KASHMIR, THROUGH THE EYES OF LOVE

Love, platonic, familial, and for one's homeland, finds expression through author and filmmaker, Mehak Jamal's personal stories of people trying to survive through the conflict in Kashmir. Loal Kashmir: Love and Longing in a Torn Land, will help readers touch ordinary Kashmiri lives beyond the headlines.

- PANKIL JHAJHRIA

IN January 1990, a young Kashmiri Pandit, Sagar's three-month vacation in Jammu seemed a holiday without an end. As political tensions rose in Kashmir, it wasn't easy for his family to return home. The 10-year-old understood what it meant to live in "a place of conflict." He feared being forgotten by his friends back home and when his parents made him join a new school, he thought this meant he was "never going to see home again."

Sagar is one of the protagonists of Kashmiri author Mehak Jamal's book, Loal Kashmir: Love and Longing in a Torn Land (HarperCollins).

"'Loal' means love, affection, and belonging in Kashmiri," Jamal tells TMS. The book features Sagar and 15 others trying to live in "a place of conflict"—a phrase Jamal uses often to describe Kashmir. Started as a "memory project" in 2020, it is a compilation of stories from the 1980s, 1990s, the 2000s, and around the time of the abrogation of Articles 370 and 35(A).