Mall Road bustles with mid-day traffic around 3 pm on a Tuesday. I sit, leaning as close to the door of an in-drive as possible, keeping the window open even if it means having air pungent with the smell of burnt fuel blowing into my face. Incessant honking that gets no one nowhere continues to ring out every few seconds and I have to make a choice.
Put on my headphones and let the music take away some of the overwhelming sounds of Lahore, or succumb to them? The former is a cop-out and I have never claimed to be particularly strong willed. Music, it is.
But then a billboard catches the eye. A familiar flag, one that’s waved every few months and subsequently forgotten. The sign seems to have replaced the usual “Free Palestine” billboard with the AI images of children in a generic warzone that occupied the space before. The car slows to a stop at a traffic signal and I squint to read:
یومِ یکجہتی کشمیر۔ ہم اپنی شہ رگ نہیں چھوڑیں گے!
I blink at the sign for a few seconds and the car begins to move. I wonder at the usage of the word “یکجہتی” and question whether they meant “solidarity” or “unification.” At first, the statement does seem to suggest solidarity in the context of, well, Kashmir. But then the sentimental and borrowed proclamation that follows, suggests at unification being the true meaning. “We will not forsake our jugular vein,” it says.
I hit play on a song I had been listening to the night before, it continues where I had left off. The word “forsake” comes from the Dutch “verzaken.” It means to betray, to abandon or to desert. All words that sting with a hint of guilt. All words that say “You’re a part of this.” The jugular vein is vital to the circulatory system. It keeps us alive. Whoever wrote that statement feels strongly about Kashmir. Or wants me to feel strongly about Kashmir.
I think of George Orwell, and am interrupted when the driver asks me where to turn. Momentarily, I forget the way to my own house and try not to let it show. That’s a good way to tell someone you’re a willing victim for axe murder. Once that’s settled and the song ends, the broken chain of thought returns to me. Right, all art is propaganda. That’s what it was.
The popular narrative goes, we care about Kashmir because we care about Kashmiris. That’s how it’s always been. Except for a brief stint during the 2000s when domestic terrorism was at an all time high and the elite and intellectual class of Pakistan thought Kashmir was a needless burden sinking our doomed ship. “Save Pakistan before saving Kashmir,” is something someone with a British passport published in the press.
The car lurches to a stop and I put a hand up against the seat and look to the driver who seems to be trying to throw me out the windshield. Someone broke a signal. Save Pakistan from whom, you ask? Ponder no further.
It is now perhaps a good time to tell you my ancestors were Kashmiri. They migrated to Amritsar years before the partition due to tribal conflicts and never looked back and when it was time for the partition, they once again fled Amritsar and immigrated to Lahore beginning life all over again. What little of their culture they carried into this new country, their new homes, their new life was slowly lost over the decades boiling down to…well, tea.
When the car stops outside my house, I pay an outrageous amount of money to the driver and bid him farewell. My mother opens the door to me and when I walk inside the house, I am not thinking of that billboard anymore but about loss.
A culture day many years ago in first grade when I asked my father, “We’re Punjabi, right? I’ll have to wear Punjabi clothes to school” and he told me, “No we’re not. We’re Kashmiris. Our ancestors were from Kashmir.” I couldn’t wrap my head around it. We spoke Punjabi, I was born in Lahore, we lived in Sindh, I had never been to Kashmir other than hearing that name uttered in the news. How could we be Kashmiri?
“But we don’t speak Kashmiri,” and to that, my father had no answer. It was true. We did not speak Kashmiri. The last person to speak that tongue in our family had passed away a decade ago. But still, my parents kept on believing themselves to be part of an identity that had never belonged to us.
Walking into the kitchen, there’s that huge saucepan resting on the stove. A staple of winter in the house. Pull the lid back and there it is. All of our so-called heritage. I heat up the namkeen chai and think back to the flurry of opinions when article 370 was abrogated and Kashmiris lost their autonomy, and their culture and heritage was threatened. Continues being threatened. I feel a sense of being an imposter.
The same sense of being an imposter that billboard had driven into me. Solidarity. I’ll think of it today, I’ll sit down and drink my watered down version of history, I’ll talk to friends and make statements about the agendas of our governments in wanting a piece of land to capitalize on it, about the so-called jugular vein being a way to establish dominance and then this week will pass and I’ll move on.
Today, I’ll talk of solidarity, perhaps of the self-importance of demanding a unification, the hypocrisy of demanding the persecution of Kashmiris be halted when we turn a blind eye to Balochistan, of all those who have died fighting for a land we love to call our own and for people we tell we’re always there for. But then the chai boils over. I turn the stove off, cleaning up the excess before my mother sees and I move on.