As a teacher in charge of young adults for decades, attempts at suicide or the tragically successful ones are not new to me. Even as children growing up into puberty slashing wrists was a common sight. Whether it was girls fed up of confinement at home in Muslim households, or their early marriages, or jilted boys over unrequited love, suicide attempts were fairly common in the 1980s. It didn't help that Bollywood of the 80s was obsessed with stalker heroes and the advent of cable TV in the early 90s made it possible to watch every third-grade movie ever made in the industry. The usual fare of Dostoevsky's novels and Nietzschean philosophy in adding nihilism to a syncretic culture which celebrated life didn't help things either nor did the eruption of the proxy war by Pakistan in 1989.
Having the gift of being a patient listener, and a near superhuman empathy towards the underdog, the disabled, the weak, the marginalized and the ''quiet'' (introvert), I was in a position to pull many a young adult out of doldrums and talk them out of what they thought was the end of the world over failed exams or break-ups in relationships. Maybe this enabled me to fall in love with a man famous for attempting suicide 13 times and surviving.
I have often asked my father-in-law why didn't he just let his son go. 13 attempts mean the will to live has completely died down, and no amount of empathy, counseling, medicines or therapy could spark that will which exists in all species on earth and biologically helps them to overcome odds in the environment to survive. As he sees his only son time and again relapse into self-destruction through chain smoking, occasional binge drinking, aggravating the myriad health problems in the heart, stomach and lungs, despite a supporting wife, a living child and a successful job, the nearing 70 year-old man has only the language of silence to convey his answers to me as he brushes the dark circles under my eyes, while smoothing his over.
I know what he is saying. At least his son is in front of his eyes. There are Kashmiri fathers who were pallbearers for their sons' funerals and many did not even get the bodies of their sons or news of their fates and have had no closures. My idea of asking is if anyone is so desperate to go, as long as they are not hurting anyone else along the way physically, why prolong the pain and tangle loved ones when they could have overcome the immediate pain long ago.
But then I look around, standing with my 14-year-old on the banks of the river Jhelum and see an entire state doing the same thing. As my phone pings, and news of the suicide (fidayeen) attacks in Nigeria, Turkey, Pakistan, Paris reach me periodically, I try to understand yet again how to stop this attempt at suicide by an entire community, an entire population, an entire civilization.
I know what he is saying. At least his son is in front of his eyes. There are Kashmiri fathers who were pallbearers for their sons' funerals and many did not even get the bodies of their sons or news of their fates and have had no closures. My idea of asking is if anyone is so desperate to go, as long as they are not hurting anyone else along the way physically, why prolong the pain and tangle loved ones when they could have overcome the immediate pain long ago.
But then I look around, standing with my 14-year-old on the banks of the river Jhelum and see an entire state doing the same thing. As my phone pings, and news of the suicide (fidayeen) attacks in Nigeria, Turkey, Pakistan, Paris reach me periodically, I try to understand yet again how to stop this attempt at suicide by an entire community, an entire population, an entire civilization.
I have my principles about jihad and having evolved my own interpretations, living in a Hindu majority country where Muslimophobia is fast developing on a national scale, I am not averse to resorting to violence if one has to defend one's family or in self-defense. The stories of the Partition are alive for me, having had relatives' and friends' testimonies to make it real. No Kashmiri grows up without the 1947 events etched onto his/her/their minds be it the ''kabaili'' raid on Srinagar or the 10 million displaced, killed and forced to migrate or the Jammu massacre of Muslims.
But I am more inclined towards the interpretation of the higher jihad vs the lower jihad, where the higher one entails adopting a child, getting a sister/daughter married in the subcontinent, taking care of terminally ill parents or children, giving away food when you have none, earning your keep through halal means or simply the pursuit of knowledge even if you have to go to China (a hadith - saying of the Prophet- as in those days traveling to China would have been a huge deal). The everyday things of rebuilding a society or reforming it, which is much more difficult than picking up a sword or a gun is what the higher jihad is all about.
Yet I see twisted versions of the lower one constantly being enacted in the global arena whether it is Palestinians blowing themselves up in Israeli buses, or stabbing Israeli mothers in their homes, or women fidayeen blowing themselves up in marketplaces, or armed men killing school children be it Beslan or the Army Public School, Peshawar tragedies. Even though the religion of Islam is common to the perpetrators of all these mentions, that is not to say there aren't terrorists in other religions or cultures as well. India harbours Hindutva goons, and the rise of the rightwing national ruling party doesn't make things easy for the scores of Indian Muslims living there with its periodic ''beef politics'', ''love jihad'', or outright planned carnages like the Muzaffarnagar riots, the Gujrat pogrom against its Muslim population or the now and then ''encounter killings''/ ''extra-judicial'' deaths of innocents.
In this communal scene of 2016 Indian history, a state asking for secession, based on the idea of the ''unfinished business of Partition'', or because it doesn't trust New Delhi with its governance/administration any longer due to a long history of interference, pampering of dynasty politics, and ''broken promises'' seems like a good idea. The thousands of disappeared youth, extra-judicially killed, scores incarcerated, mass graves and the deployment of heavy military might in the state also makes a case for secession. But wouldn't it be mass suicide considering the geopolitics of the region? And why take those who do not want to separate from India like the Ladakh and Jammu natives with them? Why impose this ''aspiration'' whether regressive or progressive on the others?
I am brought back to the idea of suicide. If you are so desperate to go, then do it. No amount of counseling about how ''life doesn't end here'', or ''there is a whole big, beautiful world out there'' or ''your best is yet to come'' will change the fact that another attempt is going to be traumatic to those who love and care about you. But if you believe becoming a martyr on the path of Allah by taking a few others along with you without their consent to score a political point or register a political protest is God's will, then you need to rethink your belief and your interpretation. Similarly, a population which holds hatred of the Hindu so much that they are willing to create another border between them for further ghettoisation need to understand that civilizations live together and pluralism is a progressive concept.
Every community can fight for its rights within a Constitutional framework, and if it happens to be a secular, socialist one with the right to religion embedded in it from day one, then what is the need to go ahead with the suicidal mission and take non-willing participants with you. But like I often ask my father-in-law, why not just let go. Why not just do it?
In my decades of a teaching career, I haven't yet told a child to go do it, and more than ever stopped one from doing it. But then these are children with their whole lives ahead of them. A mother can never, ever give up on that, having given birth herself and brought a life forth. A middle-aged man is a different case and so is a state which would rather annihilate their own in a siege from within and outside than give in. As I help my spouse up, drooling and crying in an agony that has held him in its grip for decades because of the abuse he suffered and which his own parents or sister know nothing about, I am inclined to reflect on ''mercy killing'' or euthanasia.
With my growing child watching his mother's fortitude in silence, his grandparents' grief and sad eyes, and developing a patience far beyond his ears as he cleans the room he shares with his beloved Daddy, I am forced to think of things with a rationality that medical doctors practice when they have the dilemma of the life of a mother and child to decide between.
Kashmir isn't middle-aged yet. 70 years is hardly a coming of age for a kingdom ravaged by plunderers - brutal Afghan governors, maniac Huns, the stellar Mughals, the indifferent Sikhs, the imperialist Dogras, or the greedy Pak rangers accompanying the ''kabailis'' mostly of the Afridi clan. The response of the Indian establishment to the uprising of 1989, and then again in 2008, 2010, 2011, and in 2016 has been the same brutality as the previous plunderers. In the history of the establishment of the modern nation states that started in the 1840s, and the subsiding of the ''Great Game'' played throughout those centuries in the Hindu-Kush, the Pamirs, the Pir Panjal range, across the Karakoram all the way to the Khyber pass, Kashmir is another ''pawn'' being used in all of this. The sooner the ''indigenous'' people realize the better.
Otherwise repeated attempts at suicide render the melancholy of the person/state moot and only end up traumatizing the people/communities around. With studies coming up about how trauma can be passed on to the next generation via genes (Holocaust survivors, Hiroshima survivors, Armenian genocide survivors, Russian gulag survivors, the comfort women of Japan, China and Korea, and the recent Yazidi women survivors in ISIS captured territory), it will become pertinent to dwell on the ''dilemma'' I face every day. Let go of something that so desperately wants to go or fight for life.
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