On the night of Aug. 4, 2019, Khawar and Iqra were on one of their routine calls but were extremely scared. Rumors had been floating around in Kashmir that the Indian government would annul Article 370 of the Indian Constitution and that the act could result in a war. The article served as the basis for Jammu and Kashmir’s accession to the Union of India in 1947, and granted the region its special semiautonomous status.
There were reasons to believe the rumors at that time. Additional paramilitary troops had been deployed in the valley. Amarnath Yatra, a popular Hindu pilgrimage in the region, had been canceled, and tourists were being ushered out of Kashmir. Schools and colleges were shut, and all prominent politicians were put under house arrest.
There was panic everywhere. People were hoarding food, medicine and fuel while preparing for a lockdown.
Khawar and Iqra, who had been engaged for four years, were expecting their call to drop at any moment. At exactly midnight, the line went silent. Phone networks, cable TV and Wi-Fi collapsed throughout Kashmir.
The next day, Home Minister Amit Shah announced in the Indian Parliament that Article 370 was being scrapped along with Article 35A, which forbade outsiders from buying land and permanently settling in the region.
With unrest expected, Kashmir had been put under a lockdown which included a complete communication blackout in the valley.
Weeks passed, and the couple had no way of reaching out to each other. Khawar thought many times of sneaking out at night or early in the morning to see Iqra, but the volatile situation in his neighborhood, along with multiple army checkpoints throughout the city of Srinagar, deterred him. The two had no choice but to wonder how the other person was doing.
Khawar and Iqra were both doctors, working in different hospitals. When work resumed, they were not allowed to use their own vehicles or public transportation and had to travel via hospital ambulances.
Although their hospitals were governed by the same public institution, which also operated the entire ambulance fleet, their routes to and from work were completely different. Even if Iqra’s ambulance stood outside Khawar’s hospital, it was only for a few minutes. If she made it to his hospital’s compound, she wouldn’t be able to track him down since the landlines were not working.
One day, however, when Iqra saw a young woman handing a letter to a shopkeeper outside the hospital, she assumed it was for her lover, who would later come to collect it. That’s when it struck her: She could send a letter to Khawar through the ambulance chain. Ambulances went from her hospital to his every couple of days.
She instructed the ambulance driver to hand the letter to the hospital’s chief medical officer, asking him to give it to Khawar. But when the driver couldn’t find the officer for three days, he handed it to the orderly, who took three more days to look for Khawar.
The letter covered a distance of a mere 2 miles in almost a week, but Khawar wrote back immediately. It then took the orderly four days to find Iqra’s hospital ambulance and hand the letter to its driver. After 10 days, one letter cycle had been completed.
This exchange continued for three months, serving as an emotional bond and holding the two together. They would sometimes send scribbles of notes saying “I love you” or “I miss you.” Sometimes the ink was smudged because Iqra had been crying while writing the letter. Later, she would label her missives with phrases starting with “The one,” borrowing from the episode titles of the American sitcom “Friends.”
Their story is told in “Loal Kashmir,” a book released last month in India. “Loal” means love in Kashmiri, and filmmaker and writer Mehak Jamal has collected 16 true stories of love, longing and loss in the region.
Some of the stories are set during the peak of militancy in the 1990s. One tells of a love letter that saved a young man during an army crackdown, while another recounts the relationship between a young Hindu man and a Muslim woman during that volatile period. The book also features the story of a Kashmiri woman who, defying her family’s disapproval, married a Palestinian man she met at university in India. They resided in Gaza until October 2023.
Most of the stories in the book are from 2019, though, during the months-long communication shutdown that followed the revocation of Kashmir’s special status. They are significant because so little is known and has been written about the lives of ordinary people in Kashmir during that period. Many journalists and activists were incarcerated in its aftermath, and several independent news publications were forced to shut down. For these reasons, many stories remain untold.
But this is the first nonfiction book since 2019 that discusses the inner lives of people in the valley during that time, and it is groundbreaking for its tender portrayal of love amid lockdown.
One has seldom read stories of love between Kashmiris, despite the fact that Kashmir is one of the top destinations for honeymooners in India, and many iconic romantic songs in Hindi cinema have been shot there.
One of the stories Jamal shares is about a couple who went ahead with their wedding as planned, despite the lockdown and with no means of communication between them and their families.
On Aug. 5, when the abrogation was announced, Sakib was in Delhi for a work trip. He immediately decided to return to Srinagar, even if it meant he had to walk home from the airport in the absence of public transport. Beena, his fiancee, was already in Srinagar, and had no means of knowing whether he had returned or not.
During that time, people would evade tight security measures by traveling before 7 a.m. or after 8 p.m. to run errands and meet one another. So Sakib’s father traveled to Beena’s uncle’s house one early morning to inform him that the wedding was on and they would be visiting her family the next day. That is how Beena learned about Sakib’s whereabouts.
Wedding invitations were sent by word of mouth. Beena hoped that those she had booked for services, like henna and makeup artists, would turn up on the wedding day. She and her mother went door to door in search of the bank manager so that they could retrieve her wedding jewelry from her bank locker. She also had to track down her tailor’s landlord to get her wedding clothes, as the tailor had locked up his shop and left Kashmir.
Sakib’s room was undergoing renovations and lacked any furniture, so he had to find a vendor who was willing to open his shop after 10 p.m. to supply the items he needed. He also had difficulty finding a mutton supplier for the traditional Kashmiri wedding feast, “wazwan,” and had to procure a new nikah (Muslim wedding) document due to updates made to the original.
The wedding happened on the day as planned, even though celebrations were subdued and muted. Sakib encouraged Beena and reminded her that they were in it to build a marriage.
The book explores the various ways couples maintained contact during the shutdown. Beyond exchanging handwritten letters through intermediaries, some couples took photos of their letters and sent them via Bluetooth. Others shared APK files, which enable the recipient to download phone applications without internet access. Bluetooth-enabled messaging apps gained popularity, facilitating communication within a limited radius. Boyfriends would often visit their girlfriends’ neighborhoods to use this feature and chat.
One story is of Asad, a transgender man who had come out to a few friends, including Haika, a medical student from Kashmir who was studying in Islamabad, Pakistan. When he was unable to reach Haika, the enforced isolation left Asad depressed. With no way to call Pakistan from Kashmir without internet access, he persuaded his father to allow him to travel to his university in Amritsar for three days under the pretense of collecting class notes.
Upon arrival in Amritsar, he could finally receive and respond to the messages Haika had sent over the past couple of months. They were overjoyed to see each other on video and talked nonstop until Asad had to leave for Amritsar.
When landline phones were restored in Kashmir, Asad and Haika found a workaround to communicate. Asad called his friend in Agra, a city in north India, from his uncle’s landline. The friend would call Haika on WhatsApp using her roommate’s phone, and then place both phones on loudspeaker, allowing Asad and Haika to speak to each other.
It was not only couples who were longing to speak to each other. The book has stories of love and longing between friends and family, too.
For instance, Mahak missed her best friend so much that she would open the front camera of her phone, press record and pretend to speak to Sehrish. Once, when her mother overheard her talking to herself, she wondered if Mahak had been possessed by a jinni.
Batul, a flight attendant with Saudi Airlines in Riyadh, was hospitalized due to her deteriorating health, which was caused by her inability to contact her family. She later discovered a Facebook group where Kashmiris in Saudi would share information and support one another. Hoping that someone would relay a message to her family, Batul would post updates about her parents’ neighborhood in the group.
Desperate to contact her parents, Batul continued her search for someone with a satellite phone. A man named Farhan, who had one and was traveling to Srinagar, offered to visit her parents and place a call to her. Unable to do so — as outgoing calls were barred — he later called Batul from Delhi to inform her.
Finally, Batul spoke to her mother when she called a local phone booth in Kashmir. Her mother had been going there for several days, but it would shut before her turn could come.
In Kashmir, after the abrogation, phone booths were set up in places like hospitals, police stations and schools for people to call their loved ones outside the valley. But due to high demand, they would have to wait for five to six hours and would only get 60 seconds to talk. Batul’s mother was calling from one such booth after standing in line for eight hours.
Her parents found ingenious ways to send messages to Batul. Her mother had located a doctor with internet access (albeit very slow) at his government hospital. She went to his home and recorded a voice message on his phone that he could send via WhatsApp to Batul.
By the time she could reply, the doctor was home from the hospital, and later his number disappeared from the app after rumors spread that people were relaying messages that weren’t medical emergencies.
“My main inspiration for the book came after the abrogation of Article 370. I began hearing stories of people finding creative ways to connect, especially couples,” Jamal told New Lines.
“There were even urban legends circulating — like the one about a man calling his girlfriend, only to have her mother answer and say she had passed away. While we don’t know if it’s true or not, it highlighted the uncertainty and pain people faced, not knowing the fate of their loved ones.”
In December 2020, Jamal created a poster to explain the project and asked people to share it through Instagram, WhatsApp and word of mouth. It included a link to a Google Form for people to share their stories. “I knew people might hesitate to talk about love in Kashmir, so I included an option for anonymous contributions. Many people chose to be anonymous initially.”
When she explained the project, people were excited because they felt nobody had asked them about their personal experiences during the conflict. “They wanted to talk about how they lived through it, how they maintained relationships and whether they found ways to connect with loved ones despite the circumstances.”
The mental health of Kashmiris is often overlooked, she said. “There are frequent moments of isolation and alienation. This made me want to explore how people navigate these periods of conflict. I wanted to look beyond the political events and focus on the inner lives of people, which are deeply affected by the conflict.”
Numerous nonfiction books have explored the political landscape of the Kashmir conflict and its resulting impact on India-Pakistan relations. Additionally, notable contributions have been made in the realms of fiction and memoir.
This includes Basharat Peer’s 2008 book “Curfewed Night,” a groundbreaking account of life in the conflict zone during the 1990s. Rahul Pandita’s 2013 memoir “Our Moon Has Blood Clots” followed, recounting the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits from the valley in 1990. Mirza Waheed and Siddhartha Gigoo also gained recognition for their fiction, crafting numerous stories set against the backdrop of the conflict. Farah Bashir’s 2021 memoir “Rumors of Spring” offered a gendered perspective on growing up during the peak of militancy.
A younger generation, who came of age in the mid-2000s, felt that their stories were absent from narratives set in the 1990s. The rape and murder of two women, the death of a teenager from a tear gas shell and a case involving land transfer to a Hindu pilgrimage board had led to many summers of civil unrest and protests during their childhood. They grew up amid a heavy military presence, and had to navigate frequent curfews, encounters, grenade blasts and killings in their surroundings.
“My political views were still developing at that time, but I knew people were dying and we were helpless,” said Jamal. But she had a sense of how daily life became an extension of the conflict and was deeply affected by it.
Jamal was reminded of those summers spent under lockdown when she heard stories of how Kashmiris found novel ways of keeping in touch with one another. She was curious about how lovers had sought each other out and stayed connected.
She decided to tell gentle stories of love and longing in the valley. “Love is a universal emotion. I hope this book, by sharing these stories, can become a vehicle for a broader conversation about Kashmir.”
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