Auschwitz and Kashmir

The Auschwitz Boy, Kashmir and The wall of the Anti-National.

I met this boy in Auschwitz – much younger than me, from Czech Republic and who happened to walk with me through Birkenau, and I was immensely glad for his footsteps in tandem with mine. During the walk he asked me, ‘Do you believe in God?’- such an incongruous question in the midst of all that, but I found myself telling him, “I do. I actually do” – and he responded to that with, “Well, I do too”. Yesterday I found a message sitting there in my inbox – ‘My condolences to India’,he said. ‘I wish these things didn’t happen and one day, humanity would be united by love and peace’. I woke up to his message and I sat there, with the sun streaming into the windows from the Romanian dawn and contemplated the humans of the world. I was so touched that he had sent me this message and I was so aware of how much we all wanted an equitable world.

I am 3 years away from 40, and in my head, I perhaps already am. I process information – especially about love, loss and purpose, very different from how I did in my twenties – I’ve seen a mother bury her son and I think it broke something within me and I wasn’t ever going to forget the irreedemability of that day. I understood how much nothing mattered, yet you had to hold on to whatever you could, and in the face of loss – we are all equally powerless and vulnerable.

The vestigial funeral videos, the gun shots, the last salute, of screams and pains, of coffins and the Indian flag – juxtaposed with ‘please donate’, the clarion call for the ban of Pakistani artists and art, some cricketing legitimacy – the mayhem of it, lay threadbare – the pointlessness of it all. No matter how much we all donated, no matter how much we decried the exchange of art – all these kids are going to grow up without their fathers, never knowing how he smelt or that he was funny, or witty or how he sang tuneless melodies – none of these little details of the father are ever going to be available to the kids for consumption, everything would be swamped up under ‘The Martyr’ tag. The woman bears the true brunt of a man’s valour and misfortune – and these women are going to have to watch their children grow with just context and stories, not the tactile warmth of a real childhood.

It also made me reflect upon the collective childhoods we have given the children of Kashmir; it seems so unfair that our kids get to grow up with birthdays with Elsa and peppa pig and rainbow cakes, while those kids grow up with dilapidated neighborhoods entrenched in convoys and curfews, and pellet wounds. Will Infosys open a sprawling campus in kashmir? Never. What do these kids grow up and aspire for? They all know that they have to leave home, and that’s a terrible non-choice to have, some of them come down south and feel incongruous and unmoored and terribly ache for home, for most of their lives. They see our cities bustling with normalcy, and they can’t understand why they couldn’t have what we did and what we do – and they only echo the fragmented lives they’ve seen and endured – and how do we expect any allegiance from them at all? Offense and intolerance are our prime skills these days – we are quick to condemn, but never take time to reflect.

For the first time ever, I realized that maybe kashmir is really sick of us, have we asked the people of kashmir what they want? Whether they want to be here or there? Kashmir is not simply the land, the rivers and the tulips – it’s all those broken people that are sick of being broken. And how many more soldiers are going to be defending a line of control – that’s nothing but a barbed wire, born out of insatiable hunger for land and power? The real war is in our heads – to let the land go and save the people.

Is army your first choice for career? If it isn’t, then you and I shouldn’t be using that army to defend a piece a land that kills more than it nurtures.

I think of Auschwitz a lot, I think of deplorable things one man could do to another man, and how all other men hold the tenacious potential to look the other way – we’ve all been looking the other way, while kashmir and its people have been slowly dying, and we’ve all the while been glorifying these senseless deaths – and taking for granted, the willingness of one man, with little choice and much less privilege, to die for a piece of land.