Wednesday, June 3, 2020

Protests Under Cover

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/protests


It’s mid-March and I’m walking through Gandhi Park in south Delhi’s Hauz Rani, where a massive, ongoing sit-in has been organized by protestors of the Citizen Amendment Act (CAA). The CAA — passed last December by the Indian Parliament — threatens to erase the existence of Muslims in India. Most of the protestors today are Muslim women.
One good thing about the Coronavirus is that I now walk the streets wearing a surgical face mask. I’m hoping it will not only protect me from the virus, but will also conceal my face in case it isn’t brown and Hindu-looking enough. I have a noticeable yellow and a pale pinkish hue around the cheeks — like many Kashmiris or immigrants, Afghanis, middle easterners.
It’s Maghrib time as prayer chants can be heard from a nearby mosque. The scraps of polyester fabric and plastic sheets hanging from wooden poles make the tent that is crowded with women protestors. One wearing a black abaya and a headscarf is presiding over other similarly dressed women, and those in Salwar Kameez — long loose shirts and creased pants. They are seated on the floor in clusters around her while she recites Arabic prayers and translates in Hindi, Allah hum sab ko shehan sakhti de, Sab taraf aman-chain ho. “May Allah give us strength. May peace prevail.”
One elderly man is backing out of the entrance on a scooter. Two skull-capped men, three teenage children, and a woman in a saree are shopping at the neighborhood stores owned by both Hindus and Muslims. Everyone appears mindful of who’s entering the neighborhood. Not all are allies. From the park fence along the entrance, no one can miss the towering portraits hanging over the stage where protestors are gathered. These portraits are of our heroes: Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh, and Babasaheb Ambedkar. Gandhi, the leader of India's struggle for independence from the British, is admired for his dogged, non-violent methods; Singh was a folk hero executed in the pursuit of Indian independence; and Ambedkar inspired the Dalit Buddhist Movement, by peacefully resisting the dominance of upper class Hindus and calling for equal rights for the untouchables.
These portraits inspire the protestors, remind them that progress has been made on their soil before. They symbolize a united India — Sikhs, Christians, Parsies, liberal Hindus, and activists have joined Muslims in protesting the CAA — while the bill represents Modi’s divided one.
Without an abaya and a headscarf, I worry that someone might point at me and call me a traitor.
Done praying, the women avoid my presence. I sit on the willow mat with them while they chat amongst themselves. A woman protester comes up and asks me who I am. Her voice sounds confident but can’t conceal the fear in her eyes. She blinks nervously and keeps looking around. Other women tug at her Kameez, shaking their heads, signaling to her that she should not talk with me.
I tell her I’ve come to show my support for their cause, which is mine as well.
“It’s just that we are scared,” she says, blinking, continuing to survey the area for danger. “We can’t trust anyone. We want peace. We are all humans. This is a mixed neighborhood. We come and go into each other's houses, have always been eating together and participating in each other’s weddings. We are all one. Our Hindu neighbors stand with us in solidarity. But Modi is dividing us.”
I ask the woman about the recent attack on the marchers by the police.
“We had just finished marching and were coming back from the nearby neighborhoods — Malviya Nagar, Khirki Gaon (village) — when some strange person pushed a cop. The man was an outsider none of us knew. Three days before, another woman popped up in the tent and started calling us names. I asked the women to stay calm and took her outside. These are the people who are trying to break us.”
As I leave the park, police barricades block the two entrances. I squeeze my way through the entrance across from the Max Hospital, where police attacked anti-CAA protestors just days earlier, injuring many of them.
*
With the passing of the CAA, Modi effectively abolished religious autonomy in India’s only Muslim-majority region: Kashmir. The day before President Trump’s visit to India, the first protests broke out in northeastern Delhi. Over eighty people have died so far at the hands of police, while many others have been injured.
Recently, a legislator in Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, Kapil Mishra, condemned the anti-CAA protests in Shaheen Bagh in south Delhi, urging his followers to clear out the protestors or he would. Riots followed the statement. A Muslim woman in her early 80s was burned alive after her house was set on fire by a Hindu nationalist mob carrying saffron flags and chanting Jai shri Ram.
*
I turn down the main road, unaware that I’m walking in the wrong direction. My heart skips a beat when an auto rickshaw driver pulls over behind me. When he asks where I am headed and if I need a ride, I realize that I’m a mile away from the Saket Metro train that will take me home.
Though he’s not wearing his skullcap, the driver turns out to be Muslim. I ask him to take me to Saket, but instead of taking the most direct route, he embarks on a longer one. This route is safer. It will steer clear of the traffic caused by the sit-ins, avoid the dangers that passing through Gandhi Park might present. The cops at the park might ask for my driver’s identification and his Muslim name might get him in trouble, trouble I avoided because of my facemask and American ID.
The driver tells me he has two daughters and is from the Poonch district of Jammu and Kashmir. We’re neighbors, I tell him.
Suddenly, he pulls over: "Sorry, my tire punctured.” He can’t go on any further. He tells me he is scared for his two daughters. Many children have died during the anti-CAA riots. More have been arrested.
He refuses payment and waves down an oncoming auto to give me a ride. Before we say goodbye, he reaches into his breast pocket for his wallet to show me pictures of his daughters, six and twelve.
“Beautiful,” I say.
“Be careful,” he replies.
*
His advice is sound. There are plenty of reasons to be careful.
Born and raised in Kashmir, I learned caution early. My Grandmother and I were at a neighborhood grocery store, only a few hundred meters from my parents’ house in Srinagar, when a bomb went off. Suddenly, the weight of a mountain fell on my leg. As smoke slowly began to clear, I saw people running for safety, faces contorted, arms thrashing the air as though they were trying to fly. I closed my eyes. After the surgery, I was laid up with a broken leg for months. My father spent days sitting beside me, unable to go to the national Radio Station where he worked as a Program Executive in charge of the music department.
I was eleven years old.
A decade later, my father, a family friend, Jawahar, and I were traveling to New Delhi where I planned to enroll in school for journalism. It was an overnight train, and the three of us were set to move me into an apartment the next day. We all settled into our bunks for the evening. It was the last time I’d see my father.
When I got up to use the restroom that night, my father wasn’t in the bunk below mine. I woke up Jawahar. We looked around the berth, in and around the restrooms, and then through the other sections of the train. But my father was nowhere.
I asked the people sitting in the compartment if they had seen him. In their half-asleep daze, no one had an answer. I alerted the railway police, but they said he probably got off at the last station and we couldn’t do anything until we arrived in Delhi. Two days later, the police finally responded: they said that they “found” my father at Mukerian Village, in the state of Punjab, a hundred miles away from where our train had stopped.
When I asked the police how he ended up in Punjab, they said that he’d fallen from the train.
How?
“He probably had gone to the exit by the restrooms to pee or smoke.”
They also said they’d cremated him immediately, yet offered no reason or explanation. Their action violated a law that requires police to allow 72 hours for a body to be identified. I filed complaints in the Indian courts and with various human rights organizations. Three years of lawsuits did little to resolve the mystery of his death. But that is a story for another time.
*
The driver who picks me up is noticeably Hindu. He drives nonchalantly around Ghandi Park, past a popular Bikaner Sweets shop where he chats briefly with a passerby about wanting a tea break. He asks me about my day but I don’t respond. I pray my face mask won’t fall off. I make it to Saket Metro safely.
At the moment, a virus which doesn’t distinguish Muslims or Hindus has provided me with the cover I need.

Not Shadows

https://solsticelitmag.org/content/not-shadows/

About my past life, my American friends
shake their heads, blinking.
Pints of shadows fall,
a mother’s womb swept bare.
Some things are good unseen.
They see nothing that looks
like that girl I was, cherry- dappled cheeks, fingers curled around
my mother’s hand,
unclenching, picking on an elephant bell
ringing in the window,
the swinging branches of childhood
suspended in space,
ivy penumbra of the days of our siege. War in Kashmir.
But my American friends, mimic, visualize;
a floating flame, a grenade, from the old kitchen window
before a thud, mirror like branches in the wind.
Mother’s screaming locked in tarnished silver pots.
Daddy’s away.
In the mirror, I see his remains,
pluck my sideburns,
the red veins in my hand, a reflection of Daddy’s lifetime,
growing thicker and thicker in his absence.



Saturday, March 28, 2020

Our Orchards Weep in Silence in Kashmir https://www.thequint.com/my-report/letters-to-kashmir-article-370-abrogation-poem

https://www.thequint.com/my-report/letters-to-kashmir-article-370-abrogation-poem


Our Orchards Weep in Silence
By Huma Sheikh
What’s left is a broken picture
weeks after Article 370 was revoked.
August 2019 – shikaras in Kashmir
tied to the shores, turning dry,
kites overhead looking for carrion;
a lone woman’s face in a houseboat window,
a baby’s scream chipped away by curfews.
In such silence, who will we be?
We thought, we’d never be without the 370,
without such privilege, that’s no one’s but ours –
without such code, bonded land, who will we be?
My mother’s fingers fumble on the phone
in our Delhi apartment.
Silence follows the dial tones
instead of her mother’s ach che theek.
“Phone lines in Kashmir down for the 20th day,”
my mother says. I haven’t been able to talk with Apa.
We are not fine. We are not ach che theek.”

Who will we be without the red soil trodden by Indian military boots?

Grandma pats the children on their heads
as they walk out the door.
Her fingers summon protection,
dua that lifts fears of a shooting, a bomb explosion
on every bend of the road filled with bunkers,
military trucks.

I wonder if her fingers tremble today to stifle the silence.
Perhaps she wants the ghostly clock to explode.

We dream of freedom
when the waters of Jhelum and Chenab
are stolen;
when a pheran-clad woman runs
through the lingering smoke of grenades
to smell the apples in her ancestral orchard.
The 370 held us like bran over a grain of rice – Kashur tomul.
(The author was born and raised in Kashmir. She’s presently based in the US where she’s pursuing her doctoral degree in Creative Writing and teaching at Florida State University. All 'My Report' branded stories are submitted by citizen journalists to The Quint. ThoughThe Quint inquires into the claims/allegations from all parties before publishing, the report and the views expressed above are the citizen journalist's own. The Quint neither endorses, nor is responsible for the same.)

IN THE AFTERMATH OF KASHMIR'S FEBRUARY 14, 2019 ATTACK ON AN INDIAN ARMY CONVOY


https://newversenews.blogspot.com/2019/03/in-aftermath.html


IN THE AFTERMATH

OF KASHMIR'S FEBRUARY 14, 2019 ATTACK ON AN INDIAN ARMY CONVOY

by Huma Sheikh


A bitter winter in Srinagar had just started to ease when the latest crisis in Kashmir was sparked on 14 February. That afternoon a local member of a Pakistan-based militant group rammed a car laden with explosives into a bus carrying Indian paramilitaries. The explosion was heard for miles around. At least 40 people were killed, the highest death toll from a single attack in the history of the insurgency. Above: A Kashmiri Muslim woman looks on as Indian government forces stand guard after clashes with separatist protesters. Photograph: Yawar Nazir/Getty Images. —The Guardian, March 2, 2019


No matter what the glistening forms
in blue cosmic wings tell me, I see
drones soaring in despair.

I left Kashmir lives ago and my veins
drained of past gore,
hallucinate in this world—Florida’s panhandle,
pounding, floating wraiths, spanning the distance,
gasping—
Rumi’s chaotic freedom.

Today, on the internet, a deceased trooper's daughter wailing;
forty mugshots scrolling the dead across the screen;
Kashmiri students, children of Indian Kashmir,
disappearing in Dehradun dungeons,
eyes of Sikh keepers burning a storm—protestors’ roar outside;
Kashmiri traders in Lucknow, whipped and kicked;
pack animals, carrying identity wares.

How to rebuild a sense of refuge when hope beans spill,
dissolve, in a battle?
Hadn’t these students, traders, escaped warfare in Kashmir?
Deaths bloom for the kith of the slain;
memories of dear ones an endless crackle of real flesh storm
dropping to ashes.
For Kashmiris still there,
war an everyday meal,
some eat, some fast by chance.

I question violence;
India and Pakistan’s territorial land-grab war,
ask myself if voicing feelings,
otherness, isn’t transcending bitterness?

Kashmir floats with me even here,
new crises piled on old ones—
a pedantic coop, winged prison,
war crumb confetti.
I do the ant’s painstaking
weight lifting of fragments—
senile Socrates.


Huma Sheikh is originally from Kashmir, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida State. Her prose and verse have appeared in various journals and magazines. A memoir and book of poems are in progress.

For Kashmiris in India, War is an Everyday Meal https://livewire.thewire.in/author/huma-sheikh/

https://livewire.thewire.in/author/huma-sheikh/



By Huma Sheikh

For Kashmiris in India, War is an Everyday Meal

No matter what the glistening forms
in blue cosmic wings tell me, I see
drones soaring in despair.
I left Kashmir lives ago and my veins
drained of past gore,
hallucinate in this world – Florida’s panhandle,
pounding, floating wraiths, spanning the distance,
gasping –
Rumi’s chaotic freedom.
Today, on the internet, a deceased trooper’s daughter wailing;
forty mugshots scrolling the dead across the screen;
Kashmiri students, children of Indian Kashmir,
disappearing in Dehradun dungeons,
eyes of Sikh keepers burning a storm – protestors’ roar outside;
Kashmiri traders in Lucknow, whipped and kicked;
pack animals, carrying identity wares.
How to rebuild a sense of refuge when hope beans spill,
dissolve, in a battle?
Hadn’t these students, traders, escaped warfare in Kashmir?
Deaths bloom for the kith of the slain;
memories of dear ones an endless crackle of real flesh storm
dropping to ashes.
For Kashmiris still there,
war is an everyday meal,
some eat, some fast by chance.
I question violence;
India and Pakistan’s territorial land-grab war,
ask myself if voicing feelings,
otherness, isn’t transcending bitterness?
Kashmir floats with me even here,
new crises piled on old ones –
a pedantic coop, winged prison,
war crumb confetti.
I do the ant’s painstaking
weight lifting of fragments –
senile Socrates.
Huma Sheikh is originally from Kashmir, currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida State. Her prose and verse have appeared in various journals and magazines. A memoir and book of poems are in progress.
This poem was originally published at TheNewVerse.News and has been re-published with the author’s permission. 
Featured image credit: Reuters