MONTH IN MONTH OUT

MOVIES, ART, BOOKS, AND MORE, HERE ARE OUR TOP PICKS OF THINGS THAT GOT US TALKING THIS MONTH

- ARMAN KHAN

CHILDHOOD IN PARADISE

This book presents a humane portrait of a people under constant siege

Family can mean different things to different people, but for us, Indians, it often means more than one thing. And in Kashmir, the land where heaven and hell are inextricably woven together, the idea of family takes on a different hue.

Farah Bashir’s Rumours of Spring, a heart-rending account of a childhood in siege, addresses the same. “Family bonds in Kashmir are both strong and fragile. The shadow and sense of death are palpable in the air,” she says. “I remember coming home from school with my friends in the late 90s. When one of my friends stepped into her house, she found her father dead, killed. You can’t help but see death everywhere, quite literally. You realise how ephemeral relationships are, and growing up in war, this sense of death just gets accentuated.”

One wonders, how then, does one go about attaching themselves to human beings at all? How does one love one’s parents, knowing fully well how transient their lives are? Bashir says one simply gets used to it. “Your fears aren’t unfounded here. You have actually seen people die. There is a chapter in the book where I talk about how my aunt lost two of her sisters who had simply met for lunch,” she says.

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