Book Excerpt: A Long Season of Ashes by Siddhartha Gigoo

An exclusive excerpt from Siddhartha Gigoo’s A Long Season of Ashes (Published by Penguin Viking ,2024)

‘It is absurd to beget children,’ says a camp-dweller. ‘What kind of life can we offer them after bringing them into this sordid world? Where will we keep them? They will curse us once they realize where they are.’

‘Not only should we beget children, but each married couple should produce at least seven children, if not more. We are dwindling. We should procreate to grow in numbers. Otherwise, we will become extinct in some years,’ says a poet.

For the first ten years (1990–2000) in the camp at Udhampur, there weren’t any marriages. There was no room for basic things, let alone marriage and married life. There was no privacy in the tents. You can live without privacy for a month, a few months, a year or a couple of years. But imagine living without privacy for twenty years. Women and teenage girls were the worst affected. If you were a married woman, imagine having to share one cramped tent with several male members of the family! You would constantly have your father-in-law, brothers-in-law or other males around you, leaving you with no personal space or privacy. Their mere presence is unsettling. Where do you go in such a situation?

All you have is a 12ft x 12ft second-hand canvas tent as your home until some messiah comes to take you back to your palace of dreams. The tent is all you have. It is a world unlike the one you have seen or known.

Inside the tent:

A 4ft x 4ft kitchen, a kerosene stove, some utensils and containers for rice, wheat, sugar and spices.

A wooden charpai or a folding bed with nylon straps for the person who needed it the most, usually an elderly grandfather or grandmother.

Tin trunks or leather attaché cases containing some belongings from Kashmir (those who were able to salvage things had them).

Most tents were partitioned into two areas using a bed sheet or a large drape, separating one end from the other. One side had a wooden cot with nylon straps. That’s all. The other side had a rug on which the family members sat, slept and did everything else. You can’t even spread your legs. You sit cross-legged. Men, women and children. Everyone. Day after day, month after month and year after year.

Then there are the essentials:

A plastic chair or stool, a small rack and a table fan.

A tarpaulin sheet on the floor and a rug to cover it. Plastic sheets to prevent rainwater from seeping into the tent. A radio set and a portable TV set in some cases.

A small corner that serves as a temple. Idols and framed pictures of gods and goddesses. A box of joss sticks. A bell. An almanac. And a book of scriptures.

No shelves. No furniture. Nothing that takes too much space. What more can a tiny tent hold inside?

A box containing medicines, a sewing kit and coins.

And the most important thing—the very life force—two large plastic drums to store water. One contains drinking water and the other holds water for washing purposes. And two earthen pots to chill the drinking water during summer.

On average, three generations live in one tent. They are joint families with eight to ten members. Grandparents, parents and children!

If you pay attention, you will notice, to a great extent, an uncanny order and hierarchy of things inside a tent. From utensils and idols to bedding and a box of clothes and a tin trunk containing valuables such as cash, bank passbooks, photo albums, migrant registration cards, ration cards, educational certificates and papers (mostly ownership papers of houses and land in Kashmir), all the things inside a tent have their own place, relevance and stature. These are the only things that really matter in the long run. Nothing else matters! Years from now, they will be the only signs of our lives in these camps. They will bear witness to a lost time that very few will remember. Especially when nobody else will believe that we lived such a life.

Men and women have their own peculiar habits. Women are largely concerned with keeping the kitchen area clean. They fret about auspiciousness, as they always have. They keep reminding the men and children not to bring shoes inside the tent. They are very particular about adhering to the same rules that governed their kitchens in Kashmir. No matter what, these rules must be adhered to and followed, even if there is barely any space. These 4ft x 4ft kitchens must always be kept sparkling clean, whatever be the circumstances. The floor must be swept twice a day. The women have also built small wooden or cardboard perches outside the tents to feed the birds. But the only birds around in the camp are crows. There are neither sparrows nor mynahs. This isn’t the land where you will find sparrows, mynahs, woodpeckers, nightingales and bulbuls.

Imagine yourself as a teenage girl living in one such tent in the camp for ten years. The wounds that ‘tent-women’ carry on their hearts and souls will always bleed and cause pain. They can’t even express the horror of having gone through such predicaments and lived such lives.

If you were five and forced to live in that tent in 1990, you lived there until you were fifteen. If you were ten, you lived there until the age of twenty. If you were twenty, you lived there until you turned thirty.

Outside the tent:

A constant haze! Dust storms! Outsiders stare at you pitifully. Men salivate. Crows, kites, foxes, snakes, scorpions and centipedes.

Six toilets for 1200 families living in tents. The families whose tents are next to toilets suffer the most. They are forced to live with the stench all the time. However, they have found a way to keep the stench at bay—joss sticks! Day and night, the fumes of joss sticks make it easy for the children to stay inside the tents.

***

In front of me is the woman. She is lying on the wooden cot. She is unaware of where she is. She doesn’t know that something is not right. She is not supposed to be on the cot. She is supposed to be on the floor next to her mother-in-law and husband. The expression on her face turns frightful the moment she opens her eyes. She turns sideways and, to her horror, she sees her father-in-law lying next to her. ‘How did this happen?’ she wonders. She is supposed to be sleeping on the floor, sandwiched between her husband and mother-in- law. I pretend to be asleep too.

The woman can’t even hide her shame. Her husband and mother-in-law are asleep on the floor. Her husband is wearing a vest. The heat is atrocious. The woman wants to know if it is morning already. It is dark outside. The crickets have gone silent—a good omen. Dawn is around the corner.

The woman can’t even hide. Where will she go? What will she do? At least, no one has seen her in this condition and position. She places her right hand over her lips, cursing her luck. She wants to strangle herself. She wants to slash her wrists. She wants to die. She prays for instant death. But she is helpless. It is not her fault. She is not to blame. She can’t even die in this position and state. It will bring her shame. It will bring shame to her family. She is virtuous and pious. She musters strength. She gets off the cot quietly, tiptoes next to her sleeping husband and sits down in a corner of the tent. Her father-in-law has a smile etched on his face. She takes a small mirror out of her satchel and brings it closer to her face. She examines her own reflection as though it weren’t hers. She runs her fingers across her cheeks, nose, chin, forehead, eyes and lips. She closes her eyes, unable to accept her own reflection.

Her hands are rough and leathery, as if she has been kneading stones with them. She takes a jar of moisturizing cream out of a bag and applies some to her hands to soften them.

She throws a blank, meaningless look at the man sleeping on the floor next to his mother. In Kashmir, they were inseparable when they were first married. They roamed in their orchards and spent days and months thinking of names for their future children and grandchildren. Now, the distance between them is growing wider and wider. Soon, they will be so far apart from each other that they won’t even be able to see each other or feel each other’s existence.

She puts the mirror down and covers her face with her hands. She sobs as though she has been robbed of the most valuable possession. Once, she was beautiful. But now . . . the beauty is gone and it will never come back. Her face isn’t hers any longer.

She knows she will never get a second chance. She will never have her life back. But she won’t stop dreaming.

She is still looking at me with those eyes and with that inscrutable look in them. The eyes that know only one language—the language of desperation, the language of silence.

‘What are you looking at?’ her look conveys. ‘This is me. This has been my fate for ten years. This will be my fate for the next ten. I was not born here, but I will die here. I will never give birth here. I will never see motherhood. This is what you do. You will just peep like the devil and go away . . .’

Lost in a reverie, she smiles for a second, but then returns to the present moment. She shudders as she whispers to herself, ‘I am not used to so much happiness . . . I must not allow myself such liberties . . . May I die if this happens to me again . . .’

She rummages through her bag again and again. She finds a tiny box barely containing some kohl. She applies whatever is left of it on her eyelids. She finds nail polish. Most of it has dried up, but there are still some remnants. She tries to paint the toenails on her right foot. Her heels are cracked. Those feet were once beautiful. Before her is a young woman in bridal attire. It is her from just a few years ago. But it seems like a lifetime ago. From another life that was cut short. She wants to get dressed, but her bridalwear is gone.

At last, she gives up. The moon, her only constant companion, holds her in its light until it hides behind a cloud. The moonlight having left her, her face is now covered in darkness.

This strange ritual continues night after night for several nights. One day, she musters courage and begs her husband to take her somewhere else. She says this land is cursed and it is making her do strange things. She can’t see eye-to-eye with her mother-in-law on many things, but she falls to her feet and begs for forgiveness. The father-in-law doesn’t know anything—he is beyond knowing anything at all.

Dawn brings relief, but with night comes fear. The woman has no one to talk to. Except for one person. No one knows what they talk about. Every evening, the two of them go behind a tree and sob when no one is around.

The nameless, faceless woman who doesn’t know what dreadful and ignominious curse has befallen her is looking at me and begging me to rid her of the curse. Her shadow is still in the camp. It will haunt the place for years. It will haunt me. This is where she wasted the prime years of her life.

The next day, many camp-dwellers distribute sweets to one another. The results of the matriculation examination are out. An old man stands at the camp entrance, holding a box of sweets in his hands. He can’t contain his happiness. He has the smile of a man who hasn’t smiled in years. He can’t chew anymore. His dentures are nowhere to be found. Even his spectacles are beyond repair. The tremor on his lips reveals a different story. ‘My grandson has passed the matriculation exam,’ he goes on and on. ‘He is a matriculate now . . .’ For the rest of the day, the man doesn’t abandon his position, like a sentry making sure that the news of his grandson’s achievement reaches everyone and that not a single person passes by without having a sweet. Passers-by who walk past stop briefly to look at him. They exchange greetings. ‘Mubarak,’ they say. Everyone offers blessings to children. ‘They will save us someday . . . They are our only hope . . .’

Inside the tents, there is the aroma of food and the sounds of chit-chat, laughter and tears. Happiness is finally here, after a long, long time. Yet some people are crying. At dinnertime, people sit inside their tents and eat the way they sat and ate in their homes in Kashmir.

Inside one tent, a girl is teaching her younger sibling how to play noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe). After several games, she lets him taste victory. He is all smiles. There is a pigeon nest atop a bamboo fixture on their tent. A pigeon is nurturing her two chicks. The hungry chicks are cooing constantly with their tiny beaks open in front of their mother. The siblings look at the pigeon chicks and place a handful of corn kernels in a bowl.

Two siblings are floating paper boats in a puddle of water. A young woman is teaching the kids how to create an embankment around the small puddle. Nearby, around some other tents, a stream has formed due to incessant rain in the night. The woman stares at it as though it were a river to be crossed. She was to get married in Kashmir. She left her trunk behind, which contained her bridal attire and other things her grandmother had kept for her. Things the girl had collected and preserved for years. Had she not fled, all her inheritance would have been safe with her. Now look at her. She has lost the will to live. But she goes on.

Excerpted with permissions from the author Siddhartha Gigoo and the publishers at Penguin Viking of A Long Season of Ashes.

About the Book

In March 1990, sixteen-year-old Siddhartha Gigoo is forced to flee his home in Safa Kadal, Srinagar, Kashmir. The preceding days have been full of fear and horror for the Gigoos— having seen friends and neighbours killed outside their homes. They could be next if they don’ t leave. But they want to stay, even when faced with a looming threat to their lives. Siddhartha thinks his leaving is temporary and that he will be back home soon. Little does he know that his fate is sealed.
What follows is a long, dark time— a camp existence and a struggle for survival.
Thirty-four years on, Siddhartha chronicles the story of his flight from Kashmir and an entire youth spent in exile.
A meditation on the nature of memory, A Long Season of Ashes is a book about a boy’ s journey of self-discovery.

About the Author

Siddhartha Gigoo won the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Asia) for his short story ‘The Umbrella Man’. He has also written a short-story collection, A Fistful of Earth and Other Stories, which was long-listed for the 2015 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. In 2021, Siddhartha won the New Asian Short Story Prize for ‘Elephant’s Tusk’. His short stories have been long-listed for the Lorian Hemingway Short Story Prize, the Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize and the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize. He has also co-edited two anthologies, A Long Dream of Home: The Persecution, Exodus and Exile of Kashmiri Pandits and Once We Had Everything: Literature in Exile. He has written two books of poetry—Fall and Other Poems and Reflections, as well as four novels—The Garden of Solitude, Mehr: A Love Story, The Lion of Kashmir and Love in the Time of Quarantine. Siddhartha’s short films, The Last Day and Goodbye, Mayfly, have won several awards at international film festivals. His writings have also appeared in various literary journals.