Tangentially, about it all

It has been a terrifying few days on the home front. The old airport in Rawalpindi, the first place I ever boarded a plane from, was bombed. Even after the ceasefire, Kashmir continues to be under attack. Possessing neither the aptitude nor the bluster for punditry, I have no analysis for you. I fear, looking at some of the chest-thumping online, that the collective memories of older wars, of 1965 and 1971, of Kargil and Siachen, have receded in the past. Too many people are thinking of war as a game.

I am a writer of fiction, and my preoccupation instead is with history, the viper in the dark field. Let me regale / distract / orient you, then, with some personal history.

**

In 2005, my father was a civil servant in the National Accountability Bureau and had to frequently travel to Pakistan-administered Kashmir. They were opening an office for the bureau in Muzaffarabad, the capital of the region, and he went to train local officers. That July, it was decided that we would all tag along—Ammi, me, my two brothers, and our young house help, Asma, whose family was from rural Kashmir. As always, the four kids packed into the back of the Suzuki jeep. There was a small bench in the back that could, with some twisting of legs and squeezing of thighs, fit three of us. On the other side, where the metal rim of the wheel curved inwards, we put a floor cushion. Typically, Asma sat on the cushion, and while this may appear like a display of hierarchy, it must be stressed—none of us was remotely comfortable in the back.

In Muzaffarabad, we stayed at a rest house managed by Kashmir’s tourism department, built out of the ruins of an old fort. From the large terrace, we looked down at the Neelum River, thick and lazy. It sparkled in the sun and, despite being named after the Persian word for blue sapphire, retained a grey, cloudy surface. Across the river were hills populated with small villages. The houses were all ramshackle, made with aluminum roofs. Trees adorned all sides of the hills and valley, their leaves the mature green of deep summer. After dark, when the lights turned on in the villages across the river, the houses looked like clay lamps, like fireflies blinking in Kashmir’s embrace. It was a pleasure to be away from the steaming plateau where Rawalpindi was located; in July, as the monsoons approached, Punjab got hot and sticky, the air an assault on the senses. Here, in the foothills of the famed Himalayas, the days were sunny and fresh, while the nights required cozy blankets. It was a treat to be here, in this mythical land we had spent all our childhoods hearing about.

Until 2006, the only channel we got was the state-owned Pakistan Television. In every one of the 5 daily news bulletins, the last item was always on a report on violence in Indian-held Kashmir, the number of innocent people martyred in Srinagar that day. Our Kashmir, we knew, was more peaceful, but it was still a part of that larger region whose beauty and lore had Westerners in thrall—the place that gave the world cashmere, the reddest saffron, the Sufi poetry of Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, the magical Dal Lake. The mountains of Kashmir fed all our rivers, which then flowed downstream to nourish mangoes and oranges, cotton and wheat. It was in Muzaffarabad that two of those rivers met, the Neelum pouring into the Jhelum, which then mightily flew into the Pakistani heartland, snaking through the plateau, down through, flat, fertile plains, before flowing into the Chenab, which then made it way down past the cities of southern Punjabi saints, before tumbling into the roaring Indus, that of the famed civilization, on its slow but sure way into the Arabian Sea.

There was also the charm of danger, of lurking threat. From Muzaffarabad, we all squeezed into the jeep to ascend further up the valley. We drove on a narrow, badly paved road. The jeep not being a comfort vehicle, every bump on the road seemed to shake the bones, and it felt as if we were driving right on the edge that dipped vertiginously into the river. But it wasn’t the threat of the car tumbling down a cliff—a real enough danger—that was on our minds. Further up the valley, the Neelum River becomes a border, the infamous Line of Control that divides India and Pakistan. As we drove, we saw farmers working on the other sides, small temples, women walking homewards. We also saw soldiers’ huts. The driver told us that it was a time of relative peace. In less harmonious times, there was regular shelling, and driving on this road could be dangerous. We sat in awed silence. Part of it was a thrill coursing through us. How cool would it be, to go back from the summer and tell our friends we had driven by the infamous LoC? Part of it was a sense of disbelief. Was that, right there, across a mere river, the famed enemy we worried about?

After a long back-breaking journey, we arrived at a place that was no less than paradise in our eyes. Some years ago, a Swedish company had been hired to work on a hydropower project in the valley. They had designed their own accommodations, in the form of beautiful cottages painted yellow on the outside, with large windows that looked out at the mountains. These cottages had since been turned into rest houses, run by Kashmir’s Hydro-Electric Power Board.

Our final stop was at Pir Chanasi, a shrine with a bright green dome, located on a verdant hilltop. We stayed at a rest house nearby. In the evening, my father’s friend Uncle Tahir came to visit us. He and his wife brought us dinner. We slept early that night, so we could wake up the next day and start our descent back to Punjab.

That October, on the 3^rd day of Ramadan, the Neelum Valley awakened to the world ending. The ground shook like a childhood rattle. Everything was collapsing like sawdust—mountains dissolving into powder, villages crashing into the ground, the earth splitting with itself.

The 2005 Kashmir earthquake was one of the deadliest natural disasters in South Asia’s recorded history. All roads leading into Muzaffarabad were blocked with landslides, and it took 3 days for aid to even start reaching most parts of the valley. When the first responders finally arrived—initially, it was army personnel and Kashmiri emigrants working in Punjabi cities rushing back to their families—scenes of absolute devastation greeted them. Everywhere was rubble, and from underneath the rubble, came desperate pleas for help. The stench of blood and flesh clotted the early winter air. My father’s friend, Uncle Tahir, had been out of town. He rushed back to Muzaffarabad to make sure his wife and children were okay. When he finally got to his neighborhood, a cruel, desolate night was falling. On the entire street, the only surviving house was his. “I can only call it a miracle,” he said shakily said to my father. How we desire to make sense of the senseless—what of the rest of the street?

There was a lot of that in the next few months—desperate attempts to make sense of it all. Some said it was God’s punishment. For what, and why God chose the poorest people to punish, why He chose children who had just started their days inside school buildings that came crashing down, why He chose the innocent, still deep in morning sleep, whose dreams would become their only shrouds, was never clear. Others said it was, simply, God’s will. He was be-niyaz, free of want. He did not need anything from us, and therefore, worked in His own mysterious ways.

Shaken and bereft, the Prime Minister of Kashmir announced that he wasn’t the leader of a province, but of a graveyard. About a 100,000 people died, and millions were rendered homeless, sleeping under cold, rainy skies as the winter set in. As the bodies piled up, mass graves were dug. Soon, the survivors began to wonder; were the dead the lucky ones? They cooked food, to regain some sense of normalcy and community, but no one could eat. Even as it rained outside, people refused to go back indoors, afraid that the walls would come crashing. For years after, the sound of rainfall, thunder, a falling rock, would take them back to the inescapable labyrinth that is the memory of October 8^th.

The hill in Muzaffarabad, upon which we had seen night lights, was neatly sliced off on one side, like a loaf of bread. All villages on that side had plunged into river, all those twinkling fireflies we had seen against the night skies of Kashmir. The Neelum shifted its course, affected by a large rupture that appeared in the ground. Everywhere you saw were new splits in the ground, the landscape permanently changed.

Aid poured in from around the world. At some point, there were so many trucks making their way up the country, from Karachi and Lahore and Peshawar and Islamabad, from Saudia Arabia and Turkey and the UAE and Indonesia, trucks full of tents and formula and dried goods and baby clothes, that the authorities had to tell people to hold off. It was a time of incomprehensible anguish, but also of an uncommon solidarity. Within Kashmir, there was a feeling of collective grief and togetherness, of strangers helping people rescue their relatives, of young men carrying injured people to hospitals far away.

The aid would go on to change the socioeconomic fabric of the valley forever. For so long, people had only left Kashmir, migrants from the valleys setting off for urban centers in British India, then for cities in the newly formed Pakistan, for the Gulf, for factory work in England. After the earthquake, foreigners were coming in droves to the valley itself. There were NGOs everywhere, spawning entire side economies—translators, mediators, transporters, contractors. One Kashmiri wryly said, “God sent us the earthquake, but the devil sent us aid.”

At our house in Rawalpindi, the news of the earthquake came to us in round-the-clock coverage on the state channel. All of us sat, somber and unmoving, in front of the TV. There was an unspoken question on everyone’s mind—was Asma’s family okay? Whenever we spoke of the earthquake, of the extent of the damage, Asma’s face went still as a sculpture. All lines were cut off, and no one was able to get in touch with her family. My father asked a friend in the army to make sure that the helicopters dropping aid over various villages flew over Asma’s village, Jhing, as well. About a week after the earthquake, we got relieving news. Almost everyone in Asma’s family had survived. An uncle, her father’s brother, had perished. The family house had been completely demolished.

For many years, I kept believing that the epicenter of the earthquake was near Balakot, a city to the north of Muzaffarabad that suffered tremendous damage. The exact epicenter wasn’t mentioned in the newspapers. Today, in 2025, I put in the exact coordinates into Google Maps. The epicenter was Jhing itself.

**

Ending with a snippet from Sahir Ludhianvi’s timeless anti-war poem Ay Shareef Insaanon. Ludhianvi wrote this in response to the 1965 war.

بم گھروں پر گریں کہ سرحد پر
روح تعمیر زخم کھاتی ہے

کھیت اپنے جلیں کہ اوروں کے
زیست فاقوں سے تلملاتی ہے

ٹینک آگے بڑھیں کہ پچھے ہٹیں
کوکھ دھرتی کی بانجھ ہوتی ہے

فتح کا جشن ہو کہ ہار کا سوگ
زندگی میتوں پہ روتی ہے

[Bum gharon par girain keh sarhad par]
[Rooh-e-taameer zakhm khaati hai]

[Khet apne jalein keh auron ke]
[Zindagi faaqon se talmilati hai]

[Tank aagay barhein keh peechay hatain]
[Kokh dharti ki baanjh hoti hai]

[Fatah ka jashn ho keh haar ka sog]
[Zindagi mayyatoun par roti hai]

Whether bombs fall on homes or at the borders

The soul of creation bears the wounds

Whether our fields burn or someone else’s

Life writhes in the pain of hunger

Whether tanks advance or retreat

The womb of the earth becomes barren

Whether it’s a celebration of victory or a mourning of defeat

Life weeps over the dead

You can read the entire poem, along with the quoted translation, here.

Yours,

Dure