Talib Zaffer
I woke up unusually early, to see a gloom of a Wednesday morning. Actually, I hadn’t slept that night. I couldn’t. It was Wednesday-25th of March, the first day of the Nation-wide Lockdown. I was feeling a little pinch of an ache in my chest. Like my heart was heavier than usual. Like, it was strangling. Like, it was at a perpetual sink.
Albeit the Lockdown didn’t bother me much, for, I have been accustomed to sudden Lockdowns and Curfews, since my early childhood.-thanks to the place I come from-Kashmir. What was troubling me was the sense of no freedom. In the usual lockdowns I at least have a choice- late in the evening, when the Cops with sticks are gone, to meet my friends, smoke and curse our existences, together. Now, that little freedom was gone too. Even if we somehow met, we wouldn’t be able to even share a cigarette; not even shake hands. Damn Covid-19 and those Chinese Bats!
It still felt like a dream. A Nightmare. My mind, which naturally has a phobia for changes, was still, in its stubborn protest, not able to accept the reality.
Lost somewhere between truths and self-consoling delusions, I got up from my bed and dragged myself to washroom. Took a bath. A bath lost- in my freedom of mobility (lack of it). A bath that sounds philosophical and feels like shitting yourself with self exasperation. ‘Shitty-feeling’ would be an adequate analogy.
‘How am I going to spend next uncertain number of days? I have left my books at my college hostel. How am I going to meet my girlfriend? I had so many plans for our date, supposed to happen next week.
How I was going to download movies without high speed internet? We haven’t seen high speed internet since August last year in Kashmir.’
Damn those Chinese bat markets! And Damn my conflict torn Paradise!
I had so many plans for this year. Making a movie for my college. Publishing my debut novel. And the most important: a road trip to Ladakh with my friends, after this semester. Everything looks bleak now. Through a window pane, I could see it raining, with clouds almost touching the ground. Dark clouds. Dark like my uncertain and ever-vulnerable future.
I knew it wasn’t ideal to think about my own freedoms and ambitions and fantasies when people all around the world were dying. Every day with a bigger number. But there was nothing really I could do. Neither about the ailing world nor about my peace of mind. I am a guy, in my early 20’s-on anti-depressants; I have too many things to worry about and I would rather think about them, than a deadly virus knocking on our doors. It is less depressing that way- I guess!
My mother welcomed me with a mixed look of surprise and delight.
‘The sun must have risen from the west,’ she said smiling, a little infer toward my fetish for morning sleeps.
I said nothing. I was too tired in my mind to answer.
I looked outside and it was drizzling. The street was empty, so was the park. No kids with umbrellas were waiting for their school busses. No adult was in a rush to go somewhere. Only a couple of street dogs. Seemed as if the human race was banished from earth and those two dogs owned our street.
‘I have seen this before,’ I thought. ‘But when?’
Only, last year. August -the- fifth 2019. When the Indian government decided that I was going to spend next half of that year reading books and cursing my life and scrapped Article 370 that used to give me some ‘rights’ I never gave a fuck about. Though, not giving a fuck could unfortunately not change the fact that for the next 7 months I couldn’t go to college, I couldn’t call my college friends, I could not talk to my girlfriend, I couldn’t even Google (in my opinion, a contemporary fundamental right).
After a couple of years of psychiatric counsel and fighting my ‘over thinkingly pessimistic’ mind I had managed to come out of Depression and Insomnia. I was keeping myself busy with college, internships and friends. That August morning undid everything. For the next 3 months, the only time I slept was the mornings. I would get up at noon, sit idle in my bed for an hour- miss my girlfriend, my college, my friends, my teachers, the internet and suffocate myself for every second of that hour. Get up. Eat lunch. And then there was the big question. ‘What do I do with my Day?’ sometimes I would just sit for hours watching movies till my butt hurt sitting. Sometimes, I would spend hours watching the police barricading our street and imagine possible scenarios of what if I was a protagonist of a movie, how I would kill each one of them and disappear. I am a compulsive reader so, read a lot too. There was a week when I read ten books. It later came down to point where I felt book reading adding to my sense of loneliness and stress, and a little later I started to have this strange urge of ending my life. I had no access to poison (the markets were locked down and I couldn’t ask my mother where she had kept the rat killers), I am afraid of heights, I can’t stand cold water and I haven’t got what it takes to cut your own vein. So, dying was a luxury I had nothing to buy with. Damn me!
Meanwhile, I did my breakfast and rushed straight back into my bed again. Switched the Television on. It opened with a young lady shouting her lungs out to sell a low standard mobile phone. Tele market- A place for over enthusiastic and underpaid youngsters. I come from a journalism school and normally my natural instinct is to watch news, but because the pandemic has made news more disturbing than it already is, I decided to watch a documentary or something to take my mind off the conundrums of my life and beyond. They were showing a documentary on student protests in Ukraine. Suddenly, the horrors of the past started to haunt my mind again.
In the two years before 2019, I had seen many students protest myself. Some in the main city Srinagar where I was interning with a local newspaper, few through the window of my room, and few in my college too.
There was this one particular day; we were having a joint session of all our semesters in our college department. Someone came rushing into the hall and said a local militant was killed. In a matter of seconds hundreds of students gathered in the college ground. Out of nowhere the police came in, charging with sticks and shells. Many of my friends beaten to pulp, many of them injured, many of them taken. I have a repulsion towards violence (fancy way of saying I am a coward), so I along with half a dozen of other students hid in our lab. We heard the screams, felt the teargas in our eyes, heard one of the teachers being hit and none of us dared to move.
I couldn’t watch the documentary anymore. I thought maybe there was no escape from what haunts me, for, what does perhaps exists in my own mind than anywhere else.
I called my girlfriend and for the first time in the morning, felt at ease. She sensed something wrong with me, asked me if I was fine, I said nothing and she didn’t press any further and hung up. I didn’t call again. I wanted to but I didn’t.
I looked out again and the street looked flooded. Even those two dogs had abandoned their territory. Reminded of 2014. The year the flood came doing what something or the other does to us (Kashmir) every year. Then there was 2013 that started with many of our people dying because the Government had hanged someone.
There was also a 2016 in between. That was horrible too. Killing of a young charismatic militant and then the deaths that followed. I cried every time I heard the number. 10……20………100, almost every year since I can remember I count the deaths, and then imagine their faces, their wailing mothers, their unrealized dreams and curse everything that lead to a deaths and the denial of our freedoms- the politics, the greed, the virus, the religion, my whole life-everything.
The author is pursuing bachelor’s degree in Mass Communication at GDC Baramulla.
