Blood In My Kahwa

At the stroke of midnight

in the humid August of 1947,

India woke up to independence

Except —

it wasn’t the India you see today

The boundaries of a nation

are never as binary,

never as defined

as we grew up believing them to be

Independent India had seventeen provinces

Pakistan had five

What lay in the muddled chaos in between

were more than five hundred princely states —

lesser kingdoms and frail kings

with egos big enough

to sink democracies

They were handed a choice

between two countries

born off fresh violence

Kashmir was one of them

And a rather crucial one —

a province with a different religion in majority

and a starkly different one in power

A landscape of ice-capades and lush valleys,

an imagined heaven,

soaked in kahwa-dipped afternoons

and etched in ghazal-wrapped bonfires

Lying beneath:

a dormant volcano of communalism,

waiting to erupt

And like they do with everything

beautiful and serene,

the greedy men and their insatiable lust

cut Kashmir —

right through its spine and ribs

Kashmir bled

Head separate

Limbs separate

The rest — separate

India, Pakistan, and China

tossed corpses to decide

who gets which

If it took you death

to have a chance at life,

if your amputated existence

was labeled “independence”

and sold in the name of a secular democracy —

would you give a fuck about governments

when they didn’t

give a fuck about your existence?

When they bargained you in parts

like it was a goddamn fish market?

Children of war

have only ever known blood and flesh

as their only tongue —

their only inheritance

Your history and theirs aren't the same

Yours is a history of sophisticated privileges

Theirs

A history of blunt survival

and organized trauma

To “understand Kashmir”

by breathing its touristy air

and sipping your on-vacation kahwa

isn’t even a fair start

You haven’t smelled

their gunpowder-riddled air

or burnt your hands

on the blood-stained cups

that served you that kahwa

If you think you can binarize

every nuanced existence

like it was human anatomy

from your ninth-grade biology book —

If you think you can understand Kashmir

through pamphlet news

and romanticized imaginations —

You are a dumbfuck of the greatest order

And dumbfuckery,

unlike most diseases,

doesn’t come with a cure