Click to play videoNew Delhi: The haunting cover picture of Curfewed Night, the first English memoir by a young Kashmiri journalist, Basharat Peer, is where it starts to get you.
Peer says, “It's a picture by an American journalist Ami Vitale. It’s a girl looking through the fence at a funeral, at the body of a boy being taken away in Srinagar.”
The book talks about the intimate incidents that the author has experienced up close while growing up in Kashmir.
Peer has written a candid, matter-of-fact account of life in the valley. The window of calm in the 80s to the fear and horror of the 90s when disappearances and crackdowns became commonplace.
It's a harrowing read and you never forget for an instant just how personal the stories are.
Whether it's his family narrowly escaping a landmine blast, which left his father scarred or being fearful of stepping out of his shelter.
Peer says, “It was painful. I wrote it on paper first. I tried writing it on computer, couldn't, and the fact was using a personal story. I knew so many people. These stories are representative of certain kinds of things that happened a lot of times. Similar things were experienced by hundreds of people. This was the story I knew most intimately, hardest for me to do, but most powerful for me to write.”
Peer talks about a woman whose son had been killed in an encounter between the military and militants. One of her sons was sent in with a landmine and was killed. The other son was being sent in too; however, she jumps at her son, fights the soldiers and brings him back but at the end of that interview, she just keeps staring at Peer. She says the boy who was killed looked exactly like you.
Curfewed Night is a book that will stay with you long after you flip its last page.
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