Nostalgia of Generation Born With Black-Ribbon’s Tied To Head

Nostalgia

Mourning A Young Songster

ZGM

My efforts fail me,  in spite of trying to drown myself in the rhythmic Coke Studio music to forget the chilling stories coming from the South Kashmir and to erase images of silted throats of children and pellet meshed rubicund faces of girl students like ‘summer tempest’ tears soak my withering cheeks.  Many times, on seeing dumbfounded mothers sitting by the side of bodies of their slain sons I start singing with Tennyson:

Home they brought her warrior dead:

She nor swoon’d nor utter’d cry:

All her maidens, watching, said,

“She must weep, or she will die.”

The past Saturday, it was a picture of a mother prostrating on the body of her slain daughter, ‘fresh as a rose’ and ‘fair as a star’ flashed on the social media that made me remember the famous lines of Robert Frost –  my classmates and I  parroted at school:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Andleeb, meaning nightingale, a twelve year old, class seven promising student was snatched of all her songs. All dreams of this girl on the bier, who reigned supreme in the playfield and topped in the class were smashed.  She was fired upon outside her house in village Hoowra, in Kulgam district of South Kashmir by men in combat fatigues and khakis along with three other teenagers and put to eternal sleep much before they could cover the first mile of their journey.

The pictures of slain Andleeb with eyes more captivating than that of a gazelle and innocence personified on the bier took me down the memory lane- to my childhood.  Those were the times when our house like almost all the other houses in our Mohalla also had a mud roof- during spring and summers, with thousands of red tulips and irises of all colours it also looked a roof-garden. On the onset of winter, dried up shrubs like Artemisia (Wormwood), locally known as Tethwan and wild rue plants asbund gave it a golden hue, and during winters with  thick blankets of snow covering roofs   every cottage looked  like Taj Mahal. Except for a few families trading in woollen rugs, who had made a big fortune during the Second World War no house in our locality had glass windows. Like most of the houses, our house also had latticed windows. Peeping through these windows into the main road had its own excitement for children. It was during one of those days; I had perhaps just been admitted in kindergarten that there was a sort of commotion in our Dan-I-Khut (kitchen) and the noise out in the street was deafening. Everyone was running upstairs and crying Gole-ha, Gole-ha (firing), like kittens to cats all children followed the elders to the room opening towards the road. To known what was happening outside, my sibling and I also glued our faces to the latticed window; streams of people in a fury were passing through the street, crying slogans full throat, neither my brother nor I could understand the slogans.  Some youth had tied black ribbons to   their foreheads and were waiving black flags in front of the bier, carrying blood soaked body of young men. My mother and aunt recognized the martyred youth, beating their chests and bruising their faces with nails, they cried he was the songster son of the potter women, who almost on a daily basis sold terracotta kitchenware in our locality.  My aunt and mother, in a plaintive voice, remembered the potter women’s son for his melodious voice and on the spur songs at marriage functions. The ambiance of our house changed, it was not my mother and aunt only who were wailing, and it seemed every artefact in the house was in mourning.  Thereafter bier after bier of martyred youth passed through our street for their burial in the martyrs’ graveyard just two to three yards from our house. It was on this day, I for the first time heard the word, Shaheed. Nonetheless, what it meant, I learned years later during my days at Islamia High School at the morning assembly where Master Pitimber Nath Dhar Fani, a poet during the month of Muharam paid his tribute to the martyrs of Karbala and Molvi Noor-u-Din, theology teacher explained importance of martyrdom in Islam.   Since then the word has been shadowing whole of my generation to this day.