This World Before Zero Fahrenheit: Read an excerpt from Suhas Munshi's travelogue on Kashmir and its people

In his travelogue, This World Below Zero Fahrenheit: Travels in the Kashmir Valley_, author Suhas Munshi weaves a rich tapestry of stories and lived experiences to present an alternative perspective on a region which is often recognised as either a sublime, eternal paradise or a place of violence and bloodshed. He writes about poets and playwrights, about Christmas service and football, about nomadic shepherd communities and a lone Pandit family from a colony in Shopian to highlight a people that are much more than the socio-political identities forced upon them by circumstance._ Munshi’s narrative begins at a time when he found himself stuck in the region while visiting the poet Habba Khatoon’s relic in Gurez. Article 370 was abrogated and a curfew was imposed in Jammu and Kashmir. It was then that he began working on his debut book, collecting interviews and stories that cover his travels through the Kashmir valley. His conversations with the locals become an attempt to decipher what this defining moment meant to common Kashmiris, how their very existence continues to be overshadowed by the momentous events that have transpired through the years and the ways in which their quotidian existence unfolds amid these tumultuous incidents. The excerpt that follows describes Munshi’s conversations with author and professor Aijaz Ahmad Bund, one of two people he revisited in his quest to find out how the changes brought on by the abrogation of Article 370 had affected their lives. *** Of all the Kashmiris I spoke with, I revisited two people to understand how their lives and the lives of those around them had changed after the abrogation of Article 370. These two had nothing in common except that I had first met them at the Bund. They came from very different backgrounds and worked in different professions where they dealt with their own sets of challenges. Dr Aijaz Ahmad Bund is an assistant professor at the Government Degree College for Women, Pulwama. He is also the founder of the Sonzal Welfare Trust in Srinagar, which perhaps is the only organization of its kind working for the rights of the LGBTQ+ community in the valley. In 2018, he wrote a book called The Hijras of Kashmir: A Marginalized Form of Personhood. It sparked, for the first time in Kashmir, a debate on the status of the LGBTQ+ community, which he describes in his book as an ‘ethnic minority’. We first spoke to each other a few days before 5 August 2019. Dr Aijaz, who was well-mannered and courteous to a fault, came dressed in a simple shirt and trousers, wearing a working-class look. ‘It was in 2008 when a transgender woman came to our house with a marriage proposal for my sister. For the longest time my mother wouldn’t allow her inside the home but relented after I intervened. But after the transwoman left, I saw my mother washing the cups that our guest had used, not once, not twice, but thrice. As if the visitor had polluted something very deep inside our house. I was very disturbed by that incident,’ Dr Aijaz said. [caption id=“attachment_9377081” align=“alignnone” width=“640”] The Bund, an erstwhile popular nature trail in Kashmir that curves along the Jhelum river.[/caption] In 2011 he started discussing the subject in his classroom, at Kashmir University’s MA, social work class. He was ridiculed and harassed by his peers. ‘Nobody was ready to hear what I had to say. It’s in those classrooms that I started my fight, that my life changed.’ He fought hard to get people to listen to the marginalized voices and to create temporary safe spaces for people from the community. And he did these things in a place as volatile and violent as Kashmir. ‘One feels a sort of toxic masculinity at work here. Sometimes the resistance here takes hyper-masculine overtones. I think men feel threatened that their patriarchal structures will come crumbling down if they allow sexual freedom to minorities. Women don’t feel as threatened. It is difficult to hold a discussion about sexual rights in Kashmir. Elsewhere you don’t find such difficulties. You can have pride marches in Delhi. Not here.’ People who don’t fit into conventional social categories are told that the only issue to bother with is the conflict. Dr Aijaz feels deeply about this. This, he argued, was a way to crush the independent identities of sexual minorities. To indefinitely put off a matter that needed to be addressed urgently. ‘How can the rights of the community be sidelined? Our issues will remain. We will remain where we are, no matter which way the political winds blow. If religion doesn’t recognize us, if the state doesn’t recognize us, where do we go? What do we do with “Azadi” in which even our existence is not acknowledged?’ Dr Aijaz worked for years to get people to confront their prejudices. But a lot of what he achieved was undone after the government imposed a curfew, cut off telephone lines and banned the Internet across the valley from 5 August 2019. ‘There were people who did not know for as long as six months whether their partners were dead or alive. So many people described to me later how cathartic the experience was of hearing the first “hello” from their partners on the phone. They wept and wept. It was a very difficult time for all of us. People who were connected to each other and to the global LGBTQ+ community through the Internet suddenly found themselves alone and disoriented,’ Dr Aijaz said. Dr Aijaz and his team were running several mental health programmes for the community. It all came to an abrupt halt after 5 August 2019. The safe spaces that he had worked so hard to create vanished. But the most severe trauma was faced by those who were forced, because of the curfew, to live with their abusers 24x7. ‘When schools and colleges were open, many were able to avoid their abusers, at least temporarily. During that time of absolute confinement, lots of people reported domestic violence and abuse. Then, there were people taking hormones; with the markets suddenly shut, many developed gender dysphoria and developed severe suicidal thoughts,’ he said. Many people from the community have still not been able to see each other in person because restrictions from 5 August 2019 have dovetailed into the restrictions placed on the meeting of people after the outbreak of COVID-19. Religion has been a coping mechanism for many in the community. In Hijras of Kashmir, Aijaz discusses how religion is a vital element in the lives of LGBTQ+ community members in Kashmir. For many, it is the only accessible form of therapy, the only source of solace. And faith also, surely, gives its adherents the right to protest, to lodge a complaint against their maker? In the same book he quotes a person who expresses his deep anguish in these words: I am the one who is living the absolute torment of occupying a body that is never coordinated with who I am inside. It is never easy to accept what I am? Am I a man? A woman or what? But I am sure that I am a human being, I see, feel and react. I have emotions. Agar khodayan mard te zanaaneh yaetchie banawih telih kaem banaiew aiess. Soun aasun agar galti chi telih chi so khodai senz galti. Sanih aasnuk kus chu kosoorwar kraal ha kinih baaneh, banawan woul ha kinih bandeh? [If God created only men and women then who created us? If we are mistakes then undoubtedly we are God’s mistakes. For my existence who is to blame, potter, or the pot; creator or the creation?] The thing that really got under Dr Aijaz’s skin, he said, was the hypocrisy of his society. He gives the example of a transgender person who lives in downtown Srinagar. The person, he says, used to be quite active in protests against the administration, and attained a heroic status among some locals. But ironically, the sexual identity of that person still wasn’t accepted. There are doors that remain closed to her. There are prejudices even her bravado hasn’t been able to break. ‘How do I explain it to you . . . It’s like there are some people who live among you, who do everything they can for you, and you still look right through them. As if they don’t even exist,’ Dr Aijaz said. Sometimes, it feels to him as if he’s swimming across a double current, blindly flapping his exhausted limbs in order to survive, ‘and at the end of it you find yourself still at the starting point, not having covered any distance. There is politics within the community and there’s oppression outside it. Kis kis se ladein, ab utni zindagi bhi nahi hai [whom all do we fight, we don’t even have that much time left on earth]?’ Dr Aijaz may occasionally sound despondent and angry, but he also exudes the warmth of a leisurely bonfire. No wonder the stories he told me when we met at the Bund before 5 August felt so believable: Of how strangers from across the valley called him in extreme distress, and how his presence usually had a calming effect not just on the survivors but on the families as well, who in most cases turned out to be the perpetrators of violence. I had nothing more to ask. But I did express my admiration for his work. Dr Aijaz smiled at the compliment and wished me luck. *** The above excerpt from Suhas Munshi’s This World Below Zero Fahrenheit: Travels in the Kashmir Valley has been reproduced here with permission from Penguin Random House.