Dear son,
I hope the Almighty bestows you with the most pious and merciful characteristics. I would like to give you a name, Ain, what do you say? Yes, it is a beautiful name that means “merciful”. A child is born always with a comely and innocent visage.
Everyone at home becomes as happy as a lark. Soon, the new member becomes the apple of everyone’s eye, particularly for the parents who always keep an eye on their children.
Here, I would like to make you cognisant of a few important points that you have to remember until your death, because you aren’t supposed to live for a long period of time—only because you are going to take birth in the ‘valley of death’, or Kashmir, also called a ‘paradise on earth’, but it only fits in books.
When you would begin your life, don’t long for lullabies to fall asleep, you aren’t allowed to listen to them. Instead, you have to soothe yourself with the roaring of machine guns, horror and violent gunshots. This is the first blessing that would be snatched from you and leave you helpless and clueless.
When you grow up, you would have to lift the heavy coffins of children of the land, not school bags on your shoulders. You’d be supposed to attend learning classes with your besties, play different games with them. But here again, you won’t own anything because you won’t be allowed to do so. Rather, you’d attend funerals of loved ones and innocent people.
You will see people outside your homeland learning A for apple, B for boy, C for cat. But amazingly, you’d learn A for ash, B for burn, C for clampdown. Somehow, with the grace of God, if you survive through your childhood, then, I would like to send you mubarkha, as only one out of thousands are fortunate to do so in your homeland.
As a teen, you would fall in love with movies — some full of action, some filled with romance — but you won’t be lucky enough to watch them. You have to see the killings of innocents, their soft bodies being pierced by razor-sharp bullets.
Moreover, you’d have to wear goggles not to witness the amusement of nature, but to clear your vision as they will be wounded by green-eyed monsters. Everyone would become a fan of sports, especially cricket and football, and so would you, except you would see people playing with bullets and guns.
With time, responsibilities would fall upon your shoulders, and you may feel quite depressed; you’d then wish to visit your relatives and loved ones, but alas! Here, you’d have to visit not their bricked beautiful homes, but their deep, dark graves.
You would see gardens full of tulips, brooks flooded with cold blue water and people calling it paradise. My dear son, look closely. Those tulips have actually grown up on the graves of innocents; that river isn’t filled with water but warm red blood of children of the land. There is a taunt in the voice of those people who call it paradise.
Anyhow, if you manage to reach this point of life, then you won’t get more time. Definitely, your end is here, bullets would pierce your soft, innocent body. And there, you’d meet me inside the two-feet-deep grave, I, your father, who too met the same fate.
Yours truly,
Your father
Valley of death