A Morning | Experienced by Kashmiri

“Don’t you dare take your f~~~~~~ car out through the gate or I’ll shoot you”, shouted the CRPF man through the slit of our gate. It was an ideal morning straight out from the pages of a novel the breeze was cool , the sun was out but it promised warmth instead of heat. The heat had already been surrendered to the advent of September. I had risen early. My feet had taken me straight to the bathroom for a bath that I wouldn’t need. After a breakfast that consisted of nothing but salt tea and leftover pieces of bread from the never-had Eid celebrations. It was a strange combination-this tea, it was rosy and almost shiny when you looked at it but it was salty to taste. How representative of the place it belongs to. The only thing that bothered me on such a beautiful morning was the morning itself , mornings herald days and the last three months had taught me to love the morning but fear the day. As I sat with a china cup in my hand my gaze wandered out of the window towards the skyline. High above the surrounding structures stood a minaret , a minaret of no or inconsequential beauty. No azan was sounded from it. But it was still built. The minaret belongs to the mosque , the mosque built over the resting place of Sheikh Dawood Sahib aka ‘Batamaal Saeb’ . A saint of the highest order whom a poet praised thus:

“ sharaab az khum e maarifat chu qaseed ;

Ba chashm e yaqeen deed zaat illah"

He has drunk so much from the chalice of realization;

That he has witnessed God through the eyes of belief.



I could visualize the scene Batmaal Saeb holding each feet of his oxen and washing them one by one and seeking God’s forgiveness ’ “ My Lord you know I didn’t do it on purpose my oxen ventured into my neighbor’s land by mistake and brought some of his soil that stuck to their feet here I was not trying to usurp his land , forgive me my Lord indeed You are the most forgiving”



Utopian I thought, men don’t think like that now. Neither do nations.



I put my cup down and rushed up to my room. My hands took charge of a book , a neat paperback on economics. Tackling the subtle selfishness of ideas. Thinking over Keynesian economics I felt a little uneasy . How could man be reduced to a fiscal entity? How could you ever determine the correct wages of a labourer ? How could you get people involved in so mean a task - ‘Dig wells and fill them up and dig them again’- just to keep money in circulation , just to keep the money mill grinding. I put it down.





I turned my head to face the wall. The wall built of stones and bricks .



A paper was hanging from the wall. It had been there from long , indeed I had put it there myself. but owing to some strange reason its print appeared magnified . The header read “ Hadith”. And below it stood the text in a beautiful font. I read it , “ The lawful is clear and the unlawful is clear but between them there are matters that are doubtful, thus he who remains aloof of what is doubtful clears his belief and religion but he who wanders into the doubtful will wander into the forbidden much like a grazer who rests his sheep on the edge of a forbidden field all but grazing therein. Remember every king has a sanctuary and Allah’s sanctuary is his prohibitions “



“You can’t get near the forbidden fruit without eating it”, I thought.





No surprises I thought , the Arabic word for mind -‘aqal’ comes from ‘iqaal’ and iqaal means a thing that stops something.

The band that the Arabs wear over their headscarves is called iqaal , It stops the headscarf from falling over. But it stopped quite another thing too , that was at the time of Bedouins. The Bedouins would carry a small length of rope with them to tie their camel’s forelegs when they dismounted it to stop it from wandering. They always needed it but didn’t know where to put it they had no pockets. In their simplicity they wound it around their heads , a tradition that continues even today.

The rope exists but the material has changed to fine textiles . then it stopped camels from wandering now it stops headscarves from falling over.

My mind shifted in time . A companion of the Prophet comes in hurriedly into the Masjid al Nabwi.

” Did you tie the camel” , asks the Prophet.

“O prophet of God I didn’t -I trusted God” , he says.

“ Aayqal suma tawaqal”.

Tie your camel’s foot and then trust God.



I stood up an looked out of the window , as my eyes fell on my car. Ah! Why don’t I wash my car today. I picked up the car keys from my study table and rushed down. I opened the car door and stepped in to turn the car around. As I pushed the key in and the ignition took affect. I heard the CRPF mans shout.

Written by : Owais Wani