A Kashmiri on the terror of the Indian military onslaught in Kashmir:
Yesterday, at the Srinagar airport, a few of us stood huddled around the only working tv near one of the boarding gates that was showing the news. I, a Kashmiri, who had spent the past week panicking, partly paralyzed with fear and uncertainty, not knowing what imminent doom lay in store scrambled across the waiting area to seek a spot within an earshot of the TV. I couldn’t see what was going on, but I could hear the address. I knew at that moment that I was going from ‘not knowing’ to ‘knowing’, all the while debating with myself whether I even wanted to know what horror would befall us now, a people who had already been subjected to so many shades of horror before.
So there I was, listening to the news at a nearby spot, as if eavesdropping on the future of my own home and my people– because that’s what you do when you live under siege, holed up inside your houses without any communication to the outside world, imagining the worst in your head as the streets that run near your locale like veins inside a human are populated by armed men who share neither your history nor language.
And there I was, suddenly hit with all the weight that comes with knowing the sinister designs that will shape the future of Kashmir. But there I also was, knowing my family and my relatives and neighbours and my people were trapped in their homes, tense and confused, some probably ill and unable to get to the hospitals, curfewed in and worse, still not knowing what had just happened.
Today, a day later, there has still been no news from Kashmir as all channels of communication have been cut. And now, the curse of not knowing what is happening falls upon us: those outside.
–Huzaafa