Having Grown Up in Kashmir, Covid Lockdown Was No Big Deal

Sameer Arshad Khatlani
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I am no stranger to lockdowns. They were the norm while I was growing up in Kashmir. I was seven when I experienced the first set of sweeping restrictions put on our movement. The curbs were imposed in January 1990 to stem further protests after scores protesting against overnight house-to-house searches were hemmed in and shot dead on a bridge over the Jhelum. It was the first of the many massacres that year, which fuelled the ongoing insurrection. We were confined to our houses in its aftermath for three weeks. Shoot-at-sight orders were in place and our neighbourhoods were suddenly swarmed by men in khaki from all over India. A cousin had a narrow escape when he was fired upon for stepping out during the lockdown. No one dared to venture out thereafter to even get essentials. We fell back on our winter stocks and were forced to survive for the longest time in recent memory on lentils.

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We thought the hardships were temporary and shall pass. Little did one know that 30 years on we will still be seeking their end. Many lockdowns and curfews followed those testing days of January-February 1990. We had several brushes with death. The lockdowns soon started appearing like the most benign of the state’s responses to the challenges it faced to its writ. They became a fact of life for those who survived.

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Kashmiris are habitual socialisers and cannot do without visiting each other and organising feasts. It was difficult for most to reconcile with the lockdowns. I was not complaining much as an incorrigible introvert and made the most of the extended periods of solitude. I read, wrote, and listened endlessly to radio news mostly on BBC World Service. Radios were our most reliable gadgets while the electricity supply was often erratic. The voltage would mostly be so low that people would joke that one needs to light a candle to locate electric bulbs whenever we got some power supply. We made most of the precious daylight. While other children played hide-and-seek, I began taking pages from bond paper notebooks and producing a handwritten newspaper—News Times— based on the information I gleaned from listening to the radio news. Celebrated BBC journalists like Mark Tully and Shafi Naqi Jamie (Urdu Service) fascinated me. I began imagining that one day I would follow in their footsteps and report from around the globe. I found refuge in my goal of becoming a journalist and an author. I had something more meaningful to look forward to.

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I have lived a relatively privileged life in Delhi since 2004 far removed from the struggles of people in Kashmir. Every time I found myself in the middle of any lockdown over the last decade or so, I was privileged enough to take the first flight available back. Every new set of curbs would bring back worries about whether my parents will get their life-saving drugs. But close-knit and generous Kashmiri society would always rise to the occasion and take care of itself. The culture of giving saw Kashmir through the mother of all lockdowns in 2019 when hundreds of thousands were confined to their homes for months to prevent protests against the revocation of the region’s semi-autonomous status. Internet and phones were shut while hundreds were detained.

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For once, Kashmir had a welcome lockdown to halt the spread of the Covid-19 in 2020 as the pandemic led to curbs for social distancing globally. Unlike the rest of the world, which relied on technology more than ever before to work, study, remain informed, entertained, safe, and connected, high-speed internet remained banned in Kashmir in the early days of the pandemic-induced lockdown. The lockdown I experienced in Delhi was not even remotely similar to the lockdowns that Kashmir has faced. I mostly counted my blessings when the lockdown was imposed here on March 25, 2020. I had high-speed Wi-Fi. Whenever it got disconnected for some time, I switched to an even better 4G phone internet. Before working completely from home, I could breeze past multiple barricades to reach my office. I put in more working hours and thanks to technology, I worked as well as I did otherwise.

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I live in a gated community, where purple Jacaranda trees were in full bloom at the beginning of the first Covid-19 lockdown. Spacious houses and fewer people meant lockdown or no lockdown, social distancing is an everyday affair. My study, located at a reasonable distance from our bedrooms and living room-cum-playground for our son, Orhan, provided me much serenity to concentrate better on my work. It offered me a view of my terrace garden and flowering plants about to yield beans, tomatoes, chillies, and mint leaves for chutney with biryani. The only plan that the lockdown spoiled was the sourcing of seeds to grow cucumbers.

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I did regular grocery shopping that I had not done in years and rediscovered the fun of carrying huge bags of flour all the way to our third-floor duplex. We never felt so grateful to our house help, who have been doing this work for years. My in-laws continued to shield us, my wife and I, from the pressing concerns of life that otherwise consume the best years of young couples in big cities. They continued to take care of everything, including babysitting, to let us focus on our work. The only other challenge for us was to have Orhan sit for his online classes. He spent most of his free time throwing things around and sketching on walls and running around the house and occasionally insisting on going out. We were able to introduce him to newer kinds of birds that we have started spotting. The thing he missed, though, are planes flying over our house that remind him of visits to his grandparents, whom he has been unable to spend time with since 2018 in Kashmir again thanks to the lockdowns.

This is a slightly updated version of an article published first in Hindustan Times  

Sameer Arshad Khatlani is an author-journalist based in New Delhi. He has been a Senior Assistant Editor with Hindustan Times, India’s second-biggest English newspaper. Khatlani worked in a similar capacity with The Indian Express, India's most influential newspaper known for its investigative journalism, until June 2018. Born and raised in Kashmir, he began his career with the now-defunct Bangalore-based Vijay Times in 2005 as its national affairs correspondent. He joined Times of India, one of the world's largest selling broadsheets, in 2007. Over the next nine years, he was a part of the paper's national and international newsgathering team as an Assistant Editor. 

Khatlani has reported from Iraq and Pakistan and covered elections and national disasters. He received a master’s degree in History from the prestigious Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. Khatlani is a fellow with Hawaii-based American East-West Center established by the US Congress in 1960 to promote better relations and understanding with Asian, and Pacific countries through cooperative study, research, and dialogue. 

Penguin published Khatlani’s first book The Other Side of the Divide: A Journey into the Heart of Pakistan in February 2020. Eminent academic and King’s college professor, Christophe Jaffrelot, has called the book ‘an erudite historical account... [that] offers a comprehensive portrait of Pakistan, including the role of the army and religion—not only Islam’.