This World Below Zero Fahrenheit- Travels in The Kashmir Valley

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This is not a goddamn "Heaven". Many years ago, a close friend called me up, fuming at a run

Of the mill piece on Kashmir. "Why do they keep saying it? We live here. We are not dead yet. I knew what he meant. The cliché wasn't just off-putting. It was corrosive. It reduced a living place to an amusement park. 'Heaven'. When Kashmir wasn't that it was a geostrategic something or a 'battleground xxx'. Every time such a cliché was uttered, Kashmir and its people grew a little more distant, more abstract. My friend's words remained somewhere at the back of my mind. Which is why I couldn't help but share a chance encounter I had with a Kashmiri man returning from a regular nine-to-five shift. And the conversations I had with elderly football enthusiasts, actors, poets, shepherds and ambitious young men and women, some of whom were fighting for their identities like people anywhere else in the world. To them Kashmir was only a home, with all its imperfections.

To Ali Mohammad, a cobbler who has been sitting in front of the old Tyndale-Biscoe School at Lal Chowk for the past twenty- five years, it is the 'best place in the whole wide world'. Though, by his own admission, he has never travelled beyond Jammu. He likes it despite the fact that in these twenty five years, 'a lot of people who used to push carts for a living have now become very rich Some of them are even driven to their shops in expensive cars. It hurts because the place where I sit, my brother-in-law sat for fifty years before me Fifty plus twenty-five is how much?"

Seventy-five. Exactly. For the last seventy-five years, we have been sitting in this corner of the road mending and polishing shoes. What do we have to show for it? Just a two-room house in Batmaloo. He blames it on his stingy customers, the Shikaslads (which means the bringer of misfortune and is often used as a term of mild abuse). Whom nothing can cure, 'not even the air of Lal Chowk, which our elders would say was the remedy to all ills."

When I started work on this book, a little over two years ago, I did not have any grand, connecting theme in mind. I only knew what I was not going to write about-violence (and I failed even at that). The moment it became central to any story, violence had a tendency of eclipsing everything else. The best way to deal with it was probably through allusion. Something of the sort that had been done in Valley of Saints, a movie on Kashmir, set in Kashmir, which had won many international awards, including two at the Sundance film festival. There's a scene in it in which a character, Afzal, is trying to cheer up his friend Gulzar. As they're lying in bed. Afzal thinks of an act-mimicking corpses. The way a person looks in death depends on the way they die. Afzal says. He plays the part of a person who has been shot to death-limbs bent at unnatural angles, a bit of flesh showing around the waist. It's as if in that frame, for a second, he becomes, at once, all the people who were gunned down in the valley.

**Contents and Sample Pages**