WE HAVE LOST the language of poetry that we used to speak here. This is what I have been told, so many times, that it has gone, but I cannot mourn something that I do not remember. More than anything else, I would like to take my cousin to Shalimar Bagh, to lie with her under the trees and trace the shadows on her body with my hands. Is this poetry?

It is very hard to be young in Kashmir now. All of the things that are normal to do when you are young are wrong, we are told. Becoming a martyr is the greatest thing, we are told. I think it will not be so easy to explain, but I will try.

My name is Irfan. I am eighteen, nineteen-running we say. I live beside the lake with my family: my mother and father, my brothers, my grandparents, my uncles and their wives and children, my sisters too, though one is already married and so she has gone. My father and his three brothers were all born on a boat on this lake. When my grandfather built a house in a garden near the shore, they moved to the land. We have been here a long time, our family of boatmen. I’m not sure how long; they did not write things down because they could not write. There are only the stories the boatmen tell their sons, stories told and retold.

I was ten when the world changed. That was when the fighting started and the tourists went away, taking the dollars with them. The boats and the boatmen used to have a good life, a rich one, but that ended. Now the houseboats on the lake are empty, and we grew thin as their timbers rotted. Then we began to be shot at, tortured and shelled. Many of the boatmen crossed the border to train for jihad, to die as martyrs. Some just disappeared.

But I have no wish to talk about these things now.

What I do want to talk about is my cousin. Her name is Aaba, which means ‘of the water’. She told me that it is also the name of a village in Lebanon, but I don’t know about that place. It sounds like the word some people use for their father, or for their god, which she thinks is funny, though not everyone sees the humour. I am not sure.

Aaba is older than me, twenty-five running. Reason enough for us not to marry, but it is not the reason. I know that in some places it is thought wrong to marry your cousin, but we do not think this. I’m not sure that I know anyone who is not married to their first cousin, except the old Pandit, one of the few of his people who stayed behind.

The Pandits are the Hindus here, Kashmiri Hindus, or they were until the fighting, but that is not what I am talking about. The old Pandit still runs the university library, even though his house was burned out in 1992. He is married, a love marriage, to a woman from Delhi. The story goes that they met at the university there. He is old now, in his fifties, I think, and she is around the same age. Such marriages do not happen here so much. When I marry, my wife will be maybe ten years younger than me, and she will be a cousin. But not the cousin I want.

Aaba and her mother have a story, but no one will tell me. My mother pretends not to hear when I ask. ‘Have something to eat,’ she says. ‘How was school today? Do you have any homework?’ I finished with school two years ago, which only left food, but I no longer ask. There are stories that I have heard, little broken-off pieces that they feed me to keep me quiet. It only makes me hungrier.

Aaba’s mother has no husband. We were told that Aaba’s father, a cousin of her mother, died just after she was born. We did not believe this version because Aaba’s skin is paler than her mother’s, and her hair is light, like autumn. I had wanted to ask my Uncle Masood because I used to think that he would tell me the truth.

Our house by the lake is big, the one built by my grandfather. There is a meadow in front that goes down to the water. Aaba and her mother live there, on a donga. This I will need to describe. The Britishers liked to be by the water here when it was burning up down in the plains, but they could not own land. It was not allowed: Kashmir for Kashmiris, our ruler said. But no one owns the water, the Britishers said, and showed our carpenters how to build little floating palaces. My grandfather says that they were made to look like the homes the Britishers had left, with lots of rooms all stuffed so full with furniture they looked like floating godowns.

After the Britishers divided the country, they left everything, even the furniture. After a while, the tourists came. They liked the houseboats and the mountains and the lakes. Aaba and her mother used to look after them on a big houseboat below our lake meadow. My grandfather says the tourists were the new Raj, though he says their manners were much worse and that none of them know how to dress. And now that the tourists have gone, Aaba and her mother have no one to serve, no one to tip them so that they can afford to live without worry all the time. They still live behind the big houseboat. Their donga is not luxurious, nor is it packed full of too many chairs and tables. Their main room is the kitchen with a black-bellied stove that burps smoke almost all the time.

Aaba cooks. When I think of her samosas and pakoras I can see her fluttering hands adding this and that, flitting like birds in half flight in the pale shadows of the donga. My mother and my aunts say that it is typical of Aaba to make food that is not properly halal – Pandit food they call it.

I remember exactly when things became bad because my father and uncles stopped giving us Jama rupees, Friday money, to spend at the market after prayers. All of us cousins thought they were just being mean; I think now that it was to try to stop us going to the market, because that was where people were getting shot, even just for crossing the road at the wrong time. We just wanted something to spend so we found other ways to get money. I earned the first money I ever made picking walnuts for Feroza Wani. Her men had gone, taken just after the first fighting in the city.

We thought the fighting was a great thing. We were all happy when it started, every boy I know. ‘Azadi, freedom, Azadi!’ We shouted it all the time. My Uncle Masood said that putting guns into the hands of peaceful men just turned them into targets. Feroza’s husband and brother-in-law were taken at the beginning; for questioning, they said. The army came to their house and they were marched away with their thumbs tied behind their backs with wire. Some soldiers found Feroza hiding in the kitchen with her sister-in-law and their children. The soldiers made them throw all the food they had been making on the floor and forced them to kneel in it. Their clothes were cut open and they were beaten with the ladles that they had been using earlier to stir their pots.

Feroza told us these stories as we picked the walnuts for her. She looked at the ground when she told of bad things, and I know that she was crying. She never told us what the soldiers did to her eldest niece, but she did show us the scar on her own knee. It was shaped like a star. She said that on the floor where they forced her to kneel had been a star anise. The six points of the spice cut deep and branded her forever.

Feroza has good English, like Aaba. She must have had schooling. My mother and aunts do not like her so much. They say that she shows off in English, though they are sad for her because of what happened to her men. They are like this too with Aaba about her English. When she made samosas for us to take walnut-picking she left them on the step of our kitchen, wrapped in one of the linen napkins from the houseboat. There was a note. Auntie Zabeena snatched it from me when I picked up the bundle. She looked at it, crumpled it into a ball and threw it at me. ‘She does it to annoy,’ she said. Aaba had written the note in English.

All of us cousins studied English, though none of my aunts speak more than a few words remembered from the time of the tourists. My English isn’t very good because just as we started learning it at school the fighting began. All the Pandit teachers left, taking their English with them. Aaba had gone to one of the good English schools close by to the lake, and she studied on her own. She uses words that I have never heard before. She teaches me how to roll them around in my mouth, even though I do not know what they mean. She says that if I can really taste the words I will understand them. The words in the note with the samosas were simple enough even for me: ‘For the walnut-pickers and I hope that these will help you to pick more than everyone else.’

It was my first love letter.

I did not show the letter to my cousins but carefully smoothed and folded it and hid it in my pocket. Later I put it between the pages of my Qur’an. It is still there, next to the pictures of her that I have drawn. It is my secret collection.

My older cousin, Ahmed, he is twenty-running, has a magazine that he had sent to him from Delhi. He hides it under the winter blanket box at the end of the room that he shares with me and another cousin, Omar. Ahmed charges us ten rupees just to look at one of the pages of the magazine. I paid him one time and my mind made me think that they were all pictures of Aaba. It was a physical pain for me, and from then I hated it every time Omar paid his ten rupees, as though he was paying to look at Aaba in a way that only a husband should see her.

Omar and Ahmed picked walnuts with me. They did not know about the note so they did not try to pick so fast. They just kept listening to Feroza’s stories. I listened too, but I kept picking hard all the time so that when we stopped to eat, our basket weighed five kilos more than any of the others. My back and neck hurt so much but I did not care. I was picking for Aaba, and when I ate her samosas it was as though she was feeding me, her fingers putting the soft pastry into my mouth.

I wonder if you know how cumin tastes when it is used the way we use it here? My mother says that firangis do not know how to cook with spices, which is why all foreign food is bland, like eating boiled blankets. She thinks that their cooking is one of the reasons that firangis do not understand so many things about us. She says, ‘How can they understand our life here if they only eat things that have been sealed into plastic by strangers. No heart in their food, no soul.’ My cousins and I eat ice cream and biscuits from packets when we are in the city and there is nothing wrong with our hearts. My mother is right in some ways, though; ice cream and biscuits taste good but, in comparison to Aaba’s smoky cumin samosas, I might as well eat boiled blankets.

When we went back to picking in the afternoon, I worked even harder. Feroza saw and she gave me a bit of extra money when the others had gone, but Ahmed found out and made me share it with him. It made me angry but Ahmed is not the sort of older cousin you stand up to.

When we were younger, one time he lost his temper with someone who had come to play cricket with us. He pulled the other boy’s arm so hard behind his back that he broke his thumb. The boy was too scared to tell anyone what really happened. Ahmed told our parents that the boy had tried to catch a cover drive, and that he stopped play as soon as he heard the boy’s shout of pain, forfeiting even the runs that were his by right, he said. He came out of it looking like a hero. This is what Ahmed is like.

Yesterday, Uncle Masood was looking for me and he asked Ahmed where I was. Ahmed told my uncle that I was down by the lake. There were so many other things that he could have said – that I was in my room, at the mosque study centre, playing cricket, anything – but, no, he sneaks to my uncle, his father. Uncle Masood told me that Ahmed had said I would probably be ‘hanging around the donga’. It was Tuesday. Aaba does the washing on Tuesdays. I like to watch her.

The days are getting cooler now. The lotus gardens have died. Winter will be soon. The lake is cold but Aaba rolls her sleeves right up high, almost to her armpits. Then she takes off her headscarf and pulls her hair back from her face, fixing it again with her scarf. I like to get close enough to see every small move. I like to be close enough so that I can watch the way the cold water makes her arms prickle, those tiny bumps all the way up to where she has rolled her sleeves; maybe they go further, but I can’t see.

I have found a place where I can squat in the shadows near the back of the big houseboat. Aaba’s washing place is close by the duckboard that leads up from the bank to the donga’s kitchen window. She cannot see me. Sometimes I can hear her breathing, especially when she first sticks her arms down into the water and her breathing is sharp, or when she is scrubbing hard on her old washboard.

Most of her clothes are almost worn through, and all of them are stitched many times over. Maybe it is just me that notices because her stitches are so small and perfect that you can only see the mending if you know to look. I know because I watch her sew. She has clever fingers and embroiders shawls for my father and my uncles to make a little extra money, pashmina shawls: pash, animal; mina, enamel. People with very little will weave and stitch, throwing the shuttles, clickety-click, all day, as long as there is enough light for them to see. My family sells pashmina, thousands of them.

You would think that you would not have to work for money in your own family, but not my family. Aaba and her mother have to work for a salary, like all the other workers that my uncles and father employ. Uncle Masood helps them in secret though. No one knows, not my father and his other brothers, especially not my mother and my aunts. But I know because I have watched him. When he has something for them from the bazaar, he takes the lake path that goes past the donga, leaving small packets at the kitchen window for Aaba and her mother to find before he hurries away across the meadow towards our garden gate, looking around all the time in that way that animals do.

Yesterday, I was only just ahead of Aaba. She came early for the washing. I don’t know how she times things at all as she has no watch, but she missed catching me by just a few seconds. There was no time for me to squat down in a comfortable way. Most times I like to be able to adjust a bit, to test the ground until my weight is even on both feet. Not yesterday, though. I heard her on the duckboard in front of me before I was ready.

She is always barefoot, even in the coldest part of winter when the ground is all ice, the bottoms of her salwar rolled up a bit so I can see her ankles. Her feet are not fat and spread wide like my mother’s and my aunts’. Aaba is very fine, little hands, little feet. To look at her, you might think that a whiff of wind could break her bones, but she is much stronger than that; very strong.

I’ve seen more of Aaba’s body – more of her arms, her ankles, her neck – than I have of any of my other female cousins since everyone started to cover up. It did not used to be this way. Of course, the burqa was common enough when I was young, before the fighting. It was a sign of success then, for everyone, Muslim, Pandit and Sikh. A way of saying you were rich enough for your wife not to work or carry things in the street. For some it was for Islam, but now it always is. Aaba does not pay too much attention to the rules. She covers her head with a scarf or a shawl when she comes to the house or goes into the city, of course, but I have never seen her in the burqa.

My cousin Ahmed doesn’t like women much, not like I do. He says that women in this place are the descendents of the Nags. They were our serpent ancestors from the time before Muhammad, long, long before, when the whole valley was one huge lake until someone beat the ground enough to make a hole in the great lake and drained it almost dry. The Nags retreated into the peaks. Ahmed says that women get their snake hips from the Nags, and that they use them to tempt us men from greatness. He gets this sort of crazy stuff from the mosque study centre, where he goes with those other boys who became his friends in year ten of school, even though some of them aren’t from around here, not even from our valley. Ahmed has said some things about Aaba, things that I am not going to repeat. He said things about what he would like to do with her. He does it because he knows how angry it makes me, but I have learned to bury that black feeling of anger somewhere deep, so far down that I hope it will die. But it does not and there are times when it comes back in a wave up my throat. I’m always afraid the vomit will be black, like how my youngest cousin who was so sick with dengue fever would vomit green, bright as grass. But I saw just what was left of my last meal.

These things, all of them, I can forget when I see Aaba’s feet and ankles coming down the duckboard. For some time then, maybe a few minutes, maybe ten or fifteen, I have heaven. Ahmed, Omar, the world of that magazine, all questions, the empty future, they are gone. Aaba is all I see.

She does this thing with her hand when she is washing. She lifts the back of her wrist to brush from her face the strands of hair that have come loose from her scarf. As soon as she has pushed them away they fall back again. When I am watching this there is a burning in me that climbs up from my belly to my throat. I want to get up and walk over to her, untie the scarf and fill my hands with her hair, pull it back and tie it again for her. This is the time when I put my hand down into my pyjamas.

Yesterday it was different. When she first bent forward I saw that she was not wearing her hair the same. It was in a thick plait. As she leant forward it fell to one side and I could see the full length of her neck, and the shorter hair that curled away from her skin.

I wanted to put my finger into one of those curls and to feel her, every part of her, to feed on her. I bit my lip to stop from crying out, so hard that I tasted blood in my mouth. Aaba did not look up from her scrubbing. I washed my hand in the flow of soap and water hugging the lakeshore. For a small moment it was as though we were washing together, Aaba and me. For some seconds I felt very happy, but it passed too fast and I was shivering and aware of the ache in my lower back. I wanted to leave then because I could not reach and touch her, could not be held by those arms that were working the lather up and down the washboard. Perhaps her heart was listening because she looked up and back to the donga.

I got up fast, but my left leg had gone to sleep and I stumbled down the length of the big houseboat, tying my pyjama string, I think, looking down so that I would not trip in the thick grass.

It might as well have been a bullet that struck me in the shoulder; my whole body felt as though it had been electrocuted.

‘What are you doing, Irfan?’ asked Uncle Masood, his hand tightening its grip on me.

‘Nothing,’ I said.

‘That’s a lie, straight on my face. Why are you tying your pyjamas?’

He seemed so huge, though he was only a few inches taller than me. Everything about him seemed enormous, from his voice to his hand on my back. Two things I know very clearly: my leg was still numb, so that I could not straighten up beside my uncle; and I wanted to turn around to see if Aaba was watching, but if I did that I would give myself away.

‘I came to give a message from my mother,’ I said.

‘You did?’ Uncle Masood stood very still in front of me so it was hard to look away from him. ‘And have you given the message?’

‘Not yet,’ I replied.

‘Then why are you in such a hurry to leave?’

I stared at my uncle’s throat, praying.

‘I had to urinate.’ It just came to me.

‘So you decided to relieve yourself in the lake, right where all the women wash?’ My uncle was staring hard at me. ‘And what was this message from your mother?’ His voice had got louder.

‘What is happening?’ It was Aaba, standing at the end of the big houseboat, a hand on one hip, the bucket of washing balanced on the other. One of the legs of her salwar was still rolled up. I looked back to my uncle. He was looking at Aaba’s leg.

‘I am speaking with Irfan.’ His voice sounded different.

‘It sounded like shouting, not speaking.’

Aaba’s tone was not the one women use in this place, and none of my aunts or my mother would look Uncle Masood in the face in this way, not out of fear but out of respect for him.

My uncle did not know what to say. He did not even seem to be able to look at Aaba now. If he had seen what I was doing, he was not going to say this thing to her.

She put the bucket down and stood, both of her hands on her hips now. She was waiting for my uncle to answer. The plait that started all of this was pulled over her shoulder.

‘Your head is not covered,’ said Uncle Masood.

‘I have been washing. No one was here. I was not expecting company,’ she replied.

Maybe I am only imagining, but I am sure my uncle looked embarrassed, shamed.

Aaba stood there, one bare ankle, her neck exposed.

That was when my uncle stopped being my hero.

How much time passed? I do not know. Certainly, the seconds seemed to stretch out into a day before my uncle regained his mind.

‘Irfan is coming to the house with me.’ He tightened his grip on my shoulder and was turning me in the right direction when he stopped and said, in English, ‘I am sorry he caused disturbance to your washing time.’

‘He did not; it was not Irfan who was shouting,’ she responded, also in English.

Did they think that I was not going to understand? Or was he trying to impress Aaba with his command of a language, while dismissing me as just a boy?

He let me go when we reached the gate of the garden that encloses the landing of the donga and houseboat. Some of the roses were still open, dying little by little. I don’t know why we remember unimportant details when something big happens, but I can clearly see the big, heavy rose heads, bending under their own weight. I wanted to run, but there were boys in the meadow, some of my friends, playing cricket.

‘Come! Join us,’ called out Sohail. He was batting.

‘Irfan has to come back to the house,’ my uncle told him.

‘Okay, sir,’ Sohail called back with a wave of his arm.

They all respect my uncle.

‘Salaams to your father,’ my uncle said, waving back.

With my friends watching, I had no choice but to keep up with my uncle as he walked briskly away from the players. As we came to the gate into our garden he stopped. I saw his grip tighten, his knuckles turning pale on the handle that my grandfather, his father made. It is shaped like a chinar leaf, the tree of our valley, this symbol of something permanent, even as everything else changes, carved over and over into panelling, on houseboats, in our homes, onto the shawls and carpets that we sell to the world.

‘I saw what you were doing,’ Uncle Masood said.

I turned my face away from him so that he would not see my humiliation. He put his hands on my shoulders and turned me to face him. I wanted to shout, to kick his shins, but instead something worse happened – I began to cry.

You have to understand that I was not crying because I was ashamed or afraid. I cried because I now hated this man who had once been my hero.

I have not left my room since yesterday. He sent me here when I cried because I think he had nothing left to say to me. He had my father try to fetch me for evening prayers at the mosque beside the bazaar. I told my father that I would pray in my room. He just shrugged and I heard him, heavy on the stairs, as if he was annoyed at having wasted his time coming up to talk to me. My uncle later sent my mother to make me come down to eat. She tried harder than my father. She even cried a little, but I was still so angry about my own tears that I was not interested in hers. When she walked away she went so slowly I think she was dragging her heart behind her. I know I hurt her.

I have been sitting for so many hours just staring out beyond the garden wall. I wanted to be able to see the donga, but there is a slope in the meadow that hides it. I stared at the lake until the lights of the houseboats on the other side came through the mist, until the line of poplar trees on the edge of the water got mixed with the mountains, until even the mountains were lost into the dark. My uncle was not great. He was no better than me. I had seen his face beside the houseboat.

I tried to remember. I knew he had been leaving packets of things for Aaba and her mother on the donga kitchen window ledge. This I had first seen when I started to watch Aaba, when I was fourteen. I had thought he was different from the others because he did not judge Aaba and her mother, that he stopped my mother and aunts from saying hard things about Aaba cooking Pandit food, and her clever English, because he thought they were being unfair. But I knew now that he was in love with her.

I thought of how he had looked when Aaba was talking to him, how he had allowed her to speak to him as if she was his wife. I thought over it again and again. They had some code, some secret language between them that I had been too afraid to take in until now, sitting in the window, my face pressed against the glass, watching this small world that I have been trapped

in lose its shape as the night took it away.

My face is cold against the window. I have not slept.

Omar and Ahmed came in late last evening, but I would not let them in; I needed to think and to be on my own. Ahmed teased me through the barred door, trying to make me feel stupid and small. He had seen the boys who had been playing cricket and they had told him about Masood taking me back to the house. Ahmed taunted me about being a naughty little boy. I said some things to him in a voice that did not sound like mine. I said things that made him back away. They must have shared one of our other cousins’ rooms because they did not come back.

I can see a boatman on the lake. The dark shape he and his shikara make on the water is the shape of a letter of the Qur’an. I hope I will be able to come back to the lake. I am fast in a shikara, faster than Ahmed, though I usually let him win so that he will not bully me. If I come back, I do not think that Ahmed will think of bullying me.

Now it is Wednesday. The bus from the main station in the city goes soon to Kargil and the border. The gate out of the kitchen yard will be locked, but I can climb over the wall from the thick branch of the pear tree. There will be food in the kitchen that I can take with me, and I could buy some fresh bread along the way, but I might be seen and that would give me away. Maybe just one warm kulcha would be safe to buy for the bus. Who could tell that someone was going away for a long time just by the piece of kulcha bread in his hand?

Many times during the night I tried to write some words for Aaba.

‘As-Salaamu Alaikum Gentle Aaba, I am leaving because I believe that my uncle, our uncle, Masood, wants to have you for his bed, and he has wanted this for a long time. I will come back to protect you.’

But such words would only lead to trouble. They would come after me; even tell the police. I would be taken away with my thumbs tied behind my back with wire. They would torture me until I am no longer a man in anything but name.

I do not write a note.

When I get to where I am going, what will I say? I do not know what questions they will ask. I do not know even if they will want me. A camp commander will easily catch me out.

I want to feel different than the way I do now, sitting and waiting for the moment when I can leave. The bus will pass Feroza Wani’s walnut grove, and I will look out over the places where we picked, my head against a different window, the smell of kid goats and old vomit mixing with fresh sweat. I know I will miss the feel of my mother’s cool hand on my forehead as the jolting, weaving bus makes me sick as well.

I will try to forget about the sickness and hold on hard to my Qur’an.

How long will it take them to realise that I have gone? How long will it take for Ahmed to tell them where I have gone? I know he will guess what I have done. I think he would like to do this himself, but now I am not sure if he is brave enough. This does not feel brave. It does not feel as though I have done it out of choice. It is something else – not God, not politics, not this valley. How else can I show Aaba that I am a man?