Lockdown Diaries: Sounds in Silence by Onaiza Drabu - Hindustan Times
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Lockdown Diaries: Sounds in Silence by Onaiza Drabu

Hindustan Times | By
Apr 01, 2020 01:16 PM IST

Onaiza Drabu, anthropologist and author of The Legend of Himal and Nagrai; Greatest Kashmiri Folk Tales, writes that Kashmir social media – limited by 2G speed but blessed with abundant patience – is a wickedly fun place for daily doses of dark humour

Reading a popular Kashmiri proverb today prompts laughter at the irony:

Social distancing in Srinagar.(Waseem Andrabi/Hindustan Times)
Social distancing in Srinagar.(Waseem Andrabi/Hindustan Times)

Garah wandiyo garah sasa, barah nerhah ne zanh.

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Oh home, I offer you a thousand houses; and I’d never want to leave your doors.

Humour, amidst the scarcity of the lockdown in Kashmir, is aplenty and has always been a companion to all that history has dealt us. If not for this humour, and the kinship that tragedy fosters, together with copious doses of superstition and faith – survival as a race would have been difficult.

I didn’t plan to be in self isolation in Kashmir. By what can only be explained as an otherworldly premonition, a kashif, I knew I had to be home. I said this to friends and family, packed my bags, quit work, and landed home a day before the government announced a lockdown. After all, where better to quarantine, God must’ve thought, than a place where lockdowns and isolation have long been a lifestyle.

Holed up indoors, I am missing spring. The almond blossoms must be blooming, as must the tulips – I do not know. Little enters or leaves the house – except for sounds, stories and social media data. So these past two weeks of the Covid19 lockdown, I’ve taken to making sense of the world aurally.

Sounds of faith

There is a way here, in Srinagar, for days to become endless stretches of imagination punctuated only by azaans – a collective cacophony of one congregation trying to outdo the other, the melody of one drowned by the screeching microphones of another. Azaans give a sense of time in languid days that stretch into months where you often forget the function that time serves. Each morning the awrade e fatiha and each evening the gurbani play soft and mellow. The soundscape of the divine fills the air. God never feels too far here. In all tragedies, one must find faith to survive. One evening, I heard an elder try to convince me of his reasons for going to the mosque. “If Allah wants it, my time would have come”; reckless death wish cloaked in words of faith.

Onaiza Drabu (Courtesy Speaking Tiger)
Onaiza Drabu (Courtesy Speaking Tiger)

Sounds of fear

Hand in hand with faith, grief and fear are always palpable in the air in Kashmir. You hear grief – in the shrines, in the wails of mothers, and in their sobs as they beat their breast; you hear it mid-sermon on a Friday, you often hear it manifest at midnight as screams; you hear it in the gunshots. Grief lingers.

Fear has changed its face, wabah or an epidemic is what it looks like in these times. But the punishments for defiance, whistles that make you shiver and commands to put your hands up in the air still come from the traditional perpetrators. These days, public health warnings are issued on loudspeakers but loudspeakers are only ominous of gloom; they have never meant good things here. Memory is capricious but trauma finds its associations.

Sounds of rumour

Fear manifests in dystopia differently. When much about life is otherworldly there is a submission to the unknown. Rumour in Kashmir is a source of information where facts are constantly shoved behind tight locks. As a race, we also don’t shy away from exaggerations. Dapaan, we say, it is said – by whom, we often do not know.

One of these mornings, I woke up to a series of messages from friends in Srinagar. Had I heard the ruckus last night? I had not. I’d slept blissfully unaware of the pandemonium of midnight azaans from mosques all over.

Ya Allah Reham’, said one. ‘Dapaan, Dajjal has been spotted in downtown.’

Another said, ‘the Angel of Death is giving the azaan.’

“It doesn’t happen to those who believe in pirs,” said an elder to me. “It is only those who have bad faith – these new Muslims who deny Kashmir’s Sufism. They get it. ” Another, blamed it on the Shias from Iran. Prejudices are never far from any conversation but these particularly have a dark end.

Sounds of the harshness of reality

While I rely on others to relay information from outside the four walls of my house, my mother witnesses the pandemic unfold as she coordinates the outbreak response. As a doctor who heads a series of associated hospitals, her three phones ring at odd hours, punctuating me expressing baser concerns like memes not loading on 2G internet.

Growing up a child of a doctor is training in desensitization to the world. Often visitors for dinner lose their appetite seeing my mother causally take a phone call to discuss a patient with a head injury as a result of excessive beating; a bullet wound; pellets. Life and death are discussed, sanitized and punctuated with a request to pass the yogurt. Dinner table conversation since last week has oscillated between a patient’s family deciding whether to put them on a ventilator, where some friends had planned to holiday this summer, a patient locking doctors out of an isolation ward, whether there is chocolate in the house, and a spiteful suspect Covid19 patient pulling down a doctor’s mask and coughing in her face.

I have wondered what heroes look like in the last few days and observed at close quarters. For starters, their phones don’t stop ringing, and they patiently answer each call much to the chagrin of their families. They sometimes show up to work at 1 am. Heroes talk politics and pray for the world while making sure to check in on relatives lest they be offended. Heroes try to contain a pandemic while being a good daughter-in-law. Heroes pray for patients’ test results to come out negative. Sometimes, heroes tweet out advisories on social media to calm the panic. Sometimes, even though it seems like the world is ending, someone on social media thinks it pertinent to ask a hero where her dupatta is.

224pp, Rs350; Speaking Tiger
224pp, Rs350; Speaking Tiger

Sounds of the personal

It must be like regular life for you, ask friends. In a way, it is. We are experts in hoarding for the unexpected – from famines to snow to curfews –we’ve been prepared across generations for this – economically. Socially, we have not. They say, people should learn from Kashmiris but all we can teach is the mechanics of it. We are still learning to negotiate the social amidst a flurry of malaal – the act of taking offense at something and sulking without communicating resentment yet waiting for an apology.

In this culture of fragile sociality, social distancing is a daily negotiation. How do you tell someone you don’t want them visiting your house without morbidly offending them? How do you avoid filial kisses of elders, and refuse the food they bring? With my aunt I talk over a wall, see her hand peek out over it. With my grandmother, ensuring safe distance is heartbreaking.

Sounds of Social Media

Revive traditional forms of sociality, said a video by a local mental healthcare centre, of grandmothers talking to each other through windows. This mohalla culture of shouting across windows is unfolding on social media. Kashmir social media – limited by 2G speed but blessed with abundant patience – is a wickedly fun place for daily doses of dark humour, and a count of deaths – much like Kashmir. People congregate and make noise – appeals to stay home, humour at the state of the world, advocating for the release of prisoners, home remedies, and occasional updates to preserve our dying culture are active and rapid. All this at 2G speed. No wonder Kashmiri Twitter had fun with the “Take back Omar and give us 4G” meme a few days ago.

Digital is the future, I said in a podcast at work last month. Soon it will not be an option. How ironic, the sound of those words is to me just a few weeks later. Digital may be the future, and in the midst of a global pandemic, going digital may be imperative but at home in Kashmir, is digital even an option?

PS: Amongst the many sounds and stories I pick up, though, in the last two weeks, I must report that no bells were rung, plates clanged, or conches blown at 5pm. Those sounds of authority were the only ones we didn’t hear.

Onaiza Drabu is a Kashmiri anthropologist. She writes about identity, nationalism and Islamophobia, and co-curates a newsletter called ‘Daak’, on South Asian literature and art. She has recently published The Legend of Himal and Nagrai: Greatest Kashmiri Folktales with Speaking Tiger.

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