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Finding Spring
Mina Farid Malik
PakistanGALLERYCONVERSATION
And because we live in a city that is green, well-watered and fed (for the most part), we can afford to maintain our personal...
She was from Delhi, a young lawyer visiting Pakistan for the first time. We like people where I work, and soon enough we had scooted our chairs over in a semi-circle and were deep in conversation. She was working in Indian Administered Kashmir, and soon enough the subject turned to the area.
Our pretty lawyer - let’s call her Aman, for peace – had never visited “our” part of Kashmir, but I had visited “theirs” in the stories I’ve grown up hearing. They survive at the edges of my memory, along with the stories of Partition I’ve heard from both sides of my “migrant” family. Kashmir, the land that looks like Heaven; the land where the sleepy village my grandfather’s family belongs to lies.
Aman was fasting. So were we. She was wearing a kurta and a shalwar. So was I. She lapsed into Urdu, so did we. As we all added our threads to the conversation we wove around our curiosities, my mind wandered back to Muzaffarabad, to Qum, to the little nameless places that felt like home. A dappled, young-tree lined side lane that meandered dustily down to some faraway little houses, where a little girl and a baby goat trotted companionably down the dirt track together.
While we were speaking with Aman, I remembered the day my siblings and I gingerly navigated the ruins of the mess, which had only the day before been a newly-renovated building. We climbed up a small hill, and with the naked eye could see bunkers on the Indian side, small bumps in the identical hillside. I waved at one of them when nobody was looking, almost expecting bullets to whistle out of the air around my feet, making dust spit up from the impact.
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