Nun chai pe charcha: Tea, memory, identity

 

Editor’s note: In June 2010, Jammu & Kashmir was in the throes of violent unrest over the extrajudicial killing of 17-year-old student Tufail Ahmed Mattoo. 117 people died in the unrest, as security forces responded to political protests with rubber bullets and live ammunition. At the time, artist and writer Alana Hunt returned home to Australia after a three-year stint in New Delhi—a time when she often visited the Valley and built close friendships with Kashmiris. 

 

As a gesture of remembrance, Hunt began conversations over cups of ‘nun chai’, a Kashmiri tea prepared with rolled-up green tea leaves, milk and baking powder. These ‘nun chai’ chats continued until July 2012, resulting in this book—118 conversations remembering Mattoo and the victims of the subsequent unrest. The three ‘cups’ below have been excerpted with permission from ‘Cups of Nun Chai’ by Alana Hunt from Yaarbal Books.

 

Archives of memory

 

THE EIGHTH CUP

27 OCTOBER 2010

 

I left Kashmir early in the summer of 2010, and from a distance I watched the death toll rise. 1. 6. 11. 18. 56. 69. 89. 111. Jay confronted the numbers and her voice began to drift, “Loss of life seems to happen everywhere in this world.” Jay had been a young girl in Sydney during WWII and her experiences fuelled our conversation. “There seems to be a certain timing all of us have—a time when it is time for us to leave. It’s the only way I can make sense of it.” She reminded me of a consolation I heard, time and time again, in Kashmir— ‘Inshallah.’ It is Allah’s wish. “The tragedy,” Jay continued, “was when that time arrived while people were still young.” Jay sipped the nun chai slowly. She seemed to appreciate the flavour.

 

The deaths in Kashmir that summer were mostly of young men, in their late teens and early twenties, some even as young as 8 years old. Jay asked, with a haunting simplicity, “Why are they killing the children?” Why are the Indian armed forces killing children in Kashmir? It is not enough to explain that 8-year-old Milad Ahmad Dar and 9-year-old Sameer Ahmad Rah were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time when they were shot or beaten to death.

 

Jay has a friend named Ruth, who cannot be in the presence of a German. Ruth lost her family in the gas chambers during WWII. While she recognises that at an individual level Germans could be good people, Ruth still can’t find it in her- self to give them a moment of her time. Jay is one of Ruth’s only ‘Aryan’ friends. When Ruth nears a German she simply walks away. Jay explained, “If you are a mother and someone kills your child, what else could you be expected to do?”

 

Hatred and violence are cyclical. They grow like a snowball on the run. Gathering speed and mass, they cause irrevocable damage over time. Jay spoke a lot of the warmth of Ruth’s Jewish family and friends. But Ruth often complained privately to Jay that while people were civil to Jews after the war, she still sensed an underlying prejudice. Israel’s forceful settlement of Palestine, in the name of a Jewish homeland, is today responsible for manifesting more cycles of hatred and violence, only this time against Palestinian Muslims. It’s a cycle where the oppressed quickly become the oppressor. Jewish and Palestinian suffering and displacement mirror each other more than is commonly recognised.

 

I recently heard about two young stone pelters in Kashmir whose fingernails were torn out by men from the paramilitary. One of these boys was 16 years old and the other was 19. Not a single nail was left on their hands and feet. I have a friend who lives in their locality. As he said, “It was helpfully explained to the boys that their nails had been removed so they would not be able to walk in protest or pelt stones for the next few months.”

 

In Kashmir, in Palestine and for the Jewish during WWII, oppressive personalised deeds like this one become crystallised in collective memory.

 

These memories gather like an informal archive that is compiled over many years, through many experiences and with many stories. It is an archive near impossible to erase, because it travels with the urgency and intimacy of human breath.

 

These archives have the capacity to feed resistance and understanding, but more commonly they feed cycles of hatred and violence that justify one kind of cruelty against another. However, at this moment in Kashmir, there seems to be a concerted effort to direct this pain and anger not at the people of India but to the Indian state. This was echoed in Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s evoca- tion of insaniyat—an Urdu term for humanity—when he spoke of the bonds that tied the people of India and Kashmir during a seminar in New Delhi, aptly titled Azadi: The Only Way.

 

Relating to the situation in Kashmir now, Jay spoke about the anxiety that shaped her life as a child living near Sydney Harbour during WWII—there was the constant threat of Japanese submarines sneaking in. Recalling the post-war London of her youth, Jay spoke of Kashmiri and Indian people interchangeably. I reiterated that Kashmir was not India, and she asked me why. I went on to talk about the linguistic, historic and cultural differences... But then I questioned the criteria I was using to produce an argument that would somehow define a “nation” and its citizens. I found myself defining India through a largely north Indian upper-caste Hindu identity, which excluded the majority of the population within the subcontinent. I stopped myself and instead said simply that this nun chai wasn’t consumed in India.

 

Jay had a sweater that read: “100% Cashmere wool. Made in Scotland.” She imagined the journey of her sweater. The wool taken from an animal in Kashmir travelled to Scotland, where her mother was born, and where it was crafted into a piece of clothing that she now holds in Sydney. Agha Shahid Ali’s words came to mind:

 

Let me cry out in that void, say it as I can. I write on that void: Kashmir, Kaschmir, Cashmere, Qashmir, Cashmir, Cashmire, Kashmere, Cachemire, Cushmeer, Cachmiere, Casmir. Or Cauchemar in a sea of stories? Or: Kacmir, Kaschemir, Kasmere, Kachmire, Kasmir. Kerseymere?

 

Jay put the leftover sodden tea leaves from the nun chai on the soil outside her back door and looked at me with a smile as she said, “Just in case it grows into something.”

“Kashmir looks like good country.”

 

THE FIFTY SIXTH CUP

10 JULY 2011

 

In order to get a clearer sense of where and what Kashmir is, Peter and I used key words to search the net. First we looked at maps; an image of Kashmir lodged between and occupied by India, Pakistan and China. It was coloured brown, orange and green. We next looked at the landscape in detail. Peter’s own Gija country lay in the north-west of Australia. Like Kashmir, this is a place renowned for its beauty. Peter’s country is also replete with the historic legacies and contemporary formations of colonisation, which means Kashmir’s story has resonance there in more than one way. But it was the snow-capped mountains that first caught his eye. Looking at the green and at the rivers Peter smiled, “Kashmir looks like good country.”

 

Finally, we came across images of the protests that engulfed Kashmir in 2010. I tried to contextualise how stone-throwing emerged in Kashmir and why the protests were happening. Peter examined the images carefully; his eyes seemed to pull apart the stark dialectic that lay between the men in uniform and those without.

 

The ongoing colonial histories of Peter’s own Gija country and the tensions that lie between Indigenous and non-indigenous people here today connected very much with Kashmir.

 

I went to get the nun chai and some chapatti I had made from the kitchen. When I returned Peter said, with an understanding that was informed by the injustices of his own world, “So... they might lock you up, over there, for all this.” He knew well how fragile nations fear the power of conversation and ideas and yet-to-be-written histories. Australia is pretty fragile too.

 

As we drank nun chai Peter and I looked out towards a small tin shed that lay rusting in the distance. When Peter was a boy the police used that shed as a lock-up for people who became unruly during the rodeos. Peter giggled at the antics of his old people and imagined them getting locked up in there when they were young and reckless. “They told me stories. Once they escaped from that tin shed. They found a way to climb out through the roof. Imagine. They weren’t always as calm as they look today. They were young and mad once too.” For many Aboriginal people within the East Kimberley, imprisonment has been normalised, with little social stigma attached to it. My feeling is that this is because, for generations of Aboriginal people, the justice system in Australia has not been about justice at all, but rather injustice. In many ways Kashmir is not dissimilar.

 

“Are people scared to speak up in Kashmir?” Peter reasoned that it might be important for people outside the region to do something if people within Kashmir were feeling intimidated. The old people from Peter’s community held living memories of being beaten, and even shot, for speaking against white pastoralists or simply not doing what they were ‘told’ to do. We spoke about how governments control populations. 

 

In the community of Warmun, where Peter and I live, I often felt as though I was watching Foucault’s theory of bio-power and governmentality enacted by the state on people every day, through a process that obsessively (though often without success) tried to make people and the movement of their lives legible to a system. The recording of birth dates, names, addresses, medical histories, phone numbers and banking details are part of what makes the modern nation-state’s control of populations possible. Peter’s old people, born in the bush, didn’t know the date or time of their births, or their birth weight, or length—but they do know the precise location of their birth within their country and of how their name connects to that country.

 

Young people in Kashmir had started telling their own stories, wrestling back the power of narration. This was generally viewed in a positive light, but Peter was hesitant. “For me it’s important that young people listen to the old people first.We need to know the old peoples’ stories before we start telling our own.”

 

Peter’s words were rooted deep in the struggle to hold on to his culture in the face of Euro-Australian colonisation, and the deep respect for elders such oral cultures demand.

 

Peter joked that once his old people taste nun chai they might ask me to pre- pare whole billy-cans of it every day! I spoke about how common nun chai is in Kashmir, and how it is drunk at all times of the day and usually accompanied by some kind of bread. I told Peter how the idea of these conversations came about, when people were being killed by the state in 2010 in Kashmir. When Kashmiri people were dying almost every day, I thought of the empty cups of nun chai that would be sitting in people’s homes after someone had died. There is a beautiful potential for those cups to be refilled by the continuing presence of families drink- ing from the same cups their loved ones held. I wanted to explain the need to talk, to acknowledge, to share information, to remember, but before I could finish explaining, Peter held his cup up, subtly gestured forward, and said, “That is what these cups are for.”

When meaning becomes too much to bear

 

THE EIGHTY SEVENTH CUP

19 May 2012

 

In these mountains of Nainital, the days pass quickly. It was already late afternoon when Rupin reheated two leftover chapattis from the previous evening’s meal to share with our nun chai. “Is it common in Kashmir to have nun chai with yesterday’s chapatti?” she asked. Her question led to a conversation about all the fantastic kinds of bread in Kashmir—bread that people have every- day with nun chai. Unlike many parts of India, where breads like chapatti and parantha are made at home, the village bakery is a central part of life in Kashmir. It is where most days begin.

 

I was soon recollecting the intimate rhythms of a friend’s home in a small village in the mountains of Kashmir. Because it was such a small village, and the bakery was a fair walk from home, my friend’s sister made their morning bread herself, from a coarse flour made from corn, on a wood-fired stove in the kitchen. She was always the first to rise in the house, getting to work before dawn broke. She worked hard, but when the rest of the family went to work for the day, the house became hers. She had chores to do, but she also had time that was solely hers. She slept, listened to music, chatted over tea with neighbourhood visitors— and entertained me with cheeky jokes and community gossip, much of which was lost in translation between her broken English, my terribly fragmented Urdu, and a handful of Kashmiri words. But their house certainly had flavours different from other places I’d been in Kashmir.

 

These small stories—personal, almost irrelevant—are in a sense what ‘Cups of Nun Chai’ is made of. They are a means of learning in the everyday. This kind of thing is what makes it possible to move past the headlines and start to listen to the shape that life takes under occupation in Kashmir and the pieces of life that persist defiantly beyond that occupation.

 

Rupin has a tendency to move into the essence of things with a provocative sensitivity that is rare. She does not shy away from complication; in fact, she thrives on it. This made our conversation long and spirited. The nun chai tasted good, and for someone not familiar with its flavour it was telling when she asked for a second cup. We spoke about Kashmir until the room became dark and the disappearing sun had turned the afternoon into night.

 

“Do you think it would have been possible to make this work without the tea?” Rupin asked without waiting for an answer, “Do you remember, a few years ago you told me about an artist who made art with food? But this doesn’t feel like art about food. It’s something else. So, do you think you could have done this without the tea?”

 

In turn I asked Rupin to imagine the nature of our conversation right now, if it had been devoid of tea. It didn’t really work. While the work is not about tea, nun chai is the anchor. It is a catalyst. It provides flavour. It helps to hold space and time in place. Nun chai is symbolic, yet also material. It accumulates. It grows memories. It ties everything together. Drinking and speaking with these cups of nun chai is entwined with a refusal to accept, a refusal to be silent and a refusal to forget the injustice of the summer of 2010. It is a small attempt to ask questions and try to join the dots, so as to create a clearer picture of the political narratives that are at play.

 

“It’s vulnerable. You’re doing something that is really open to ridicule.” Rupin spoke softly, “But somehow that vulnerability is its strength. There is a certain force in this, a vulnerable force.” The vulnerability of this is not something I have embarked upon without hesitation or mountains of doubt. Cups of nun chai embodies a tenuous relationship between something very meaningful and something absolutely meaningless. As I have said before, it is at once a search for meaning in the face of something so brutal it appears absurd, and an absurd gesture when meaning itself becomes too much to bear.

 

Rupin was also concerned about how this force could be felt by those not part of the process directly—those who didn’t taste these cups of nun chai. Finding a language through which to do this was the role of art. “I think this whole process is a kind of language. Writing about what this ‘language’ is, is important. Just as one would follow a flock of birds to water, I wonder how does one really move with this?”