Beauty and the Beast - The Palm Tree

I look at the palm tree that my recently deceased husband had planted in our courtyard as a sapling and which towers over the three storey house where he grew up, lived, married, helped me in nurturing our son, took care of his aged parents, was the best brother ever to his sister and where he stopped breathing in his favourite room, even as I instructed my son on CPR procedure on the phone 1100 kms away. This palm tree is special in the sense it is growing in Srinagar, Kashmir, which can get pretty cold in the winters and a tropical tree growing there is nothing short of a miracle.

I remember when the day after our marriage, when I stole down the stairs into the courtyard and found him whispering to the tree. When he sensed me behind, a certain sense of pride flushed through me, realising he was not embarrassed at being caught like this but was so sure of my understanding and sensitive nature that he extended his hand and went on to narrate the story of the palm tree. He swore that even though he had cared and watered it for years, it was only after he had started talking to it that it had shown any signs of growing.

Today he was sharing the most important moments of his life with it, and we both stood in a reverie, I peering into the fronds of the tree which was roughly a little over my height, 15 years ago, and he gazing lovingly at it as the din of the real world shattered our fairy tale moment.

Yes, it was a fairy tale. I called him my Beast. I was his Beauty. Both terms unconventionally appropriated to our marriage (as the term goes today) – he wasn’t a cruel one, just a tortured soul and I wasn’t beautiful in the materialistic sense of the word. I always referred to what he called his home base, as the Castle, which in my trying to scale to rescue him ended up hurting me deeply and out of which he could only escape in Death.

I got introduced to his personal demons early on in our friendship, sitting on the rooftop building of the newspaper office at ‘’Kashmir Images’’ that he used to work for, even as I had started collecting mine, sharing with him the countless stories of the tragedies of Kashmir I had collected in my UN Survey in the winter of 2001-02. His trauma had started in the 80s, a result of the childhood afflictions that the subcontinent’s society suffers from and which no amount of ‘’azadi’’ will ever liberate children from unless the malaise of incest and male abuse is acknowledged in the first place. He told me how talking to me was like standing under the shade of his palm tree; a shade his tortured soul had been searching for ages, and was relieved of the non-judgemental, empathetic, and loving shoulder that I provided.

I in turn told him how this gave me courage to share my personal stories, my past truths without apprehensions of judgement or bias and how much he was showing me a deeper picture of a society that ‘’won’t accept me, but won’t let me go either’’ – an adage which had become a mantra post 9/11. Those moments of soul-sharing talks, amidst the smiling, jeering and knowing glances of his colleagues were when we actually got married; the rest was just rituals. He was the darling of the staff, so evidently visible to me, and his sheer genius with language and understanding of the world, coupled with his maddening calm amidst the usual chaos of the newsroom was a delight to watch.

Everyone was happy for him, which is why all went out of the way to accommodate our unconventional marriage, something he had resolved to do with his mental toughness, despite the usual subcontinent cultural opposition peculiar to middle class families whose parents believe it is their god-given right to choose a girl for their son. For you see, on the Indian subcontinent, you do not get married to the man only, you get married to the whole family, immediate and extended – a conclusion I came to learn in a few years.

Unconventional it was –in every sense. I took a principled stand against dowry, something I had been writing about for months now, and my three conditions are legend in among my kids. How I kept three conditions before him after I answered in the positive to his marriage proposal, ia a story I like to tell people whenever I narrate our Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, knowing full well a Kashmiri man from a middle-class family with strong ties to them would never be able to go along because of peer pressure. But he surprised me, in fact, astounded me.

Estranged from my family which is a whole book and will someday be explored elaborately, I had told him the only dowry which would come from my home would be my roughly 3000 odd books, collected painstakingly all through childhood and teen life well into my twenties. Secondly, as I had understood Islam, my bridal trousseau and any accessories or jewellery would have to come from his side. Thirdly, there would be no ‘wazwan’ (Kashmiri wedding receptions which are competing with the Big Fat Indian Weddings in their lavishness despite the conflict) and it was to be a simple affair just like the Prophet’s daughter’s had been – dates and the Kashmiri ‘kehwa’ (green tea).

As I lay these three conditions before him explaining my reasons for them despite my having accepted his proposal, looking down all the while, sure in my heart that he would never be able to cut the trappings that all sons of the continent were accustomed to and getting ready to assure him when he refused that I would always be his best friend and ‘listener’ despite everything, I missed the twinkle of his eyes, as his respect for me soared in his heart. Later in life when we would recall these moments and I came to know what he was thinking, feeling and experiencing, it seemed I had echoed his heart and mind but needed my wilful stubbornness to actually go through with what his pen had always been opposing – 40-50 year old Kashmiri women sitting unmarried at home because of the inability to pay dowry (including his aged aunts).

I found myself embracing my Beast in spirit (this was a conservative outdoor setting in a Muslim region) as Arshid started speaking his mind. My soul found its oasis for the first time as I basked in the love of man who not only agreed to the conditions because he loved me but because they were his principles too. The marriage was a huge success that not only did his newspaper do a front page story on it, but it was featured on the radio programme ‘’Sheherbeen’’ too on 15 June 2002. Trust his colleagues-cum-friends to almost spoil it with a little ‘’wazwan’’ but we gave in because their darling Arshid was getting hitched, not to mention that they did it slyly – Bashir Manzar’s (his mentor, friend and editor) hand behind it whose delight was evident as he signed our ‘’nikahnama’’ despite his misgivings about my family’s absence as Arshid later told me.

Of course it is not easy standing on one’s principles in the backwaters of a backward region of a third world country. The coming year showed us how hard it could be and how much our combined willpower, our awareness of society and its manipulations, our knowledge of psychology, both mass and individual, and our communication lines through intimacy weathered us through the storms. Until the birth of our son, which in the subcontinent and in sharia Islam is a huge thing as I discovered. He became the excuse to renew broken ties, rebuild broken bridges, resolve grudges, and establish new foundations for families – this time for mine as well. It was a new marriage of sorts.

These days as I pore over his belongings, his books, his spectacles, his lighter, his favourite hoodie, his phone with sweat mark of his fingerprints still visible, I try to analyse as I have done countless times if the Beast inside him that he had learned to tame when he met me, had started to rear its head in those days of turmoil with the family over his stand on our principles. The violence that ensued sometimes all along my pregnancy shows me that it did, but the overwhelming love that he showered later as he expressed regret, pain and his undying love for me would show me he was reining in those demons.

As he started witnessing what women go through during birth, and nursing later, the new father in him started gravitating towards his own mother, a silent, invisible, unheard figure till then despite her non-stop chatter – a woman he had never really bonded with, having transferred his affections naturally to his father. The labours of birth and the sheer physical exhaustion having silenced me into a calm that was preparing me for the nurturing I would be doing to raise him, I watched as he now took the time to sit with her and listen beyond the usual inane language and chatter what she was actually trying to say.

This was a study of sorts as I saw how Kashmiri women despite their famous beauty of legends and folklore had been relegated to the background and the only way they could catch the attention of their men was to become as loud as possible. And my usual self started thinking about those dark ones, those silent ones, those invisible ones who would not resort to any noise to express themselves and would turn to the silent, blank pages of a diary even as I did, filling them with the ink of their thoughts.  

  

I watched the new father settle into a role he had prepared for months before the birth as he proved yet again how much he could resist the archaic traditions and how radically similar he was to me as he supported me in joining the new trend of pregnancy/parenting classes which believed that fathers should be inclusive to the whole process including operation theatre procedures. This is a revolution in itself in Kashmir and I am forever indebted to Dr. Zahida of the Mother Care Clinic, Mehjoor Nagar, shifted to Barzulla now, who gave me the most modern experience of child care and pregnancy both pre and post.

I have often wondered if my child had been a daughter, how different an effect it would have had on all – the family – him, his parents, my parents, the extended relatives, neighbours, and our life. But those musings are relegated to just some intellectual exercises in the recesses of my mind that I indulge in sometimes. Arshid’s delicate handling in changing Azza’s diapers, patting him after his full feed of breast milk, crooning him to sleep showed me he would have been as tender with either, a daughter or a son. My mother has a story to tell about him when I was still under the effects of anaesthesia, the result of an emergency C-section after my baby developed distress due to a prolonged labour of two days. It is a story my son does not like but has grown to like. Mama narrates how when my baby, a healthy 4 and a half pounds, was given to her, and his grandfather (Arshid’s Papa) recited the obligatory ‘azan’ (adhan) in his ears, Arshid just gave a cursory look while keeping eyes glued to the Operation Theatre door. A surgery is a huge thing in Kashmir and having grown up on the hypochondriac tales of many a relatives about the effects of anaesthesia and post-surgery blues, for Arshid it was nothing less than an open heart surgery happening to me despite Dr. Zahida’s reassurances.

To my mother and son, my husband standing vigil at my head as I drooled and moaned under the waning effect of the chloroform, whispering glad tidings of the arrival of our child as if that would pull me out of the daze, was proof of his immense love for me – a fact I tease them with ‘’Are you jealous?’’ in a friendly banter. When we discussed that moment in the coming months, his deep fear of losing me, it was the start of my continuous dialogues with him on morality and how Death was an inevitability we should never shy away from talking about – something ‘good’ Muslims are often told in Quranic verses, and in the Muslim culture of participating in a burial so that the materialism of the world is kept in check.  

Talking about death with a man who had tried to commit suicide 13 times in his 20s was an experience which deepened my love of life in the most Sufistic way – to be in world but not of it. To never form an attachment, but to live life to the fullest with the detached attitude that one day it will end – something I envision for my son and always advise youngsters when counselling them about their reckless ways; to give back to the world, to make it a little less dark, a little more happier in every tiny possible way.

Arshid’s palm tree grown through compost (decayed organic material from the kitchen), nature, water and secret whisperings is a monument to the little way a deeply troubled man, fighting for sanity, amidst the repression and gore of conflict tried to make sense of his life.