Madiha Tariq
Srinagar runs in every memory that burns and cools and burns again.
My home is an outline traced in memory, a door that swings open in dreams but refuses to appear in waking life. It is where, betrayed by the cruelty of all which is not home, something in me insists comprehension is still a possibility — the curves of the mountains, the murmur of an accent half-forgotten on the tongue. I carry it in fragments that weigh heavier than presence. It is the desire to step outside of time, to collapse the distance between my fractured selves. And yet, perhaps my most fragile truth is that I am always already in exile, even when I arrive.
I want to return and I want to run. I want to be clawed by the embrace of my home, my mouj, and then I want it to set me free.
I. Memory
I grew up in a city that never slept, though it pretended to. In winter, the snow muffled everything except the sound of boots against the road, the occasional whir of a convoy, the echo of the adhan that travelled bravely like hope through fog. In summer, the streets carried heat and tension in equal measure. The rhythm of our days was tuned to the unpredictable: a call for protest one afternoon, a curfew the next, a hurried return home before sunset because someone had heard noise from the next locality.
As children we measured time and space carefully. We learned to read our parents’ eyes before we read words. There were ways to sense when the air grew heavy, when the sound of vans, buses or helicopters meant we should draw the curtains.
Still, there was beauty too. The smell of haakh simmering in the kitchen even when smoke irritants leaked through half-closed windows, the crisp sound of snow underfoot, the sudden laughter that broke out during a power cut. Love was never distant from fear; it just grew around it, like grass pushing through cracks in concrete. Joy demanded persistence.
Home did not mean to me only a geography of streets and lakes. It was a constant negotiation with the unruly nature of life. Each return from school carried the unspoken relief of having made it back. The vocabulary of survival became ordinary, even tender. And somewhere between these repetitions, I learned that belonging is not comfort but endurance.
II. Elsewhere
When I left at eighteen for college, I expected distance to dilute intensity. It didn’t. I arrived in a place where mornings were ordinary and sirens meant nothing. For the first few weeks, my body didn’t know how to unclench. The absence of checkpoints felt like a trick. I walked to class and felt almost reckless crossing a street without glancing at policing bodies. At night, I heard the hum of party speakers and almost mistook it for danger. The stillness of peace frightened me more than chaos ever had.
People asked where I was from. I often pushed them to guess. Delhi, Bombay, Bangalore, Calcutta, everything but never Kashmir. And when I did say “Kashmir,” I watched a familiar flicker in their eyes. It was always a mixture of curiosity, pity, sometimes fascination, sometimes politics rehearsed from the news. The name carried more weight than I did. Conversations became small but hard performances translating pain into something digestible. I learned to say “it’s complicated” and smile. Each introduction was a subtle surrender. And a reminder to be polite, especially now that I was not home.
Outside, I could finally breathe, but the breath was borrowed. There was comfort in being anonymous, yet a guilt in enjoying it. Safety tasted metallic because it required forgetting, even if momentary. I began to miss the sharp alertness that had once exhausted me, the intimacy of fear, the knowledge that everyone understood it without speaking.
In classrooms, I spoke of histories and theories, of conflict and peace processes, as though they belonged to distant places. But every abstraction was personal. I wrote essays about displacement using the language of scholars who had never waited for curfew passes. Each sentence was a translation between tongues: the academic one that promised credibility, and the inner one that trembled with memory.
III. Return
I come (go?) back often, especially during the longer university breaks. Yet, each return is progressively partial. The city changes by inches, new presences, new absences. Relatives speak of time differently — before the last shutdown, after the last crisis, and there are days when I cannot be witness to those befores and afters. Things change. So do people and places. But the light on Dal Lake at dusk is still defiant, the mountains still look like they’re guarding something unspoken. At times like these, home feels both fluid and territorial. When I walk familiar streets, I see an inevitable negotiation. The city allows me in, but perhaps as a visitor. I am fluent yet foreign.
There are nights when I walk up to the window and watch the faint lights from the old neighbourhoods. The sound of multiple adhans from several mosques drifts again — steady, unchanged. For a moment, time folds into itself. I think of the child I was, pressing against the windowpane during hartals and curfews,believing that understanding might one day dissolve fear. I want to tell her that comprehension never arrives whole because it only circles back in fragments.
Living elsewhere, away from home, has taught me that peace is not an opposite of conflict, but another form of forgetting. In calm cities, away from conflicted borderlands, people do not know how much it costs to stay ordinary. When I catch myself moving easily through their streets, I sense a fracture widening inside me: one self still alert, another learning to rest. My identity becomes the tension between the two. And an often hard but necessary relegation of one of them. I will confess that sometimes, I too want that. So I borrow, no…I buy their calm by forgetting deliberately, even if temporarily the burden of my tainted home’s tainted memory.
IV) Tension
And yet, the desire to return never softens. It arrives in small moments — the green of trees, the sound of someone pronouncing a word the way my people do, the sight of aari kaem in a crowded market. These fragments insist that belonging is not in what is lost but what keeps rearranging itself around absence.
My home, my mouj, may be physically absent but they are too heavy to set down. The body remembers patterns of fear in the home even when the mind wishes to forget. When fireworks explode during festivals here, my first instinct is still to duck. I tell myself I’m safe, but safety has never been neutral; just another border drawn inside the skin.
There’s a peculiar fatigue in explaining this to those who have never had to name fear. They listen with sympathy, sometimes admiration, and I nod through it, knowing that what I carry is neither tragedy nor resilience, but simply continuity. Conflict is not a status, it’s a condition of being. You grow around it the way trees bend around barbed wire, adapting without surrendering shape.
When I write, I try to name this without turning it into dandy metaphors. But the line between testimony and poetry keeps blurring. Language falters before experience; it either softens it too much or makes it too hard to touch. So I stay somewhere in between…writing as though each sentence might crack open silence without inviting danger. The politics of telling is always shadowed by the politics of survival. I have learned that memory is political because it decides what survives forgetting. I fear becoming a curator of pain, the kind that others consume for empathy. But to remain silent feels like betrayal. So I try…to remember and remember.
IV. Fragments
There are moments when I feel both tethered and untethered. In Delhi, a certain evening light falls on red, sandstone walls of Jama Majid and reminds me of autumn in Srinagar. The resemblance is imperfect, but it wakes something inside me. I ache to cook haakh the way my mother does, less for taste than for memory. I dream that the smell fills my small room, and suddenly I am neither here nor there. I am suspended between the streets I walk now and the streets I left behind — but go back to — between the rhythm of a city that breathes calmly and a city that hums with constant alertness.
Home under a conflict is never simple. It is just that: under a conflict. Each return rewrites what I thought I knew, each departure folds the city into memory again. Srinagar remains the first language of my being, even as I try to shed it outside. Its sounds still inhabit the pauses between my sentences. Sometimes, when the evening call to prayer rises from a distant mosque, I pause mid-conversation. Friends think I’m distracted. They don’t know that, for me, that sound is neither devotion, nor religion. It is geography, my roots, calling me by name. But, in the same instance, it tells me that to step fully back would be to walk once more into chaos and the sound of unrest.
My identity breeds and breeds in this tension. Srinagar beats through my words, my gestures, my silences, yet it is not a place I can fully inhabit. And so, I move through the world carrying fragments of home. Some parts I share openly; others I keep folded inside. The self that longs to return, the self that hesitates, the self that observes silently, they exist together, neither dissolving the other. I have stopped trying to reconcile these selves. My fragmentation is not my failure but my fidelity to an unfortunate truth. To live with contradiction is the only honest way I know.
Perhaps to belong to a borderland means to recognise that identity itself is a moving frontier. We are always crossing between what we remember and what we must forget to keep going. The world sees the border as a line, but for us, it is an embodied rhythm of everyday life. So even when the world grows quieter around me, the sound of that translation between memory and survival never stops. It hums beneath everything I do. It is the pulse of both loss and persistence.
Sometimes, I want to go back forever. I might. And yet, I hesitate.
I want to return and I want to run. I want to be clawed by the embrace of my home, my mouj, and then I want it to set me free.
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Glossary
- Aari Kaem – Traditional Kashmiri embroidery, often featuring intricate needlework.
- Adhan – The Islamic call to prayer, recited five times a day.
- Haakh – Collard greens commonly eaten in the Kashmir Valley.
- Mouj – Kashmiri word for “mother.”
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Madiha Tariq studies Sociology and Anthropology at Ashoka University, India. She takes interest in cultural studies, spatiality, critical theory, Kashmir studies and questions of identity.