Kashmir Has A Love Language. And This Book Speaks It Fluently

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer)
Loal Kashmir by Mehak Jamal

By Fiza Masoodi

In Kashmir, even love is at a crossroads. It waits in shadows. It hides in scribbled notes passed under doors. It flickers, briefly, on borrowed phones before the signal dies again.

In Loal Kashmir, Mehak Jamal curates sixteen such moments. True stories of love trying to breathe in a place that shifts like sand.

This is not the love of ballads and Bollywood. It is quieter, hungrier, half-formed. It doesn't gallop; it limps. It learns to speak in silences. It disappears mid-sentence. It waits, sometimes forever, for curbs to lift.

Jamal, a Kashmiri filmmaker, began collecting these stories in 2019, just after New Delhi revoked the region's autonomy and switched off the internet. Lovers were cut off mid-call. Fiancés vanished into vaccum. Weddings happened without witnesses. But love survived another spell of strife.

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The book is divided into three parts: Otru (the day before yesterday), Rath (yesterday), and Az (today). But Kashmir doesn't move in straight lines. It loops.

In these pages, a girl's father disappears in the '90s and she still waits by the door. A bride writes her own nikah vows because no maulvi will marry her to a man from the other side of the border. A teenager, caught in a crackdown, is forced by soldiers to read his love letter aloud on the street.

Jamal does not write with fireworks. Her prose is spare, surgical. She does not romanticize rigidity. She listens, records, steps back. The result is a mosaic of aching restraint.

In Post-it, a man leaves sticky notes on a car windshield during curfew hours-their only form of conversation. In Matador, a Hindu boy and Muslim girl fall in love just as his family flees the Valley.

Years later, they meet again in a Delhi street, say nothing, and keep walking. What more is there to say?

Kashmiri words-loal, sahibo, tchur-punctuate the text like mines of meaning. Untranslated, unapologetic. They belong to the soil, heavy with things English cannot hold.

Some stories feel rushed, ending in obituary-style updates: married, migrated, gone. A few are burdened by too much context, as if the politics must always explain the love. But these are small bruises on an otherwise vital book.

Because what Loal Kashmir offers is not closure, but clarity. That in a place where being seen can be problem, to love is to risk exposure. And yet, they risk it all for love.

This is the poetry of Jamal's work. Not in how it is written, but in what it captures: the fragile tenderness in a valley that has seen too much grief.

Love, here, is not a subplot. It is a form of culture. And Loal Kashmir just celebrates that.

• The reviewer is a Srinagar-based storyteller. Her debut book on Myth of Mountains is coming out later this year.

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