By Syed Eesar Mehdi

The year I turned fourteen, winter arrived with the quietude of an old man breathing. In our village near Budgam, snow covered the almond groves and roofs with a kind of forgetfulness that made the world look holy, or at least clean.

My mother’s fever had lasted three days. She needed medicine. I remember buttoning my pheran and slipping into the white air, the hill ahead cloaked in a silence that always came after the snowfall.

Halfway up the hill, a person stood like punctuation at the edge of my sentence. A shadow bent against the wind. He called out, not kindly. I hesitated. In that half-second pause, something ancient and irreversible happened. His hand met my cheek. My body staggered. My sense of being, too.

It was not pain that stayed with me. It was the rupture. A clean break in how the world had moved until then.

Veena Das might call it a “critical event,” not for its scale but for how it slipped into the daily, rearranging what it meant to be seen, to move, to speak.

After that slap, the road home felt longer. The snow heavier. My name, somehow, less mine.

There was no explanation. And explanations, I would later learn, are often a luxury of those who are not interrupted. Philippe Bourgois might describe this as part of a continuum. One more silent shattering folded into the daily script of life........

© Kashmir Observer