13. Firdous Cinema

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]P’s memory is neatly folded. She spreads it out. There, in the centre, is a grey building laced with concertina wiring and a rusted neon sign that spells out Firdous Cinema. ‘Firdous’, meaning paradise.

Once, it is said, there was nothing. A bare field girded by a wire fence. Then, her father told her, the government rigged up a shed on the field. Horses and cows that had strayed would be penned up there. Their owners could get them back for a fine. Sometime in the sixties, she has heard, the Kawoosas bought the land from the government and built Firdous Cinema.

The movie theatre is in Hawal, once on the peripheries of downtown Srinagar and now absorbed deep into the dense urban growth. But it is also part of other geographies, some of this world and some not of it.

Firdous Cinema was not the only movie hall in Srinagar to be turned into a camp. It was not the site of the worst massacres— that was Islamia College, also in Hawal, where about seventy people were killed in one day. Nor did it have a name for torture, unlike, say, Kawoosa House in nearby Nowhatta. It was attacked a few times, most notably by Ashfaq Wani just as he was killed in 1990. But such attacks were routine in those days.

Still, Firdous Cinema is curiously lit up in the memory of those who knew it in their youth and saw it change from movie hall to camp. It flickers between dream and nightmare. It lives in both historical time and impossible time, time that belongs to other worlds, but also to a past that no longer feels believable.

PP starts out historical. So, where was she? Yes, a road running past the side of Firdous Cinema connects it to Hari Parbat, travelling through concentric circles of history as it ascends the hill. Hari Parbat is circled by a wall built by the Mughals in the sixteenth century and crowned by a fort finished by the Pathans in the nineteenth century.1 The wall had three main gates, and the gates used to have checkposts in Pathan times. PP knows this because her family had lived there since Pathan times. By the time she was growing up, the walls were largely gone, leaving behind the gates, grandiose and lonely. When PP was very small, her grandfather took her to see the fort. They saw guns and heavy, heavy cannonballs still strewn about. That was before Indian soldiers moved into the fort and closed it to the public for decades.

Hari Parbat also lives in mythical time. It is said, the mountain is a rock dropped by a goddess to kill the demon Jalodbhava. It is also called Koh-i-Maran, the mountain of serpents, a Persian name with echoes from Kashmir’s ancient past, when nagas are said to have lived in the Valley. But PP has no time for these stories. She thinks Koh-i-Maran got its name because the road winds up the hill like a snake. Still, it is sacred ground. On one side of the hill lies the Makhdoom Sahib shrine, the empire of a powerful Sufi saint. On the other, the temple of the Hindu goddess Sharika. PP’s childhood home was right below the temple, in an area known as Devi Angan, courtyard of the goddess. From wall to fort, the road once travelled through an orchard of almond trees, Badamwari. People went for picnics there in PP’s childhood, drawn by the fresh air that was scented with almond blossoms.

Not everywhere was pleasant. If you walked up the hill from Firdous Cinema and turned left before you reached Devi Angan, you reached the psychiatric hospital originally set up by British missionaries in the nineteenth century. Further up this road, you reached the central jail set up in Dogra times. The almond groves once thickened into forests on this side of the hill, haunted by older places of punishment. The forests were named Bagh-e Waris Khan, after a bloodthirsty official who liked to hang his victim’s upside down over a well. When PP was growing up, this corner of the hill was a place of fear that most people avoided.

What else? Oh yes, if you went down the hill, past Firdous Cinema, and kept walking, you would reach a canal that drew water from the Anchar Lake. Her father sometimes went down to the canal to fetch drinking water. It was clean and sweet.

Then the waters grew polluted, and the canal disappeared beneath a road. And PP seems to remember a fire in Badamwari. Soon afterwards, in the seventies, the government gave land on one side of the road leading up to the hill from Firdous Cinema to Tibetan refugees. Land on the other side went to downtown families who wanted to move into the relative quiet of Hawal. And that was the end of old Badamwari.

Years later, the forest of Bagh-e-Waris Khan would be cleared to make way for almond trees and a ticketed park calling itself Badamwari. Only Waris Khan’s well remains, a wire mesh stretching across the abyss below.

Excerpted with permission from “Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir’s Conflict”, by Ipsita Chakravarty, Context-Westland Books.

About the Book

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In Kashmir, folktales often begin with the word dapaan—‘it is said’. So too do local narratives told and retold about the past, among people who have lived through nearly eight decades of a bitter contest between India and Pakistan.

This is a story about stories. In the hyper-nationalist din over a territorial dispute, Kashmiri voices are often drowned out. Yet the region is home to long habits of storytelling, its communities intensely engaged with history-keeping. For centuries, folk traditions of theatre, song and fable have flowed into a reservoir of common talk. Mythology, hearsay and historical memory coexist here without any apparent hierarchies.

By the time armed rebellion spread through Kashmir in 1989, many of these traditions had died out, or been forced underground. But they have left traces in the way ordinary people speak about the conflict—in their songs of loss, and jokes about dark times; in fantastical geographies, and rumours turning the Valley’s militarisation into a ghostly haunting. From Partition to the 2019 Indian crackdown, Ipsita Chakravarty discovers a vivid, distinctly Kashmiri vision of events that have often been narrated from the top-down. Her interviewees conjure a kaleidoscope of towns and villages shaping their own memories.

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Ipsita Chakravarty

Ipsita Chakravarty is an award-winning journalist who has reported on politics and armed conflict in Kashmir and North-East India for a decade. She has worked as a reporter, editor and opinion writer for national dailies including The Times of India, The Telegraph, The Indian Express and Scroll.

Relevant Links

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