Kashmir in Malaysia

In the bustling corridors of Kuala Lumpur, I discovered that speaking Koshur was survival, memory, and the heart of Kashmir itself.

- Subail Manzoor

Years before I ever read him on the iconic Bund by the Jhelum, just across from his home, I learned that the heart could be a weapon.

I was just a boy then, walking among the chinar leaves with the damp smell of earth all around, when someone recited Agha Shahid Ali's lines.

I felt it in my chest, a strange feeling that had nothing to do with understanding the words and everything to do with recognizing something inside me.

Years later, the lesson came back to me when I read about the beloved bard's airport encounter.

“Are you carrying anything dangerous for the passengers?” the officer asked him, eyes flicking over the passport, the boarding pass, perhaps even the shadow of a poet.

“My heart,” Agha Shahid Ali replied, hand pressed over his chest, and eyes glinting like broken fragments of memory.

It was a simple answer, but it carried a fierce honesty. It stayed with me. His heart had never left Kashmir.

Years later, in February of 2022, I landed at Kuala Lumpur International Airport. The air smelled unfamiliar, and the world seemed to have opened its arms wider than I had imagined. I had dreamed of life beyond the mountains, but stepping onto foreign soil tugged something inside me backward, a gentle but insistent pull.

The farther I travelled, the closer I came to a self I had almost forgotten.

I carried no dangerous heart with me. What I carried, like Agha Shahid Ali, in a metaphor only he could have meant, was my mind, restless, curious, weighted with stories that the world rarely asks for and seldom hears.

At the airport, the questions began. “Where are you from?” they asked.

“Kashmir,” I said.

Her brows knit. “Kashmir... you mean India?”

“Kashmir,” I said again, steady now.

“What language do you speak?”

I said it slowly, deliberately, as if the words themselves were talismans: “Koshur.”