Book Review | Siddhartha Gigoo’s ‘A Long Season of Ashes’  | By Sushant Dhar

Guest post by Sushant Dhar. First published at News18.

“The truck pulls over by the roadside of this strange place that I’ve never wanted to go to. Behind me is the setting sun, which shone brightly over the dew in the courtyard of my ancestral house earlier that day.”  

The truck pulled over for me as well, a two year old exile curled up in the lap of his grandpa who was sobbing incessantly throughout this journey of separation from his beloved home. Thousands of trucks pulled over for many days on different places along the Jammu-Srinagar National Highway in the year 1990, some stopped at Batote, some at Udhampur, Nagrota, Battal Ballian, Muthi camp, Jhiri camp, some went a bit far to Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh and some pulled over at Delhi. Imagine you’re at home in the morning and as the sun sets you’re forced to arrive at an unfamiliar place, dotted by tattered canvas tents, away from your family, away from everything that belongs to you, to live a life of deprivation and perpetual exile. Imagine living in a camp for all these years, the first ten years in tents and the following sixteen years in one room dome shaped quarters, bereft of everything that was once yours. That’s where we lived, the children of exile, our parents, grandparents and thousands of other Kashmiri Pandits.

 A Long Season of Ashes stands as a voluminous testament to the ever enduring humanizing power of literature, of memory, of written word. The author has relentlessly pursued the idea of displacement, time, disease, loss, longing throughout the book. The terse prologue sets the tone emphasizing the importance of preservation of memory; delineating the role of the exiles to fall back on what they’ve gone through, to remember, to retrace back their journey, to go on retelling their stories of persecution and forced displacement to their progeny. The forty two word blurb of the book depicts our human condition in the wake of insurmountable grief and trauma, ‘Those who yearned to return to their homes in Kashmir are long dead. An entire generation was wiped out in the camps. What’s left now is residue. This residue has now begun to cast a long shadow on our own personal histories.’ 

The year 1990 saw one of the most dehumanizing chapters in the history of our country when half a million Kashmiri Pandits were driven out of their homes by radical Islamists chanting slogans of ‘Yaha kya chalega, Nizame-mustafa (What do we want here? Rule of Shariah),  Zalimo, O Kafiro, Kashmir hamara Chhod Do (O! Merciless, O! Infidels, Leave our Kashmir); hundreds of Kashmiri Pandits were killed by terrorists, declarations issued to the effect that Kashmiri Pandits are kafirs and informers. Many local dailies and newspapers published threats by terrorist organizations threatening Pandits to leave the valley in 36 hours. Several prominent Kashmiri Pandits including Tika Lal Taploo (BJP Leader), Neelkanth Ganjoo (Retired Judge), Lassa Kaul (Director Doordarshan Srinagar) were killed by terrorists in the year 1990. Those who stayed back were massacred in Sangrampora (21 March 1997), Wandhama (25 January 1998) and Nadimarg (23 March 2003).

The author of the book has painted an exhaustive detail of his childhood in Srinagar and the horrors he witnessed at the camps for displaced Kashmiri Pandits. The first seven nights spent by the author and his sister in a buffalo shed in Jammu are the most harrowing of all his experiences in a camp. The lips of his sister are dry and cracked, she’s terribly thirsty and asks for water but there’s no water, she has to wait till morning. What unfolds on the third night is bone chilling. The author goes back and forth in time, taking us to pre 1990’s when he was home, going on with his life, visiting temples with his grandmother, going on for picnics with his friends to Verinag, Pahalgam, Gulmarg, attending his school, learning skiing in Gulmarg, roaming around the lanes of his downtown home with grandfather, then post 1990’s in a camp for displaced in Udhampur, at a crematorium near the Devika Ghat meditating on the nature of death, watching the half-burnt bodies of the exiles, studying in a camp school under the scorching heat, at the banks of the river Chandrabhaga in Akhnoor immersing the ashes of his grandfather, someday in Delhi living in obscure towns, the next year in Varanasi battling the crisis within, on a journey of self discovery, visiting random places, houses of music maestros, then again in the camp school and back to his home at Safakadal in Downtown Srinagar, in his room writing his diary, arranging his bookshelf. In camps, he’s the mute spectator of life’s ugliness, he looks at the people who have been emptied of everything, atrophied; lost in the haze that never left them. In some other chapter, his father takes him to the site of the newly bought plot of land at Ompora, Budgam in the year 1988, in the next chapter he is watching a movie in a theatre in Srinagar, appearing for his matriculation examination in the school and the other day he’s being put onto a truck carrying him away from his home. Like several thousand Kashmiri Pandits of his age, the author witnesses the ordeal his community members are forced to go through.  

As a reader and somebody who has seen it all, experienced it, I’m overwhelmed, deeply consumed by the powerful content of the book. It was difficult for me to read through all the pages. The book is personal because it’s the story of all of us, nearly half a million displaced Kashmiri Pandits scattered across India and abroad. Our stories of exile and persecution are intertwined. We all went through the same dark night of the soul. I’ve first hand witnessed the sufferings of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits in camps; a death every day, some died from snakebites, some from sunstrokes, some were taken over by strange ailments. The summer heat made our skin pale yellow. Our parents shriveled in the stifling heat and inadequate spaces. The toilets, which were around 200 metres away from our camp, were made of sticks, pieces of wood, scrap and tin. The doors were made of torn canvas. A dug-out was made to contain the faeces. It all remained there, the faeces, the dirty water and the urine in that little dug out area, all stacked, emanating a foul stench. We slept in snatches during the night, sometimes on the roads because of the frequent power-cuts. Many of us didn’t even have fans or coolers. The nights and the cries of distress were never-ending. Our bodies were drenched in sweat all the time. Hiding all day from the blazing sun was a routine game. Finding a corner untouched by the sun on the camp streets was a daily affair for the elders. The elders with ashen faces looked frazzled and wilted as if they were carrying a permanent burden on their shoulders. Elders were often seen loitering in the camp, expressing their longing through inane soliloquies and monologues. Many ran away from the camps and were never found, many drowned in the Ranbir canal while bathing, some which lost sense of place and time still live in the camps and old age homes in Jammu. 

The author’s grandfather always kept his shirts, other clothes ironed every day. He polished his shoes every night in the hope that the Government can anytime take them back to Kashmir and that they should be in a state of readiness. He kept on with this habit for nine years until his death in the year 1999. My grandfather also passed away after two years of exodus at Garhi, Udhampur on the day of Shivratri in the year 1992. In exile, the author saw many lonely deaths and one of the deaths was of his own grandfather who lost his memory post exodus. He confused his wife for his mother, his son for his father, his granddaughter for his wife. An entire generation grew up in the shadows of the horrors inflicted on their ancestors. Many wished to be cremated at the crematoriums in their native villages, some still wish the same even after 34 years of exodus. Last year, my uncle with terminal illness wished the same before being shifted to the ventilator for 54 days.  His last wish was that his final remains be immersed in the brook running adjacent to the crematorium in his native village in Trail, Anantnag. We fulfilled his last wish. The author’s grandfather pleads the same, “On his deathbed, Babuji implores us to take him home to Kashmir, but he knows he will not live to see that day. Therefore, he wants us to take his ashes there. And then he dies a lonely death, unable to even dream one last happy dream of homecoming.” A decade later, Babi (author’s grandmother) too dies but near her home in Srinagar at a hospital when she’s on a fourth visit to Kashmir with her family in the year 2012. This visit was important for her because she had promised herself that she’ll visit her home at Safakadal but little did she know that this won’t happen in this lifetime. 

The author stresses that every day is a Memorial Day for the Kashmiri Pandit community. I’m reminded of literary scholar Kate McLoughlin’s words about Primo Levi’s book If This is a Man, “It’s hard to believe that the human frame can survive under such circumstances, let alone survive to write something like this.” It takes enormous efforts to put forth everything that has happened to us all these years, to carry this burden all along and be an instrument of catharsis for the entire displaced community. The author does this with most of his earlier publications which includes The Garden of Solitude (novel), A Fistful of Earth and other short stories, A Long Dream of Home (Anthology, co-editor), essays, poems; painstakingly writing about the exiles and their predicament. 

 All these years, I’ve tried to carve my own meaning of Nikos Kazantzakis’ home poem from his novel The Rock Garden. 

O plum tree before my house,

I shall never return,

But you do not forget to blossom

Again in the spring!

Kazantzakis sojourned in Paris, Berlin, Italy, Russia, Spain, Cyprus, Egypt; translating books, writing novels, essays, spending most of his time in his second home at Antibes, France but kept returning back to his war-torn country, to his home at Crete and Aegina, keeping a large clod of soil from Crete on his work desk; asserting his longing for home and his beloved land.

The same happened with the exiles putting up in the camps in Jammu and other places across the country. In one of the chapters, the author shares that a Kashmir Pandit writer Arjan Dev Majboor had kept the water of Vitasta (river in Kashmir) in a bottle at his room in Udhampur and he used to show the bottle to all who came to visit his place. Many Kashmiri Pandit families bought soil from their native places in Kashmir and kept them at their places of worship in their tents, camp quarters. The soil, the water, the old photo albums, photo frames is now their family heirloom, to be preserved for generations, to be passed onto the people who will preserve the memory of their long lost ancestors. The eyes of our parents and grandparents are fixed at the place they once called home, then the eyes shift to the time of their persecution and forced exodus, thereafter to the experience of the horrible camp life which no human being should ever see or go through. We are refugees of Time; trapped in the beautiful and gory past. My mother only dreams about Kashmir. She can’t believe that she lived in those camps where she struggled/scrounged for the most basic necessities. She goes back in time and remembers the everyday ordeal of scraping the drains, cleaning the makeshift toilets used by a dozen families in one part of the block. She falls back to dreams which transport her to the beautiful house in Anantnag. She is at home only in her dreams; that is her only escape from the ugly reality. I’ll never forget the dreary nights of studying in the kitchen we had made adjacent to our one room quarter. It had a hanging roof made of tin sheets, supported by bamboo logs, which used to beat violently because of seasonal winds, many a times the kitchen caved in, tin sheets flung in the air from one block to another. During the rainy season, every year, the rain water would get into our quarters and into the shops of camp inmates and the terrible sight of people searching for their belongings in the drains was disturbing. At the face of this constant humiliation and incomprehensible adversity, the displaced had only one option, to remain steady, to continue dragging themselves all day, to live for a day, for a year, for their children, for their families, for the good days. 

As we journey from one book to another, from one city to another; embracing cosmopolitanism, building better lives for ourselves, we must carry our exile within us and not forget the struggle and sufferings of our parents and grandparents,  we must not forget about the Kashmiri Pandit families killed by terrorists, families destroyed forever, we must carry the wounds of the entire community beyond time, we must narrate our stories every day, shifting to the oral transmission of history, the written word, making it a permanent ritual within our households to pass on what we endured. Our fulcrum of existence should revolve around what is ours now, memories of our native homes and grandparents, stories of displacement, poems/stories/essays/ literature of exile, it’s our duty to narrate what happened to us. 

 Babi’s prayer rings in my ears every now and then, ‘May we always be happy in our homes! May our hearts be warm and lit! May our children prosper and flourish, May we never get to leave our beautiful house, our beautiful land….May we live and die happily here in Kashmir.’ Babi’s prayer is the most endearing moment amidst all this great suffering. The entire brunt of exodus was borne by our grandparents who died in horrid camps, other places that they didn’t belong to, away from the land/home that was once theirs since time immemorial.

The author is hopeful that one day we will reclaim what was ours and reaffirms that our part of the story has not ended. He answers his own questions. “Do you think the long season of ashes will end one day? I am within striking distance of everything I’ve ever lost. Somewhere in the book he says that a day will come when someone’s diary entry will read: ‘Today, I am back home, where my parents and grandparents once lived. And it is going to be the longest day ever, with so much to do and so much to remember… But this time it won’t be a dream. When I open my eyes, I will find my home in Kashmir before me.”

A Long Season of Ashes is an essential read, a monumental attempt to make sense of the collective history of the persecuted Kashmiri Pandit community. It’s a moving portrait of the long dark time- camp existence of the displaced community. This memoir will go on to become a vital historical document on Kashmir history, immortalizing the lives/stories of displacement of thousands of unknown, forgotten Kashmiri Pandits who lived and died in the camps longing for their home. 

Bio: Sushant Dhar is a Jammu-based writer. His work has appeared in various magazines including The Punch, Outlook, The Fountain Ink, New Asian Writing, Kitaab, The Bombay Review, Muse India and others.

About the Book:

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Imprint: India Viking

Published: Jan/2024

Pages: 480

MRP: ₹699.00