Parallel Parking in Downtown Srinagar

"Kashmir was constitutionally up for grabs. 'Buy the exotic Kashmiri land' and 'marry the apple-cheeked Kashmiri women' was the refurbished two-point policy of settling in Kashmir"

- Tabish Rafiq Mir

SIX months after that fateful day—August 5, 2019— succumbing to inactivity, Kashmiri user accounts would drop from WhatsApp groups like flies. It had the world worried. It had my world worried. Kashmir had been blacked out by the Indian state for a record period; long enough for WhatsApp to deem them/deem us, non-users/non-entities. WhatsApp groups with Kashmiri presence were being emptied. A communication blockade unlike anything ever seen. Truly unprecedented. Mobile internet, phone calling, Wifi, landlines, postal services— decimated/redacted in one fell swoop. Redacted—that wonder of modern war machinery; digital, intangible, ambiguously and infinitely negotiable in nature. Unprecedented.

Mothers waited in queues outside dreaded police stations of the most dreaded, purely homegrown Jammu and Kashmir state police; hour-long queues at the tail-end of 30-second surveilled calls. Not unprecedented. “We are okay here. How are you? Okay, you take care; people are waiting in the queue behind me. Don’t get into trouble” Beep. Slam. Next call. The queue, also surveilled, moves another miserly step toward the much sought-after landline in the local police station.

‘And yes, don’t grieve to anyone. Be careful’.