Lōal: The Valley of Love, Longing and Aching Memories

Babi watched the six o’clock news every evening. She would lean forward in her chair, body growing more rigid with each name the announcer read, as if sitting closer to the television might somehow change the outcome. She was waiting, silently, to not hear one particular name, her youngest grandchild’s. Logically, there was no reason for the fear. But loal does not attend non-verbal reasoning lessons. It prefers worst-case scenarios, ideally in prose.

When my cousin was due to visit during the holidays, Babi became a different person entirely: her hands busier, her voice louder, the kitchen suddenly full of purpose. She would cook his favourite dishes, make endless cups of tea and simply sit there, gazing at him. When he was away, she ran an endless checklist in her mind: his health, his meals, his sleep, his studies; layering her loal with a fine, anxious dusting of worry. She passed away more than a quarter of a century ago, but her worry sits beside me still.

If you want to study loal in its purest form, you don’t need a vocabulary. You just need a grandmother. Preferably your own.

If you ask someone with a textbook to translate loal, they will probably frown, straighten their posture and say: “It means love. Or longing. Or desire.” All technically correct. All emotionally bankrupt.

Kashmiri is a beautiful language, full of words that shift meaning with context in ways few other languages can match; subtle yet direct, light yet heavy, simple on the surface but carrying entire histories underneath. And there cannot be a better example of that than loal, or lōal. Each time I stumble upon it in a book, something in me bristles. This is not it, I want to say, tapping the page like a strict teacher. This is not how the word sits in the Kashmiri chest.

Because loal isn’t just love. It is the feeling of love after it has been stretched, sun-dried, smoked and hung up like aal hattch (sundried bottle gourd slices) to survive a long winter that shows no sign of relenting. Love can see life through rose-coloured glasses; she is still allowed to remain soft. But loal . . . she is weathered by storms. She has lived life and seen things.

The scientific formula for this drug is: loal = love + distance + fear + aching pain + tight worry. The kind of worry you carry in your throat when you send someone you adore out into a world you don’t quite trust.

Loal is what stirs when love realises it cannot keep what it loves close. It is the quiet malfunction in the heart when the beloved, not just romantically, is out of reach in that bigger, more frightening, semi-permanent way. It is not the first flutter, nor the second. It is what remains after you have packed your child’s suitcase, smoothed their collar, told them to go and conquer the world, and then stood at the door afterward, staring at the hook where their bag used to hang.

In English, we would have to pile up words: longing, worry, tenderness, fear, homesickness, hope. We might say, “I miss you. I wish you were here. I love you.” In Kashmiri, we simply sigh and say “Loal chum aamut.” As if it is a visitor, a condition, a season.

Babi seemed designed to make loal visible. Her loal wore many layers of pherans. There was the loal for home, the real one in Kashmir, with its precise crack in the courtyard and that one window which framed the neighbourhood like a moving painting. She could walk you through that house room by room, ten years and many flats later, as if she had just livmut (mopped) the tchoka that morning. There was loal for her sons and daughters, scattered across the country. And then there was the loal for us, the grandchildren: a blend of adoration and sheer terror of the unknown.

As she moved between the homes of her children, she longed for the ones who weren’t close enough. She missed familiar voices, missed cooking for them, missed telling her grandchildren bedtime stories, or feeding them one batta myond at a time. Had we never left Kashmir, her entire clan and more would have been within her wings, waiting for her to bring out the batta thaal from her loving tchoka. Instead, she sat before a television, counting names.

That fear was not random. It was a direct descendant of her loal, stretched thin by distance and exile, born in a place where people had, too often, disappeared overnight, quietly, without explanation. She had already lived through the unthinkable once. Why would the news spare her twice?

On a recent visit to India, I picked up books by writers of Kashmiri origin, a small act that mends something in my chest. There is a particular pleasure in reading as an insider — in catching what only you can catch. A Habba Khatoon reference here, a samovar there, and somewhere, as a garnish, this word: loal. Sometimes I wish every book about Kashmir came with a glossary written by our grandparents. Every word seems to have an alternate identity, a split personality that only they can unlock, as if it first learned to breathe in their mouths before it reached ours.

For those of us who left Kashmir in 1990, loal attached itself like a forwarding address. You could change cities, hostels, countries, passwords; loal would quietly update its records and follow along. Our loal languishes silently for the home that stands tall in memory, with frosted windows and unnervingly clear vision; for sharing punn roth and dooyn at Herath with neighbours whose faces we can’t quite recall, though we still remember the exact number of steps between our front door and theirs. It sings for winters where everything froze except feelings, which remained stubbornly warm. It is what starts as a lump in the throat and ends with a barely audible whisper: “Gharuk chum aamut loal” . . .

Many of us who left Kashmir not by choice carry a private dictionary now. Some words travel easily into other languages. Others refuse to be translated. Loal sits at the top of that stubborn list, like a dog on a leash that has decided they would rather be dragged than move on their own. For those of us who have watched our Babis, Kaknis and Jigris track the evening news as though every bulletin might rearrange our lives, loal will always feel heavier.

It is love, yes, but love that never fully relaxes, never quite trusts that the people it holds dear will remain where it last left them. Your heart has become a kind of border itself: granting visas, stamping departures, monitoring arrivals, and never really sleeping. All you are left with is the echo in your soul of Lal Ded crying, ‘Zuh chum bramaan, garra gase-he’ (My soul wanders, longing to go home).