Legally away we go
I am sitting in the Kashmir University cafe overlooking the Shehjar Lawn. It is a warm, sunlit morning. The campus lies almost deserted, and I am hunched over my computer. The cafe staff are still sweeping away yesterday’s dust and discarded wrappers. It hardly bothers me. I have abandoned my long-standing routine of spending early mornings in the library and instead begun turning up at the Shehjar cafe as soon as it opens to write before the first class begins. Unlike the chaos that swamps the cafe later in the day, it is comparatively still at this hour. But this is slowly fleeting. As the first bus pulls up a few metres away and students spill out, rushing towards their departments, I find myself overcome by recollections. After spending my entire first semester in near seclusion, moving between the University’s libraries and remaining largely disconnected from my classmates within the Journalism department, my first interaction with my peers only began with a drive initiated to reopen one of the oldest cafes in the campus that had been temporarily shut on hygienic grounds. I had known Bashir Sahab as a humble and pious soul who always welcomed me with a smile and let me use his cafe kitchen whenever I wanted to brew a cup of black tea to jolt my brain back to life. I bought chart papers, sketches and pencils and initiated a signature campaign together with a few of my classmates who shared my hatred for the locked gates of Bashir Sahab’s cafe and believed in his rejuvenation as he sat home battling stress and anxiety with an uncertain future dangling above him after losing his only source of income. Over a hundred students and staff members added their names and we pasted it on his cafe wall. Within days, as the campaign caught the administration’s attention, Bashir Sahab was back in business, this time with more rigour and humility. On one wintry morning, as I drove to the University, I was denied permission to park my vehicle inside the campus. As a policy, parking passes are issued only in the second year, and I was still a first-year student. This frustrated me, but I was impassive to expand my social circle by befriending the guards. Instead, a friend huddled me into the architecturally grand and imposing office of one of the University’s senior officials. As he served us tea, my friend explained my predicament and requested a parking pass on my behalf. The official replied that if he granted me one, the entire University would descend upon his office in protest; there was even a chance, he added with mock seriousness, that they might launch a hunger strike and bring the University to a standstill. At the mention of a hunger strike, I burst into laughter, embarrassing my friend and startling the official. We left his office with him visibly irritated. Befriending the guards became my only refuge and I have never been stopped since. Ironically, the official also became a good acquaintance and often invited me for tea at the University guest house. “I could be bitten by a dog while walking to the gate at midnight,” I had dramatically argued in my defence. He still remembers the remark and quotes it every now and then. By now, the University had come full circle. Most of us had settled into campus life, strengthening bonds with our professors and spending extended evenings listening to poetry, stories of prominent poets, accounts of literary giants, and discussions on momentous political events. I was particularly drawn to the life of quintessential Faiz Ahmad Faiz, especially the story of how he fell in love with Alys George (later Alys Faiz or Ms. Faiz), and the remarkable manner in which their destinies intertwined. “Of fragrance and colour, beauty and goodness; the metaphors all began and ended in you,” my professor would often recite while speaking of Faiz’s verses for Alys. Such evenings routinely stretched into midnight, whether on the University campus or in the hostel building, over endless rounds of tea. I would often drive home past midnight only to return at sunrise. Today, as I sit in Shehjar Cafe with only a few weeks of University life remaining, writing and reflecting upon a period I neither anticipated nor prepared for, a fresh batch of morning e-papers arrives in my inbox. As I flick through them, I am reminded of the e-paper I read on my very first day at the University. The headline, published in September 2024, declared: “Stage set for intense election battle in Srinagar.” Today, that election has long passed, a government has been formed, and the political contest has faded. Yet another stage has been set in Hazratbal. It is the looming transition from academia into professional life that remains as uncertain and consequential as any election battle. Sheikh Saqib is a graduate student at MERC, Kashmir University.
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