My eyes are my wounds. My face a smashed screen. My mind is stiff-skein of voices. I am embedded in a bottomless pit of glass-splints. I am brimmed with the bloody pages of history. I am stirred to revolt, nonetheless I love peace. The violence has become my crutch. In my world, day and night makes no distinction. There is timelessness. How can one keep a count of time there?
I am put to floating on blood as iceberg floats on the ocean. My mind traces streets across which it always roams like a night-thief. My voices have a graveyard in the womb they are born; In Kashmir such paradoxes seem not exciting, though. Paradoxy is its food. Irony a drink. The little of my being feels alive. Most of my story is dead. What little is alive is because of this stone. All else is lost in my hands, now. Only stones stay. Stone is my language. It crystallizes my cognition. I talk through it. I don’t seem to exist if I don’t have it. My thoughts fall on it through and through, over and over like a ball falling into the same series of slots again and again. Stones define me. Stones make me. Stones carry me. I have conceptualized their diverse shapes in my psychic turf. When I don’t carry them in my hands, I carry them in my mind. They are my arguments. My identities. My revolts. My mirror of insides; of my broken heart, of my frail bones and of my fractured mind. Your value judgement about them misreads their surface, their sense of abstraction. So, it is where you lose the thread of our story, of our struggle.
I belong to a stone city with stones muffled on landscape as well as on mindscape. We internalize them, they immortalize us. That is it.
Stones bespeak bigger, bitter realities. You just call them a ‘mass of matter’. But I deem them the ‘mass of truth’. Non-living entities sometimes voice reality louder, faster than living ones. They become means to greater causes and bigger ends. Holding stone is holding reality, since my expression has been long back rubbed out. It is no more what you call ‘lunatic credulity, paralyzing stupidity, extremism, and imbecile enthusiasm’. It is guarding the truth in the world of lies. It is virtue. It is a defensive conduct. I wish if you could once mull over the abstract of stone pelting and understand our psychological realism (that what motivates us to do so). What piles the stones in the mainland? What made stone like a buzzword in Kashmir? Are such plain questions to remain frozen ever?
So long as you happen to cling to pellet-bullet romance, I am here in this romantic cult. Leave me and I will leave you. If you run on at this all, I am to double down at my stance. So, the ‘end’ of my romance has ‘synchronism’ with the ‘end’ of your romance.
Everyday I wake up to finding human blossoms combusting in the flooding fire, leaving only pathological crinkles and boiling courage behind to revenge, to rebel with something greater than stones. But when I look about, I see nothing, no nukes under my sight, but only the clumps and sheets of stones awaiting my hands to pick, to throw full blast. I have majored in this game now, yet I had to, even if the game didn’t interest me at all. Street is my universe, my dreamland, my school at the best. Like a nomad, mad I ramble about it. Upon its rugged heart are my paraphernalia, my bucklers, my counteracts : the stones. It is there where I dust out the spirit of slavery from me. My creeds, cultures keep a fount there. There is my climate of thought, my plain philosophy.
The more I am wounded there, the more I evolve out unwounded robust. The tumultuous resister. Outside it I don’t exist. Rest world is vacuum, just.
Stone pelting is not my element of business. But yes, if defending the dignity, & the higher human rung is that, then my whole act is business. And yes if it is that then why don’t you provide me with the bucks to halt my rebellion, my anarchic mannerisms? Rightly, it is the point where you let reality decay like a hunk of damp bread and bark of doomed tree. The point where you rape those facts fitting not your order, your agenda, your political apparatus of survival. The point where you rebut the evidences of your senses to justify your crippled logics. History makes you a food of political stigma!
Honestly speaking, when I don’t throw a stone a day I feel myself and the very day not in being. Not because it stands as my habit, but rather a sense of survival. It gives me the sense of being alive, struggling to be out from the intricacies of “reality control”. It seems that quitting stone pelting is leaving the resistance paralyzed in the gridlock, so paralyzed to advance for destination. Realization. For, it is only a stone that wings , that mobolizes it now. The rest is gone. Vanished. I don’t moralize my politics, as you do to preserve your national facade. I accept all that I am. I bear being deemed damn stone pelter by you, but you don’t bear being called culprits by me, so you maim me on and on. As French absurdist Albert Camus puts it in ‘The Fall’ “How many crimes have been committed for no other reason than that the perpetrator couldn’t bear being in the wrong”.
Bottom line: It is a perennial flood in Kashmir; the lives drown to death unnoticed. Unlamented. Everyone realizes the survival is lost, as the flood is making its story more brutal by each flying moment. Yet, we try in spades to pull through this catastrophe by hurrying onto a little lifeboat (the stone).
Muneer Hussain Dar from Parisabad, Budgam.