Review: This Our Paradise by Karan Mujoo
A story of two Kashmiri families with alternating narratives, this is an exploration of how violence arrives in small towns and villages and uproots communities
Writers have chronicled the ambiguity of the idea of a free Kashmir. It is an idea that varies from person to person, from one ethnic group to another. For some, it means the demilitarization of Kashmir; for others, it means a merger with Pakistan; for still others, it means an autonomous Kashmir, independent of both India and Pakistan. Arundhati Roy wrote about it in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Shabir Ahmad Mir captured it in The Plague Upon Us. Karan Mujoo writes about it in his debut novel, This Our Paradise.
There is often a sense that there isn’t enough space for more than one narrative within the discourse about some aspects of Indian politics. Kashmir has always been entangled in multiple stories and agendas. Mujoo conveys this in his authorial note that emphasizes the breadth of Kashmir’s sociopolitical landscape and the dangers of a single story. It begins with a quote from Stendhal: “I cannot provide the reality of events. I can only convey their shadows.”
This is the story of two Kashmiri families with alternating narratives. One of the narrators is a child witnessing the last decades of the twentieth century, the tumultuous years that would see the arrival of militancy and the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits. In heartbreaking prose, the book explores how a child makes sense of exile, loss and death and how violence arrives in small towns and villages and uproots communities.
The boy narrates his own family’s tale. Displaced from their home in Bagh-i-Mehtab, they move to Talab Tillo in Jammu, where the five remaining members sleep in a makeshift room and share a dingy bathroom without running water. His grandparents, who were used to the sheets of snow that covered the beautiful Valley, find it hard to survive the loos of Jammu’s plains. “I am worried about the old and the sick. They might have survived the bullets, but they will be finished off by the exile,” he thinks.
To make matters even more difficult, Jammu locals were hostile and believed the Pandits ran away from confrontation and gave up their land too easily. Perhaps the truth is that the Pandits didn’t read the signs – the sparks of radicalization, the botched elections, the growing unrest. Later, they would look back and wonder why they had missed them. They had placed their faith in the security of the Indian nation-state, something they would later come to regret. The author writes: “We listened to the (radio) bulletin but could not fully comprehend it. How could mere words convey such terror? How could we understand the thud of a bullet hitting the body, the blood oozing out, turning the asphalt black? Or the eardrum shattering sound of a bomb? The shrapnel whizzing through the air puncturing lungs and livers? A grey, cold body lying in the street? A note warning people not to pick it up? We heard these words on the radio, but we did not understand them. The literature of violence had to be lived to be felt. And we were yet to reach the page where our story was written.”
As the community lived through their last days in Kashmir in early 1990, through endless nights of frenzied mobs roaming unchallenged, they wondered whether the central government or the army would intervene. It was clear that the morals that bound a society together had disappeared and fathers contemplated the murder of their daughters to protect them from sexual violence. Today, sadly, the story of the Pandits is a forgotten footnote.
Mujoo also writes about the fate of Kashmiri Muslims whose lives were engulfed by terror. Caught between the armed forces and militants backed by ISI and Jamaat, and unable to secure jobs in a corrupt system, young Kashmiri men were drawn to the idea of serving a greater cause. Dejected, they believed Kashmiri society needed an overhaul. Countless mothers waited by windows and outside police stations hoping to catch a glimpse of their sons, who had picked up arms against the Indian state. Dismantled families sank into grief.
In Mujoo’s vivid picture of Kashmiri society, nobody is overlooked, not even the Henz or the boat people, who are at the bottom of the caste ladder. The reader is taken into a settlement of sweepers, scavengers and tanners. Reviled by the general populace, they are called “watals”. “At school, if a boy’s clothes were unkempt, he was promptly denounced as a watal. Watal was a joke, a slur, an insult, a warning. Used carelessly and arrogantly. Nurtured over centuries by those who sat atop the social pyramid in the Valley.”
The paragraphs of beautiful descriptions provide some relief: “They wove the weeds together to create floating farms on which they grew tomatoes, melons, cucumbers, and pumpkins…The Dal, I realized, was a city within a city, a world within a world, with lives that followed the rhythm of water, not that of the land…”
An exploration of a society crumbling from within, This Our Paradise, is a moving read.
Sharmistha Jha is an independent writer and editor.