Dr Akhtar Purvez
Two decades is a long time to stay away from a place you still call home.
This was my first journey back to Kashmir in twenty years, and my mother was traveling with me. She had returned to Kashmir a few times during those years, but she had never gone back to our ancestral home in Gotilpur, the village near Tangmarg where an earlier part of our family life had unfolded. In that sense, the journey we were making together belonged to neither of us alone.
At Dulles International Airport, as we moved through the familiar rituals of departure—passports, luggage, security, waiting—I found myself watching her more than the departure board. I wondered what she was thinking, but I did not ask. Perhaps, families develop their own manners around memory. We can travel beside one another for thousands of miles without opening the suitcase the other person is carrying inside.
During the flight I thought about the people I would see after so many years. Memory is unfair to those we leave behind. It preserves them at the age they were when we last saw them, while allowing us to watch ourselves grow older every morning in the mirror. I remembered cousins with dark hair and familiar voices, aunts and uncles with the faces they had possessed when I last embraced them. I knew too many years had passed for them. I had simply not prepared myself for what those years would look like.
They were waiting for us at the airport in Kashmir.
For several seconds I only looked at them.
Their hair had whitened. Familiar faces carried the gentle evidence of passing years. Some had changed enough that I needed an extra moment before the person standing before me joined the person I had been carrying in memory. Yet their eyes were glistening, bright with the same affection I remembered, and suddenly the years seemed to have altered everything except what mattered.
My mother went to them first. She embraced one person, then another. Someone called her name. Someone tried to speak and could not finish. My mother began crying. My cousins cried. My aunts and uncles cried. Long years disappeared into embraces.
I stood among them.
I did not cry.
I was in Kashmir. I was a man.
Men of my generation had inherited peculiar instructions about tears. We could leave countries, cross oceans, lose people, return after decades and carry memories without discussing their weight, but crying in front of others still seemed to require a permission nobody had formally granted us. So I embraced everyone, held shoulders, smiled, made jokes, and kept my eyes under control.
My cousin, Nazir Sahib who has been more than a brother for me, rescued me from too much emotion. He was older than I was, and I had always known him as exceptionally intelligent, deliberate, realistic, and almost impossibly quick with an answer.
He hugged me, and then examined me for a moment.
“You have become old.”
I looked at his white hair.
“I was about to tell you how young you look.”
He laughed. “America has taught you diplomacy.”
“No,” I said. “Age has taught me self-preservation.”
Nazir Sahib laughed again, and there he was—the man I remembered. Twenty years had changed face. They had done nothing to the speed of the answer. Or to the intellect.
During the days that followed, I encountered the same small miracle everywhere. People had grown older without becoming strangers. We spoke of marriages, children, careers, illnesses, grandchildren and those who were no longer with us. Someone I remembered as a child now had grown children. Someone else introduced me to a grandchild and waited for me to discover a familiar face in a new generation. Every conversation restored another small piece of the years between us.
Then my mother and I decided to go to Gotilpur.
We had left our ancestral village and moved to Srinagar when I was young. The Gotilpur I carried inside me belonged to another era. There had been no road bringing cars conveniently to our house. There was no electricity. There was no running water. We walked the paths between homes and orchards. Water had to be carried from small stream, a tributery of Nar Koll, in our property. Darkness arrived without switches. Winter entered daily life directly, without mediation.
Our home stood among orchards behind a brick perimeter wall. Inside that enclosure was a geography my body had once known without needing directions: rooms, trees, pathways, corners where children could disappear from adults, and one room that had exerted an unusual fascination over me even before I understood why.
My father’s library.
When we moved to Srinagar, my father brought his books, manuscripts, artifacts and other possessions with him. Nothing about the library had been abandoned in Gotilpur. It simply acquired another room in another house. In Srinagar, as in Tangmarg, my father surrounded himself with books in different languages—Kashmiri, Urdu, Persian and English among them.
My earliest memories of those libraries are not of being instructed.
They are of his hand.
My father would take my hand and lead me into the library. He would sit down and ask me to sit beside him. Then he would take one or two books from the shelves and place them in front of me.
He did not say, “Read this.”
He did not ask what I understood.
He simply gave me the books.
At first I must have looked mostly at pictures. Perhaps I recognized a letter here, a word there. I would turn the pages and examine whatever I could decipher. The books were in different languages, and nobody seemed particularly concerned that I could not yet properly read any of them.
The ritual continued.
My father would sit with his own reading. I would sit beside him with mine.
Gradually, as he instucted me casually, the pages began opening differently. Letters became words. Words became sentences. I became interested in headings, definitions, the shapes and arrangements of language. I noticed how one word could lean upon another and alter it. I noticed punctuation before I knew its rules. I noticed that dialogue occupied its own space on the page—that when one person spoke and another answered, the book itself seemed to make room for the exchange.
Much of what I encountered was beyond me. I did not understand the philosophy, history, poetry or deeper arguments contained in those books. I was a child. But apparently a child does not have to understand a book in order to begin a relationship with it.
Before I entered school, I had learnt mathmetics and begun reading in several languages.
No one had formally announced that this was happening.
My father had simply held my hand, taken me into a room, placed books in front of me and allowed curiosity to do the rest.
Perhaps that was why, more than half a century later, as our car approached Gotilpur, I wanted to find that room again.
The road itself confused me because no road existed in the landscape I remembered. Houses had appeared where there had once been open land. Orchards had disappeared. Replaced by construction. Walls now marked spaces that childhood had left open.
“I don’t know where to stop,” I said.
Nazir sahib looked ahead.
“It should be here somewhere.”
“Somewhere is a large place after fifty years.”
“That is because your memory is older than the road.”
I looked at him.
“You have been saving that sentence.”
“No. I just thought of it.”
That was Nazir Sahib.
We drove a little farther and stopped near the edge of the village. The sound of the car carried ahead of us, and some children came running toward us. Watching them approach awakened another memory. In the village of my childhood, the sound of a motor vehicle was enough to bring another cousin, Irfan, outside- as if by magic. Perhaps, children, and occasionaly adults, sometimes run simply to see who has arrived.
I stepped out of the car.
I could not find my house.
Nothing arranged itself according to memory. I had expected some old instinct to take over, some compass hidden inside childhood to point toward home. Instead, I stood at the edge of Gotilpur looking at a village I knew and did not know.
A young woman was nearby.
I approached her.
“You are very young,” I said, “so I don’t imagine you would know what I am looking for.”
She smiled. “Ask me first.”
“I am looking for the old Mir house.”
“The Mir house?”
“Yes. We lived here a very long time ago.”
I gave her a few details.
“Oh, yes,” she said. “I know it.”
I thought she had misunderstood.
“You know the house?”
“Of course.”
“How?”
“My grandfather bought it.”
I stared at her.
“Your grandfather bought our house?”
She nodded.
“I can take you there if you want.”
For a moment I could think of nothing to say.
I had come back after more than half a century expecting to search for a place that perhaps nobody remembered. Instead, a young woman born long after we had left was standing in front of me offering to take me home.
“Yes,” I said. “Please.”
My mother and I followed her.
Then I saw the wall.
Much of it had weathered with time. Sections were broken, but enough of the old brick perimeter remained for recognition to arrive before thought.
“That is it,” I said.
My mother stopped beside me.
We stood looking at it.
Certain objects from childhood are enlarged by memory. When we encounter them decades later, they often appear smaller than we remember. But that old wall did not seem smaller. Perhaps I was no longer measuring it in feet.
The young woman watched us.
“Our family changed the house a lot,” she said.
“They should have,” I replied. “They lived here.”
And I meant it. Her grandfather had bought a house. His family had cared for it, altered it, repaired it and raised their own children within its walls. The house had not been waiting empty for our return. It had continued doing what houses are supposed to do: sheltering lives.
She invited us inside.
News traveled quickly. The Mirs had returned.
Distant relatives and old neighbors began appearing. Some recognized my mother immediately. Others stared for a moment until a name unlocked memory. One woman embraced her and began to cry. My mother cried with her. Another person arrived, then another. People held my mother’s hands and touched her face. Old relationships, apparently dormant for decades, required remarkably little time to wake.
I embraced them too.
I did not cry.
Then I began looking for the room.
Not the books.
I knew where the books had gone. My father had taken them with us to Srinagar, together with his manuscripts and artifacts. I was searching for the place where, as a little boy, I had sat beside him while he placed books in front of me without asking me to understand them.
“Where was the library?” I asked my mother.
She looked around.
“Somewhere on this side.”
“This side?”
“I think.”
I walked farther into the house.
The young woman followed.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“The room where my father kept his books.”
“Did you leave the books here?”
“No. He took them when we moved to Srinagar.”
She looked puzzled.
“Then why are you looking for the room?”
I smiled.
That was a more difficult question than she knew.
“I used to sit there with him.”
She nodded.
That answer seemed sufficient for her.
My mother came closer, and together we tried to reconstruct the old house.
“The door was there,” I said.
“No,” she replied. “More to that side.”
“Are you sure?”
“I lived here too.”
“I was younger. My memory should be better.”
She gave me the look mothers reserve for sons who have said something foolish but harmless.
“Your memory has had fifty years to improve the house.”
I laughed.
We stood there disagreeing gently about the position of a room that no longer existed in the form either of us remembered. I tried to locate the window. I tried to determine where the shelves had stood. I searched for the direction from which daylight had entered.
Then, for a moment, I stopped looking at the walls.
I remembered a hand holding mine.
I remembered sitting down.
I remembered books being placed in front of me.
Not lessons. Not examinations. Not instructions.
Books.
I had spent much of my adult life in medicine and research, and I had eventually written books of my own. Yet standing in that altered house in Gotilpur, I wondered whether part of that journey had begun before school, before profession, before I possessed enough language even to understand what I was reading.
A father had put books before his son and trusted the pages to make their own introduction.
We were offered noon chai and kulcha. We sat with people whose family had occupied the house after ours, and soon it became difficult to distinguish hosts from relatives and relatives from neighbors. More people arrived. Someone had heard my mother was there. Someone else wanted to see me because he remembered our family. Or wanted to seek a medical advice from an Amreeki doctor. Stories moved around the room, corrected and enlarged by whoever happened to remember the next part.
At another house we were made to sit again.
A man began explaining how we were related.
Nazir Sahib listened for a while and finally interrupted.
“If you continue, everyone in Kashmir will become his cousin.”
The man looked at him.
“They probably are. We simply haven’t finished the calculation.”
We laughed.
By the time we prepared to leave, a small group had formed around us. I had entered Gotilpur uncertain whether anyone would know where our house had stood. Now people were walking beside us toward the car, supplying forgotten names, correcting memories, pointing toward orchards and homes, arguing affectionately about who had married whom and who had moved where.
An Urdu couplet came to me:
Main akela hi chala tha janib-e-manzil magar,
log saath aate gaye aur karvan banta gaya.
I had set out alone toward my destination, but people kept joining me until a caravan formed.
I did not recite it aloud.
I simply walked among them.
At the car there were more embraces. My mother cried again. Others cried with her. An older man held my hand between both of his.
“Come again,” he said.
“Inshallah.”
“Not after another fifty years.”
“No.”
I smiled.
I still did not cry.
On our way back, we stopped at the shrine of the Sufi saint Baba Reshi.
Men and women entered through separate sections. My mother went toward the women’s side, and I entered from the men’s side. Between us stood the old wooden latticework surrounding the resting place of the saint.
I could hear my mother.
She was praying.
At first I heard only her voice. Then I realized she was crying. She prayed to Allah for peace, health and happiness- for the kul-kayinat, the world. Sometimes I could make out her words. Sometimes her voice broke and the words disappeared.
I remained on the other side of the wooden lattice.
I looked around.
For a moment there seemed to be no one near me.
Something changed.
I cannot describe it more precisely than that.
For a brief interval, I did not feel that I was standing in Kashmir. Nor did I feel that I was anywhere else I knew. The physical surroundings seemed to recede. My mother’s voice came through the lattice as though from very far away and very near at the same time.
The airport returned to me—the changed faces, the white hair, the familiar eyes, my mother embracing everyone through her tears. Then came Gotilpur: Irfan running toward our car, the broken wall, the young woman leading me back to our house, Nazir Sahib among the relatives and neighbors who had gathered around us. And somewhere behind all of it was the library, and a little boy sitting beside his father as one book, then another, was placed before him.
Through the wooden lattice, I could still hear my mother praying.
For twenty years I had carried Kashmir at a distance. Until that moment, I had managed the distance.
For the first time in this journey, something changed.
I cried.
I held the lattice and let the moment pass without trying to name what belonged to the twenty years, what belonged to Gotilpur, what belonged to my mother, and what belonged simply to returning. Her voice continued from the other side.
Eventually her prayer became quieter.
So did I.
When we met outside, she looked at my face. And into my eyes.
She did not ask.
“Shall we go?” she said.
“Yes.”
We walked back to the car.
When the visit ended, my mother and I returned to America. Eventually I was again traveling from Dulles toward my home in Virginia. The Blue Ridge Mountains appeared along the horizon. I had lived among them long enough for their outlines to mean home to me. I knew their seasons and roads, the way mist settled between the ridges in the morning.
For several days I unpacked Kashmir slowly. And delibrately. Perhaps I was taking time unpacking my life. Clothes, papers, gifts, small packages relatives had insisted we take. My mother had brought back her own memories.
I did not ask which ones she had carried most heavily.
That evening I went into my study.
Books surrounded me.
Medicine beside literature. History besides philosophy. Kashmiri beside Urdu and English. Books my father and I had written stood among books written by others.
I took one from the shelf and sat down.
For a while I turned its pages without reading.
Then, without thinking, I reached toward another shelf, took down a second book in another language, and placed it beside the first.
My hand remained on its cover for a moment.
I had seen that hand before.
Akhtar Purvez ,MD, FICS, FASRA, can be reached at mansbal@yahoo.com
