Maqbool Sheikh dreaded hearing a knock at the door of his home. For he was the most intimate witness to one of the world’s most enduring and forgotten conflicts, the struggle over Kashmir. As the only autopsy expert at the police hospital in Srinagar, it was his job to conduct post mortems on those shot, stabbed or blown to pieces — and the bodies arrived at the rate of around 1,000 a year.
Each time, as he drove back to the mortuary, he wondered whether he would be confronted with the corpse of a child, a woman or another young man. The law required him to determine how each one died, and his judgment could affect how their families were treated — were they a terrorist, a police informer or simply another innocent bystander? His scalpels sought answers in the destroyed bodies of the dead.
Maqbool gained some solace from knowing that when he stitched the bodies together he lessened the pain for the families who would see them. But it was not easy. ‘At times I find myself standing in a heap of limbs and then it is a struggle to ensure that the fingers I stitch to a hand are of the same person,’ he said.
Worst of all, he lives with the gnawing fear of all parents in this beautiful but blighted place that his own children might be ensnared in a conflict that has dragged on for more than two decades. The proxy war between India and Pakistan has left about 70,000 Kashmiris dead; and, as Basharat Peer reveals in this timely book, few families have been left unscarred.
Curfewed Night is a courageous and enlightening work. It is partly a beautifully written memoir of growing up in one of the most idyllic parts of the world as it descends into ugly conflict, a tale of innocence lost amid savagery and stupidity.
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