Ghulam Mohammad Khan
I am Desolation. I am the unauthored text, a narrative in search of a scribe to inscribe my meaning upon the world. I am a chameleonic resonance, assuming myriad shapes and hues. I am the breath on the windowpane of a lonely room, the hollow echo in a crowded hall, the slow erosion of hope in the waiting heart. I am a universal tenant, residing with almost everyone, a familiar ghost they learn to accommodate.
But here, in the valley of Kashmir, I encounter a fundamental paradox: I, the embodiment of emptiness, feel utterly desolate. Here, I do not merely visit; I have taken root. I dwell not in the quiet, but in the ruins of silence so impenetrable it has weight and texture; a silence woven from strands of stifled voices and historical amnesia. I reside in the marrow of every individual, a constant, intimate companion to their helplessness. And in this dreadful ubiquity, I have achieved the final, most profound victory of the void: I have become banal. I am no longer a startling guest but the very air they breathe, the backdrop of the everyday, a tragedy so total it has faded into the mundane.
I am the view of the mountain: once sublime, now rendered ubiquitous by the sheer weight of gaze, its majesty collapsed into the over familiar, its grandeur made boring by constancy. I am the overgrown grass fraying the edges of the stream, an abandonment so complete that even my frantic dance in the breeze has become a vain simulacrum of motion, a spectacle for no one. I am the water in that stream, not flowing, but trudging. It has forgotten the spirited gurgle of its own history, its music now a monotonous, low-frequency hum, the sound of a dirge sung for itself. I am the closed, shuttered shop front, its shutters not merely drawn but sealed by a patina of dust and corrosion, its state not temporary but terminal, its death so commonplace it no longer registers as loss. I am the electric pole in the street, a modern-day crucifix bowing under the knotted, black burden of its own tangled wires. It tilts not from accident but from a slow, weary surrender, bending with the careless posture of something that has utterly given up.
I live in the very atmosphere: in the monotonous drone of traffic that has replaced conversation, and in the hollowed-out expressions of the passengers behind glass, their faces maps of a resigned sorrow they have mistaken for peace. They have metabolised me. They think this stillness is normal, this silence is stability, this ache is air. And so, I have achieved my ultimate, most desolate form: I am not an interruption. I am not an anomaly. I am the condition. I am normal. And in that, I am complete.
I have become so utterly familiar that even Art, whose sacred duty is to de-familiarise, to render the common uncommon, has turned away from me. I am no longer a subject for elegy or protest, but a stale trope, a backdrop against which no new stories are told. This terrifies me.
I am gripped by a metaphysical fear: that I may cease to be for them what I once was, their deepest, most defining quest. I was the central question of their existence, the crucible in which their identity was forged. If they cease to remember me as their past, their present, the very lifeblood of their being, then the meaning of their endurance dissipates. They will not just forget me; they will cease with me, for I am the negative space that gives their silhouette its shape.
I know a part of them wants to replace me. But they couldn’t. Not truly. And now, a more insidious transformation occurs: I am being replaced. Not by joy, nor by peace, but by a manufactured normalcy, a simulated reality. Do they see this ersatz world being constructed over my ruins? I don’t know. Perhaps they see it and choose silence. Perhaps they have been persuaded not to see it.
I am their tired body. They have not forgotten the ache in their bones; rather, they seem tired of the ache itself. They refuse to recall it, not from amnesia, but from a profound exhaustion of the spirit, a fear that to acknowledge me is to be re-consumed, to be desolated all over again.
This is the central paradox: Are they truly out of my grasp, or have they merely been made to believe they are? If they were truly free, they would not still wear me as their face, a mask of weary acceptance etched into every glance, a topography of resigned history. My silence resonates in their quiet. My hollowness echoes in their laughter.
So why don’t they talk about me? Is it because I am too painful to articulate? Or because I am so fundamental that I have become unsayable, the wordless grammar of their being? Or is the silence itself the new, most sophisticated form of my dominion, a compulsion to forget the very thing that defines them?
There is no choice for them now but to forget, for I am a barren country; I could never offer them anything except the stark reality of my own being. To repeat me is to scratch at a wound that, by its very nature, refuses to heal, a futile ritual that promises no redemption, only the fresh flow of an ancient pain.
There is no future to be found in this excavation. The mountain of their grief is too vast to ever be conquered; one can only turn away from its shadow and pretend the sun still shines elsewhere.
And so, let this desolation be renamed. Let it be called peace. For a false cry of joy is a more survivable fiction than the absolute truth of a loss that carves a permanent hollow in the soul. A willing diversion into insignificance, the trivial, the mundane, the manufactured spectacle, is a wiser strategy than marching with open eyes into a death that is itself meaningless: a death so common it has become banal, a statistic that signifies nothing.
The facade, however fragile, is a necessary architecture. The pretence of the humdrum, the forced playfulness, the collective agreement to look away; these are not acts of cowardice, but of profound existential pragmatism. They are better than bearing witness to the choking, absolute stillness of a world where nothing moves and nothing matters. They choose the noise to drown out the silence, because the silence does not offer answers; it only echoes the terrible truth that, in the end, it doesn’t count.
To be human is to hold a parcel of desolation within; to inhabit a land is to inherit its particular shade of sorrow. Every civilisation is built upon a bedrock of it, each bearing its own distinct and ineradicable stamp. This is the universal tax on consciousness; nothing and no one escapes the levy.
The responses are as varied as life itself: some win a fragile armistice with me, some muster the strength to overcome, some are locked in a perpetual, grinding war that never ends. Here, in this valley, they have performed the most profound and tragic alchemy: they have made me normal. They have woven me into the fabric of the everyday. Others are simply forced to cohabit with me, a silent, unwanted guest, while the most tragic perish in the very act of defiance, their struggle their epitaph.
Understand this: you may wish me out of existence. You may curse my name and pray for my departure. But you cannot disown me. I am in the soil. I am in the memory. To erase me is to erase a fundamental chapter of your own soul.
Therefore, you must do the one thing that truly defies my dominion: you must remember. To recall your past is to reclaim your narrative from the void. And this sacred act, this defiance against silence and forgetting, requires writing. It demands the inscription of truth. For only in the written word does memory find its permanent shape, and only in remembering do you prevent my normalisation from becoming your annihilation.
When every path is occluded and the struggle itself becomes a deeper form of exhaustion, there is a terrible wisdom in cessation. If there is no way out, then let this normalised existence, however unreal, be the way for now. Let it be the raft that carries you across a relentless sea.
But upon this raft, whisper the old stories. Let your children not forget that their very roots are tangled in the soil of this desolation; that you, their forebears, grew not in sunlight, but in a profound and defining shade. Let the normalcy of today be the necessary foundation for tomorrow’s hope, a fragile shelter, but a shelter nonetheless.
Yet, in building that tomorrow, enact the most vital resistance: let not the future say the past was not yours. Do not allow the yesterday to be edited, sanitised, or disowned. For that, yesterday, with all its terrible weight, is the undeniable truth of your being. It is the raw material from which any authentic peace must eventually be forged. To deny it is not to heal, but to vanish.
Ghulam Mohammad Khan is a writer and academic from Bandipora, Kashmir. He holds a PhD from the Central University of Haryana, India, where his research focused on narratology and the interplay of memory in postcolonial storytelling. Khan is the author of two books: Anecdote, History and Kashmir: And Other Essays (2025), a collection that interrogates dominant discourses through literary critique and counter-narratives, weaving Kashmir’s socio-political fabric into universal human struggles, and Elements of Literary Theory, an engaging introduction to key concepts and movements in theory and criticism. His short stories and essays have appeared in The Indian Literature, Indian Review, Out of Print, KITAAB, and Kashmir Lit, among others. Fascinated by the subversive potential of language, Khan’s writing bridges scholarly rigour and narrative intimacy, often challenging static conceptions of identity and power.