| 07 January 2010
Name of the Book: Curfewed night
Author: Basharat Peer
Publisher: Random House, India
Price: Rs 395
Pages: 246
Reveiwer: Iesha Javed
Very few people attempt to paste their pictures on the Book cover of their first book.
What does a Kashmiri night and an average mind have in common? A curfew! Yes, one restricts the flow of traffic and people and the other restricts the flow of clear thinking and unprejudiced ideas. Nothing personal against the writer but in short this book begins on a pleasant note but ends up at a curfew.
Curfewed the night may be the young man’s life as depicted here is anything but restricted. Jumping from Delhi to Srinagar and back at will, booking tickets, catching busses, getting lifts, summoning taxis to weirdest locations- the Springs of Heemal and Nagirai, the grave of Yusuf Shah Chak and Robert Thrope makes a person believe that this man might possess something like a magical carpet or Alladin’s Genie.
One almost begins to envy this man- being lucky enough to find an old school teacher with the help of a dusty telephone directory and being lucky enough to escape a Forced disappearance in childhood in the first place. Also being as free as a bird makes him more enviable. This moment he is at home sipping salt tea, the next he narrowly escapes a terrorist attack on his bus. Here he is dreaming of Kamachi shoes brought into vogue by militants and the nest he is actually pleading a militant to get him enrolled to cross the border. His fingers just give up gliding seamlessly over his father’s leather bound books and the next moment he stands before the endless rows of books at the Delhi University.
The young man has a nature that is unprecedented. After being able to secure a job with enormous difficulty and after finally finding accomodation after months of wandering like gypsies in the Delhi suburb, he just leaves everything and returns home.
The young man’s heart is seared to see how people of all diferent conflict zones have narrated their stories, all but KASHMIRIS. He returns to his Homeland, making an enormous sacrifice only to revisit the place that haunts him the most, with a pledge to become the voice of a Voiceless Kashmir. And does he succeed in doing it through the book?
The book begins on a crisp note. The narration is beautiful and has the oratory of a poet and a magician’s charm to weave the words combined. The reader is mesmerized. For once it feels that maybe Kashmir has found its voice. It bares it all.. The truth of how Srinagar is a Ghost town, unbelievably militarised, a population that lived under constant threat… It contains a vivid expression of “The raped bride” a stain on the Indian Military presence in Kashmir…”The Gawkadal Massacre” “Papa-II Torture centre tales”… interviews of tortured Kashmiris and even the betrayals of the people at the hands of so called leaders. It even describes the plight of India’s Muslim minority with references to the Babri Demolition, Gujarat masacre and how Muslim youth mere attacked aboard a train by Kar Sevaks.
The book is going great. It builds momentum and the reader begins to feel the headiness of the wine and then…. It looses the whole game!
The reader begins to smell a rat. It seems some crucial detail are missing- the intellectual dimension of the issue.
Soon the book looses its soul to monotony. It turns into a book which only puffs cigarettes, the writer travels, searches whereabouts of some old acquaintance, they are delighted to meet, they hug and cry and the reader knows this would be followed by a bout of puffing cigarettes. The book becomes too predictable, even boring.
Finally the mind plays tricks and instead of an exceptional book reflecting the voice of Kashmir it ends up as the rumblings of an average mind subjected to prejudice .
Books act like a mirror reflecting thoughts, personal fears and shortcomings; psyche, intellect and even greatness. This is the reason that books immortalized people like Hemingway and Agatha Christie. Their books proved that they had the genius of Intellect and narration combined.
This book however proves the contrary for Basharat Peer.
The book suffers from intellectual hollow and shallowness of the mind.
The book begins to present facts twisted to its own convenience. At times conveniently playing down facts which could otherwise tear down the skyscraper of its prejudiced ideals and at times over emphasizing a point to prove that the people of a different ideology are altogether fanatical and absurd.
Young men driven by the frenzy of freeing their homeland, fuelled by the sprit of Marxism or Patriotism are heroes, undeterred and brave- the true martyrs. However men whose desire to liberate Kashmir is fuelled by the flame of their faith are the hijackers of the moment!
How absurd! Both have a common objective, both train men with Kalashnikovs and grenades yet just because the writer dosent associate with latter makes them fanatics and ideologically flawed.
This is a book claiming to strike the perfect balance and yet anything over the head of the writer is an exaggeration. The salafis are termed “fanatical and extremist” just because they exhort men to sport a beard. It tries to play down the imposition of the “veil” by saying that it never was a part of the culture and the peasant women find it more feasible to wear head scarves, adjusting them when the Mullah calls for prayer.
This book is caught on the back foot as it fails to defend itself on the beliefs of a man as nurtured in childhood.
This is a book defending Sufism and shrine-going and expecting to gain audience for it by showing the reader rather flimsily the tears in the eyes of an old couple leaving a shrine being careful not to turn their backs to it.
Why draw conclusions when ideally it should have been a non-judgemental descriptive book? It dictates terms as if it’s the greatest treatise on morality.
The book sees no harm in a couple sharing a few moments of privacy in a net café; instead of accepting that the young man is lax, a lady, Asiya Andrabi who starts a drive against immorality is termed a fanatic.
Why to play fish with one hand and fowl with the other? Underestimating the reader and falling to prejudice proves fatal for this book.
Further it falls prey to generalizations. Take for example the pains the book takes to narrate stories of young zealots finally arriving at the conclusion that all or most men taking to the armed rebellion either had a serious personality problem or were betrayed by a girl.
On one hand it maintains the cherished notion of “Sufi moderates” despite admitting that they went on to burn down houses of Jama’at people; even desecrating copies of the Quran. But surprisingly no conclusions drawn. Deliberate criminal silence.
On the other hand he has chances to break the ice and to come out of the box but he dosent.
An example is the depiction of Syeda Asiya Andrabi. Young man meets her in person has a frank conversation and even finds a copy of Bagvad Gita, Chomsky and Said’s books in her study but again no conclusions drawn.
The book seems more concerned highlighting the “progressive Vs fundamentalist” problem instead of the Kashmir issue, wasting a lot of precious space in the process. Conclusions are drawn only when tilted to the writers convenience.
Fanaticism is infact a man’s inability to accommodate competing ideas and that’s exactly the defect this book sufers from.
Anyone desirous of reading on Kashmir should simply skip this book, its not even worth Rs 395 and better books have already been written on Kashmir.
A book by a young man who couldn’t fulfill his ambition to join the elite Indian Administrative service, ended up as a rooky lawyer switching to reporting court sessions.
In the authors own words “Frustrated ambition is a dangerous thing”!