The Day I Became A Metaphor In Kashmir

(MENAFN- Kashmir Observer)
File Photo

By Syed Eesar Mehdi

The year I turned fourteen, winter arrived with the quietude of an old man breathing. In our village near Budgam, snow covered the almond groves and roofs with a kind of forgetfulness that made the world look holy, or at least clean.

My mother's fever had lasted three days. She needed medicine. I remember buttoning my pheran and slipping into the white air, the hill ahead cloaked in a silence that always came after the snowfall.

Halfway up the hill, a person stood like punctuation at the edge of my sentence. A shadow bent against the wind. He called out, not kindly. I hesitated. In that half-second pause, something ancient and irreversible happened. His hand met my cheek. My body staggered. My sense of being, too.

It was not pain that stayed with me. It was the rupture. A clean break in how the world had moved until then.

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Veena Das might call it a“critical event,” not for its scale but for how it slipped into the daily, rearranging what it meant to be seen, to move, to speak.

After that slap, the road home felt longer. The snow heavier. My name, somehow, less mine.

There was no explanation. And explanations, I would later learn, are often a luxury of those who are not interrupted. Philippe Bourgois might describe this as part of a continuum. One more silent shattering folded into the daily script of life in a polemic place.

In mountains I call home, melancholy accumulates like snow on the tin rooftops. It's incremental, weighty, often dismissed until it crashes.

Yet, as Talal Asad reminds us, trouble does not translate well. Not into reports, not into editorials, not into the soft, foreign tongues of sympathy. What can I say that hasn't already been footnoted?

Sometimes I wonder if the man on the hill ever thought of me again. Perhaps not. But I've carried him. Not as resentment, but as residue.

Nancy Scheper-Hughes might name this the violence of the ordinary. The way a gesture becomes something you flinch from decades later, when someone raises their voice or blocks your path. It embeds itself not in the memory, but in the muscles.

And what of time? Ghassan Hage speaks of stuckedness. A life suspended, not in dramatic pain, but in the glue of waiting, of circling, of returning to the same point on the hill and expecting it, this time, to be different.

I walk the same route even now. It is the same. The road curves the same. But I am not. I never will be.

Frantz Fanon once wrote about the body remembering the trauma of being seen through a certain impression. Not the event itself, but the look that turned your face into a troubled terrain.

In that moment, I had become a category. No longer a boy with errands. Something else. Something less.

Kashmir teaches its children to move with caution, to listen for things not said. Michel-Rolph Trouillot tells us about silences in history. Not the kind we forget, but the kind that are orchestrated.

Our chronicles do not go missing. They're junked. Curated out. We become shadows in someone else's story, metaphors in another's op-ed.

But we remember. And memory here is not nostalgia. It's architecture. Gopal Guru writes of the right to theorize, to define our own experience. But in Kashmir, theorizing too often comes from afar. Men in suits explaining our sorrows in fluent, borrowed grief.

Simone Weil believed that attention was the purest form of generosity. But what we get is gaze. What we need is listening. Our lives aren't case studies. They are rooms. Full of echoes. Of laughter and lament. Of stories passed in whispers because louder voices never helped.

Gayatri Spivak asked: can the subaltern speak? She also answered: not in the way you'll hear. We speak through poetry, through meditation, through snow falling on cedar. Our language isn't academic. It's affirmation. We say“alhamdulillah” when we mean: the wound didn't win today.

I've learned that memory has weather. Some days it's fog. Some days, hail. On certain mornings, I find myself tracing that slap like a scar that no mirror shows. Sundar Sarukkai would warn against universal categories. A slap is not just a slap. It's geography, gloom and gravity. I learned more in that moment than I have from any textbook.

Arthur Kleinman insists that grief must be told to be known. But in the valley, telling is tough. So we speak in metaphor.

Levinas says the face commands an ethical response. But here, faces are faded. We look down. We lower our gaze. And yet we go on. The smallest acts carry the weight.

But somewhere in Budgam, a boy still climbs that hill, still trying to understand what changed when the cold touched his face in the shape of a hand.

• Dr Syed Eesar Mehdi is a Research Fellow at International Centre for Peace Studies, New Delhi, India. The views expressed here are his own. He can be reached @ [email protected]

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