Magical Marquez on Kashmir

BY MOHSIN ALI

Revolutions and upheavals, dictators and army generals, the magical aspects like lakes smelling of roses, melancholic  phantoms, maidens with butterflies swirling about them, strange pilgrims,  gypsies and saints and above all the solitude of experience and existence. The perfect substrate for a Marquez novel and what better setting than magical Kashmir. The Valley possesses it all and no guesses for the title – The valley of solitude.

Marquez would have used his pen like a wand to relate the magical tale. The story would have chronicled several generations. The vantage point in the plot being the present times, Marquez would have looked back at the glory of the first two generations. Intrigue would have crept maybe in the third generation, followed by rebellions and finally foreign occupation. He would have created phantoms of Kashmir youth killed fighting the occupation. Dripping blood the phantoms would sway throughout the book reminding the later generations of the sacrifices. Shirts of martyrs would have become flags.

We may leave the horrors of the realism of agitations in the Valley to Joseph Conrad for a practical description but for Marquez the miasma of teargas shells would seem the apparitions of the curse of living in the valley of solitude. Leaders would be there but there would be no general in his labyrinth in this case. No Simon Bolivar. No so called Loins of the valley would have qualified as a substitute. Consequently dictators would have been a feature of his novels but there would have been no autumns for these patriarchs.

One of the motifs in his novels, Macondo the imaginary place would have been aptly substituted by Lal Chowk (City Centre). Although it would lack the sleepy character of a fictional town, the famous square of thousand mutinies and paroxysms, defunct clocks and flag hoisting would have become the microcosm for the Valley. The square will bustle with generals, revolutionaries, melancholic old people beholding the phantoms of past memories, grandfathers taking their grandchildren to touch ice for the first time and aged booksellers selling books and tales.

You can’t have magic without romance and Marquez always follows the rule. There would be love in the time of cholera here too. Cholera, a metaphor for agitations and periods of suppression in the case of Kashmir. Heroes not returning back to their lovers, lovers sacrificing their loves for the nation, butterflies circling the ethereal maidens with blue eyes, graves smelling of lavender and rosewater, the pangs of separation, the awaited bliss of reunion that doesn’t materialize and of course, mothers hearing the breathing of their dead sons during nights, sons talking to their dead fathers, everything.

Marquez would create the magic here with the bounties that nature has bestowed on Kashmir. Blue lakes with legends buried beneath them, meadows where the lovers meet, tulips dripping blood of slain boys, silvery winters and tangerine summers-the perpetual colors of tragedy for the inhabitants of the valley of solitude. But Marquez wouldn’t give another chance to the valley because in his own words, races condemned to one hundred years of solitude don’t get second opportunity on earth. But then magic is illusion.

(Mohsin Ali is a journalist based in Kashmir)