Is it DNA, Nostalgia, or Something much deeper?
Last month, as tensions between India and Pakistan escalated, casting a shadow of impending conflict, a flurry of WhatsApp messages began circulating among anxious friends and family. These messages urged people to stock up on essential food items, encouraging them to prepare for uncertain times ahead.
Sure enough! My wife asked me to stock up on food items in preparation for any potential unrest. I headed out to the local markets and after two hours I returned home with 10 kilograms of rice and five one-kilogram packets of frozen meat.
She stood there, utterly aghast, her eyes wide with disbelief. “Is that all you could think of? What about the sugar, the tea leaves, the dals, the salt, and all those essentials?” she exclaimed, her voice rising with frustration. I replied that I had focused on what I thought were the most crucial items for us and promised I would pick up everything on my next trip.
I still vividly recall the expression on her face. It reminded me of a famous dialogue from the cult comedy movie ‘Welcome’: ‘Arrey Kya Karon mei iska—Kya Karun -Maar bhi nahi sakta. Pyar jo karta hai mujjse.’
We KPs love our meat and Rice. It’s a relationship that runs deep, almost bordering on obsession, as these staples have woven into our identity’s fabric. There are a handful of other habits for which our affection may verge on obsession, perhaps because these rituals resonate so deeply with our sense of identity. For the sake of brevity, let me pick the top three that come to my mind today.
Meat, Rice, and the Excitement of seeking out fellow KPs and getting unduly excited if we find one. The last one, though, tends to increase the farther you are from Kashmir; in other words, the more distant you are, the more excited you feel upon meeting a fellow KP. This is an inadvertent habit or trait that borders on comic.
Let us dissect and understand each of these one by one.
Meat :
A KP friend in college often joked that his mouth watered every time he saw a live goat. While we could dismiss this as typical college bravado and abhor his crude choice of words, we still can’t ignore or overlook the intensity of his love for meat that he was trying to express.
Another friend, whose wife and children have become vegetarians, refuses to join them because he believes that eating meat is the last connection he has to his homeland. He fears that if he gives it up, he will lose all ties to his heritage. You might find this laughable, but it’s not if we take a moment to understand the emotions at play. This man is clinging to memories of his past, and we can only guess what those memories entail. Perhaps he recalls enjoying a naeni batte (Rice and meat) meal under a chinar tree during a school picnic, or maybe he remembers his mother serving him meat in the attic of their ancestral home on a snowy night.
Here I must confess that since leaving the cool climes of Kashmir, many of us have reduced our meat consumption and turned to vegetarianism to some extent. However, meat still remains one of our primary obsessions, and all our events, including some of our major religious festivals, feel incomplete without it.
Rice :
Rice is another level of addiction for us. I am saying addiction because we actually start getting withdrawal symptoms if we go without it for a few days. Trust me on this. For us, only when we have eaten rice can it be considered as having finished our lunch or dinner. No matter how many sandwiches, pizzas, or dosas we have gobbled, unless and until at least one morsel of rice has not gone inside, we are technically unfed.
When I turned forty, cholesterol came calling, and we went to a doctor. He explained the precautions I needed to take and fleetingly mentioned that I should stop eating rice for some time. The words struck me like a lightning bolt, and I turned blank, not hearing a word after that. Finishing his ten-minute-long sermon using all the medical jargon to impress us, he asked whether I wanted to ask him anything.
All I could manage to say was, “Could we take the rice off the list? I mean, I’m Kashmiri.”
“So what?” the startled doctor replied.
“Sorry, I meant maybe we could change one of the pills, or perhaps you could suggest something else.” It looked more like I was haggling with a babu….’kuch le de ke ho sakta hai kya sir’ types.
In the next moment, I felt my embarrassed wife’s elbow nudging sharply into my floating rib as she looked sheepishly at the doctor. The kind doctor, however, understood my predicament and smiled, saying, “Well, it is marginally high, but if you exercise hard enough, you can still remain a Kashmiri.” The sarcasm in his voice was unmistakable. My face lit up even though the nudge was almost puncturing my lungs by then.
The very next day, I started running and managed to beat my cholesterol, without taking any medication, in just four months. Even after that, I kept running and have participated in three editions of the Mumbai Marathon since then – all for the love of rice.
Another thing that really excites us is discovering and encountering another KP. We love to connect, and just hearing or seeing a KP surname name pop up anywhere almost brings us a rush of excitement. My children often tease me when they see me jumping out of my seat at the mere sight of a Kashmiri name on the screen, even if it’s in the smallest font in the bottom right corner and disappears even before I land back.
No wonder there is a KP association in almost all the places we live.
‘Big deal? – It’s called nostalgia, which applies to everyone living away from their homeland.’ You may say, ‘In fact, in your case, it borders on frivolous.’ You may even argue.
I would like to unfold a few points here. It is not even sane to compare living away by choice and having been forced out of your homeland along with your entire community, with little or probably no chance of return. Perhaps deep down in our hearts, we all fear that we might never be able to return to our land, and as a dwindling tribe, this frivolity may be our subconscious’s last-gasp efforts to save our identity.
It is the difference between missing your mother who stays in another town and missing her after having lost her. You tend to hang on to all the things that will keep her memories alive, and you connected to her. Frivolity be damned.
Prashant Pandita
A fun loving guy who, if not making sales plans, is making stories. Am an engineer by world standards, but a writer at heart who believes that every face is a story. I may not be as perfect as my children think of me, but neither am I as clumsy as my wife makes me out to be; maybe somewhere in between, though I personally feel that the scale might tilt more towards her perception. I love to spend my leisure hours sipping tea and reading books. Am a keen observer of life and the aspect that amazes me most about it is the certainty of uncertainty. I firmly believe that my being in Maharashtra is by a cosmic design. Since I could not settle in the land of lord Shiva, His son, lord Ganesha gave me refuge in his own land and has only pampered me as a host.
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