In the vicinity, suitcases are being quietly packed with the essentials of olden days.

Secrets of slaughter are flying from paper to paper, from house to house.

In caravans, are leaving ancestral names with their progressive ambition for their motherland.

It’s 1990, I am not born and my mother is a recent bride.

Someone peeks through the window, finger on their mouth, mourning for a house that’ll fade like

an old photograph for decades to come.

Someone with a mask pours water over the oil lamps.

The temple bells, like the tinkle of her anklets are distant now.

My mother has lost a best friend.

It’s 1990, I’m not born yet and someone in my father’s house shuts a window to a neighbor who may never return.

It’s 2005,

Our school history roars of East Indian revolutions, we learn of swords that cut open the wombs of innocent mothers, of strong horses and strongest tribesmen, of lofty turbans and silken robes and their royal touch.

But where was my history?

I leaf through the dreams of my teachers, the teachers of their teachers, looking for the scent of my blood, I find indifference.

My history hides between the lines of your history.

My history weeps on empty pages, jumps out of the window, scatters blood on the streets.

My book of history lives in the haunted library of memories that my forefathers were forbidden to put on paper.

It’s 2005,

Someone peeks through the window of my father’s house, watches a man with a gun shoot dead a boy of 5.

Someone drags his body indoors.

My history finds home for a night.

It is 2016 and the newspaper promises peace on the streets

I leave the city again

For freedom or an illusion of it

I reach Delhi, waiting for a call from home

Nobody calls.

So we ran away from our bleeding city, It’s 2018,

We speak of it in distant lands.

But how does a city run away from itself? From its history? From its memory?

Your history is in the way of my history.

Your memory is again in the way of my memory.

It’s a still night and all the cities have lost track of each other.

Born and brought up in the small town of Sopore in Baramulla, Kashmir, Samia Mehraj is a poet and a social impact professional currently based in New Delhi.

Driving Lolita in the World’s Most Militarised Zone

Rafiq Kathwari



A boy, I hid in grandpa’s study.

An art dealer he loved books

with gilded edges, Aristotle to Zola

stuck together in the humidity.

I snuck Lo out to his black Chevy,

rifled for the dirty bits

(should have looked harder I guess),

took her for a spin,

teen tunes swirling in my head,

I Want to Hold Your Hand,

beamed us forward to the future –

a crackdown in downtown,

mothers hid their first-born sons.

“We fear forces’ll take our boys away.”

A soldier speckled pellets on the face

of a nymphet, light of her mother’s eye.

“Nothing can be seen,” the nymphet said,

“as far as the eye can see.”

Counterinsurgents wrapped petrol-

soaked rags around a boy’s penis,

lit a match. “Not tortured anyone

needlessly,” they said as the Zabarvan,

white turbans on peaks,

amplified the boy’s shrieks.

Cold full moon of Kashmir

hid her face in sullied Dal lake.

A shikara wallah knifed the swells

with a heart-shaped oar.

Butterflies fluttered at Pari Mahal

(where once Dara Shikoh translated

the Upanishads – a comfort to

Schopenhauer in his old age.)

Memory now is muteness.

An ancient Sufi shrine gutted,

its rich latticework lost.

New architecture

showed no awe for Nature.

Half-widows wailed, clawing

at mass graves, yearned

for their disappeared.

A paisley-shaped river

sobbed through a dazed valley.

Concrete barriers fenced the Shalimar,

bullet riddled Toyotas in bazaars.

Amputated trees lost their esteem,

reams of plastic choked mountain streams.

“We are all lifeless here. Hello!

Operator, resurrect our telephone.”

At Zero Bridge

lilacs by bunkers bloomed.

A nightingale sang of sorrow

(countering Keats who said it sang of joy.)

“Why aren’t we where we’re going?”

my mother asked, sipping salt tea

at the Mental Hospital, Raina Wari,

synthetic flowers gilding her hair.

A Lord of the Skies

broke the sound barrier.

at precisely 1300 hours

stifling calls to Jumma namaaz.

Startled,

stray dogs howled

at Kashmir’s gunmetal sky.

Loh – lee – tha,

in Grandpa’s shiny Chevy,

slid from my lap

ending

our ominous odyssey.

Poet, photographer, and translator Rafiq Kathwari is the first Kashmiri recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. His debut poetry collection In Another Country (Doire Press) was published in 2015. His second collection, Mother’s Scribe, will be published later this year by Yoda Press. He divides his time between New York, Dublin and Kashmir.

Gifts for My Daughter Not Yet Conceived

Asiya Zahoor

I gift you millennium of confusion

in my genes;

muffled chromosomes,

a double X

to excavate epiphanies.

I sow doubt in my womb

watered with fears.

I gift you

my unsettled struggles,

uncommitted sins,

unnoticed virtues,

unread and half-read books,

three-by-two-inches laminated paper

in the name of identity.

I gift you a rugged map

carved from cracks

between divorced nations.

I gift you

unyielding obsessions,

unexplored passions,

a horoscope of cusps,

Hamlet’s unfinished line

for the Vale of Kashmir,

To be or not to be, that is...

Born and raised in Baramulla, Kashmir, Asiya Zahoor is an academic and an award-winning film-maker. She is the curator of Bolbosh, which documents the literature of Kashmir as well as the various languages spoken in the valley. Her debut collection of poems, Serpents Under My Veil, was published by Tethys in 2019. She was recently awarded the Sanford H Taylor Fellowship for post-doctoral studies at Cornell University where she will spend the next two years studying South Asian literature.

one lazy august afternoon from a childhood in Kashmir

Ather Zia

crackdown oas[1]

all homes were empty

of men, and young lads detained

in verdant meadows turned prisons

ashen ghosts of toddlers, and women

remained in homes

another dull morning

was leading to a hot afternoon

taaph oas zaneh zalaan[2]

roses drooped,

honeysuckle whiffs rose lazily

white butterflies looked yellow

the earth scorched our bare feet

a far off radio

blared yesterday’s khabar[3] –

someone in haste

had forgotten to switch it off

wozul[4] bicycle, ridden too much

when there was no curfew –

and left too long in the sun

burst a tire,

everyone jumped,

thinking they heard a bullet –

the soldiers not ever convinced

by the natural order of elements

did what they do –

barging into homes

demanding the imaginary guns

zulmitch hadh[5]

mothers doubled from chores,

doubly made to feel female,

half covered their faces,

pointing

to the glistening bicycle’s

plastic rupture

towoon yeman[6]

they cursed irresponsible children

who forget moving things

into shade, to safety –

the soldiers shook their metalheads

not convinced

by the natural order of elements

and did what they do –

proceeded to deliver

customary kicks,

staple curses, shoving,

pulling threadbare scarves,

zyaadti hez karekh[7]

pummelling flesh, kicking dogs,

hitting toddlers

mixing rice with kerosene

a signature act,

rab te sab karekh kuni[8]

their wrath a national dumpster fire

growing, just because it could –

a puny tween, an annoying friend,

a partner in banter,

su rotukh bechor[10]

he was hiding at home,

trying to finish his overdue

math homework

teacher had given him a zero

the soldiers

pumped n-number of bullets into him

we had learned addition together

and nothing has ever added up after –

he once told me hisaab[11] would kill him

but i also knew the red bicycle was mine,

and mine alone,

for many years which still qualified

as childhood – even in Kashmir,

i prepared for the hereafter

where he would confront me

for his killing and i

would reason, he could have finished

his homework on time –

Footnotes

[1] [It was]

[2] [sun was scorching]

[3] [news]

[4] [red]

[5] [limitless cruelty]

[6] [may plague fall on them]

[7] [they forced themselves upon us]

[8] [mud has been mixed with a feast (by them)]

[9] [one young lad]

[10] [hapless! he was caught]

[11] mathematics

Ather Zia is a poet and a political anthropologist who teaches at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Her book, Resisting Disappearance: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir, will be published in India by Zubaan Books in February 2020. She is also the founding editor of Kashmir Lit which is an invaluable resource for those interested in literature from and about the region that isn’t available elsewhere.