Kitna Yaad Thayega?

Preface:

1. Pasikdar or Gar Devta is a house ghost/protector of a Kashmiri household, tasked with the protection of the house from evil spirits. Kashmiri Pandits also celebrate a festival in which they offer a plate of rice and fish to Pasikdar by placing it in the attic of their house.

2. This series of excerpts are from a chapter titled “Kitna yaad thayega?” as part of my MA Visual Arts dissertation, Whispers from the void: Time in a state of exception (2022). These are part of Pasikdar’s retelling of their own time located in the year 2019. The character of Pasikdar allows for an attempt to navigate the labyrinth of memory blackouts and the timelessness of living in a militarised territory. It acknowledges gaps, glitches and exhaustion as a default of memory, and validates experiences of time otherwise disregarded as vague and incoherent. This also marks an attempt at willfully slowing down of duration against the statist forward-moving time and its dizzying pace. 

3. Time here is gathered from memories, personal accounts, eyewitness testimonials, dreams, fears, and overheard conversations. It follows no specific chronology and reveals itself in-between feelings and feelinglessness. Pasikdar gathers accounts that leave no trace.

Kitna yaad thayega?

Pasikdar suddenly realises that something has happened to time. This has pushed it away from human time as it became too unhygienic to be safeguarded from evil. Pasikdar has failed to protect and now in abject frustration, roams around, asking the remaining question: Something has happened with time?

In the third of the night, today

Pasikdar making an ablution. Pours water into the mouth and nose, followed by the face and arms.
Three times.

It was a usual night, the air was unusually bitter, and I could still taste it. A week before this night, at the local baker’s shop, J had heard that an extended seizure was incoming. He knew what this meant; I knew what it could mean. Only I could not foresee time this time so wouldn’t know how I had to prepare. Zarka was in Delhi and losing her mind while reading things over social media, one message at a time. She tried to go back in history and review all the developments to decipher what was to come. She lost her way in the news and could not come out with an answer. She is still lurking there. Last lover’s day, things had blown up, and she had lost her phone. The year that went on was exactly as normal as it is today, nothing was happening, and it was horrendous to see. Annie was furiously calm. She tells Zarka about psy-ops, and to focus on her studies. Do well. T had set off from home carrying some food and clothes for her brother detained at the local thana. A week had passed since he had been asked to show up at the station and was permanently stuck to the floor. Zarka’s mother was packing the nanekohsik her aunt had so lovingly ordered for her. It would taste better with nunchai, so she kept enough tea leaves and some soda. In the sumo, two men share speculations on the cause of the traffic jam at Ram Bagh. A boy killed a couple of days ago was supposedly from the nearby area; people had just found out. Qayamat had revealed itself on the house as traffic diverted from the main road. The air is heavy, vibrations coming from the ground and down the sky. Ali’s heart was failing at the sight of queues and queues and queues everywhere. She wanted to ask: where would they even go? I could not look ahead into the time; I was there with her, I remember now. T’s brother came out wearing 119 holes. I was counting; I made a list and left it in his cell for the kid who sang ghazals. I rode nightly flights; from inside, stars looked much smaller in the sky, and the moon dimmer. It got darker as I looked down. Zarka brewed a perfect cup of nunchai in absentia; I had to spit beautiful colour into it.

Pasikdar pours water over its feet.

Three times.

A girl far off in another town draws the curtains in her room, she doesn’t want to see the cycle of days and the dawning of nights. She can't bear this lie. There is no new day or night. Annie has a sea of decisions to make. How to leave? How to stay? What if her aunt needs an ambulance, or a doctor, what if she misses her chemo? When to leave? What if they carpet-bombed us? Should I be prepared? Later, Annie manages to schedule transnational conference calls for all her siblings on a neighbour's wired phone. Annie knows this is important, this is historical, Annie wants to feel and remember every second as it passes through her body. Annie recalls nothing.

Pasikdar goes back into the attic.

I see bodies lying around my house, heads in-between their legs; they eat, sleep, and live with fingers pushed deep in their ears, and their eyes are unable to close. Are they dead or scared to death? Maybe it is the blaring sounds in the sky, incoming and ongoing. With their always rotating wings, where do these birds go to eat, sleep and die?

I will visit the dead perched on the hilltop behind the Sherbagh. They would have answers. I have to know if something has happened with time. I am running out of time.

Pasikdar is restless.

2016/19, today
When asked if their first music release after the 2019 blockade was about the time in the blockade, a singer of an upcoming band based in Kashmir pointed out that the song was written in 2016 and not in 2019.

Pasikdar walking by the flower valley on its way to report from the nearby camp.

Zarka sat down the next day and began counting. Breathing and counting, sleeping and counting, walking and counting. She counted deaths, smokes, fires, and leaves on trees, murmured some names, laughed in her sleep and became silent in the middle of the night. I opened her eyes and went inside. There, I see little shadows of K and Z running around on the lawn, screaming, and laughing wildly. It is a breezy summer afternoon, and I can see them go around in circles after each other. There is Chachi's old Yamaha Crux; I see my ancestral maternal mud and wood house standing tall and graceful. A wonderful day. I look at them from the window screen in the guest room. K called her after four months; she picked up the landline receiver, never knowing what it was. Last Zarka remembers of K is as an infant barely stitching together some words, now she introduced herself by her full name. T located her brother jailed in a distant land after weeks of arranging permits and travel. T looks at her brother inside the cell, he asks what took her so long? She freezes, was she late? He had aged years in these four months. Zarka lost all the colour in her dream, it is black and white now. Some women grabbed each other by their hands and shouted into the night; they gave themselves a revolution song. The poet wants to find a stream to sit by. He is distressed; his bird never came back. Rashid heard the birds making sonic sounds through the mic, their hoarse voices and broken bones shouting they were indeed safe and unhurt; the poet missed it by marginal decibels.

Pasikdar is losing time.

The relentless violence engendered by the state and enabled by its extensive military structure constantly ruptures all semblance of language and articulation. It is impossible to speak, recall, or sometimes make sense of this violence. The recent history of Kashmir, 2019, witnessed a greater intensity of this onslaught on speakability. Bearing this war on many fronts has bruised time further to the point of indistinction between the normal and exceptional state of siege. One cannot and is not allowed to have decisive power over one's own time and, by extension, life. It is a story of constant and continuous loss, of time, of life, of its possibilities. Additionally, the trauma caused at the behest of the state makes anxiety and uncertainty a permanent condition of everyday life.

Together these conditions create a dizziness in time, and in efforts to adapt to this dizziness, a Kashmiri encounters a new modality of time, "anxious time" as a consequence of the official-statist forward-moving time. People develop an involuntary sense of foretelling the coming ‘trouble’ and learn to be constantly prepared.

This loss features not only in waiting, remembering and resisting but also within moments of forgetting, erasure and incapacity to stitch together a narrative of time itself. Time is always fragmented. Remembering is not an easy task, it is not easy to commit something to memory unless one is not allowed to forget. People recall the unending-ness of time but barely remember how long it felt.

How much and what all can one remember when so much is happening?

IV. Counting Series. Irtiza Malik. 2019.