I thought about the ideas of Dagg and your article (Politics of emotion).

I am exploring the idea of

Dagg especially in its form as an intimate love pang. This I will be reading through the idea of
love/relationships- love letters that emerged from it especially as I observed during 2019 lockdown to
say that the pain here is not self inflicted/or just another love pain, but weaved in with the political
situations
 
Siege / noun : A military operation in which enemy forces surround a town or building, cutting off essential
supplies, with the aim of compelling those inside to surrender

Every day “normalcy” was announced to us in the confines of our home-prisons. Once, Radio
Kashmir’s news broadcast, Shaher Been, had nothing to say: “We regret to cut our broadcast short as
we have no access to communication networks.” 
Strangers brought news of loved ones away from home. 
 
 
“I would call home repeatedly knowing no one would answer and send messages knowing they won’t
get through.” 
 
The curfew that was placed prevented numerous young lovers and newlyweds from contacting their
partners, giving rise to psychological stress, depression and panic attacks, local doctors say.

“While my heart was palpitating in the remembrance of my beloved who had remained cut off from
me for more than two months, I kept hoping against all odd thoughts. I became a patient of
depression, for which I went to a psychiatric consultant who prescribed me sleeping tablets,” 

On October 2, 2019, Sheema (name changed), 28, a resident of Srinagar, couldn’t contain herself and
left in search of her boyfriend Suhail Dar
To meet Dar, who lived in the Barzulla area of Srinagar, Sheema walked nine kilometres but didn’t
know his exact location. As she began wandering the alleys of the area, the locals thought she was a
police informer. Soon, they learnt she was just in search of her boyfriend. She had to return without
meeting him after she found out that he, along with his family members, had temporarily shifted to
Jammu.

Finally, Sheema and Dar spoke on October 14, after the administration announced the restoration of
postpaid mobile services. “It was like Eid for me when I spoke to my partner after 72 days,” Sheema
exclaimed.

Sarfaraz Yousuf, 28, a resident of south Kashmir’s Anantnag district, found out that by the time the
clampdown had lifted, his girlfriend had been forced into marriage by her parents.
 
Psychiatrists are of the opinion that the absence of communication among the couples for a long
period could lead them to depression.
 
Dr Yuman Kawoos, a psychiatrist who works in the district hospital at central Kashmir’s Ganderbal

district, stated that she treated dozens of such patients who were in a relationship and were in a state

of first-episode depression because of the communication lockdown.

She added that a lot of such patients needed treatment for anxiety, panic attacks, restlessness and

sleep disturbance patterns.

However, even after the restoration of cellular mobile services, the after-effects of the communication

gag is still present among couples.

 
In a north Kashmir village earlier last month, Kaysir Malik, a young manager with a small media
company in Srinagar, saw two strangers pacing up and down the road for the third time in less than an
hour.
“Who are you looking for? You don’t belong to this place, do you?” Kaysir confronted them, stepping
towards the youths, “What is your business here?”
“We are looking for Majid sahib, the fruit dealer,” one youth replied, “He had given a cheque to my
father but it has bounced. I have to meet him over this issue.”
“But no one by that name lives in this village,” Kaysir said, promptly, his voice now attaining
menacing overtones, “Don’t act smart with me. Tell me why you are here or I will call the neighbours.”
 

Many youngsters, however, are taking the challenges posed by the communication blockade in their
stride, even as they struggle to vent their frustrations.
The two youths who surfaced outside Kaysir’s home had travelled more than 90 km from Shopian, in
south Kashmir. One of them studies at a nursing college in Srinagar, where he fell in love with a girl
from a village in north Kashmir a year ago.
He spoke with the girl on the night of 4 August, when communication lines were suddenly snapped
and all Kashmiris, in an unprecedented security clampdown, were virtually put under house arrest.
Now, he had travelled all the way from Shopian, just to get a glimpse of her.

The girl’s father repeated that no one by the name of Majid sahib, the fruit dealer, lives in the village,
and that it was better for the young boys to return home. He even offered them tea but it was declined
by Kaysir.
At this point, a girl craned out her neck from the window on the second floor. For a moment, she is
frozen in shock and awe.
“Saw the girl?” Kaysir said, as they walked on the deserted road in the village.
“I saw the crescent of Eid,” the youth replied.
 

 
 
Sameer Bhat, a student of Sri Pratap College, got in touch with his girlfriend on the third day of the
security clampdown. One of his cousins, his girlfriend’s friend, went to her home in Jawahar Nagar
locality and installed a mobile app called ‘Talkie Pro’ on her phone.
Within limited distance, the app enables users to make video calls over WiFi without internet
connectivity.
“The only open space around their house is in the graveyard, where I go once in three or four days to
talk to her. However, neighbours are giving me suspicious looks lately, so I am thinking of buying a
shovel and taking a friend along to avoid any situation,” he said.
 
At Bagh-e-Mehtab locality on the outskirts of Srinagar, residents complain that groups of boys are I
met Aqib Nabi, a well-mannered boy from a business family at a park in Srinagar, who was pursuing
Bachelors in Commerce at Srinagar’s Cluster University. He was sitting alone on a bench beneath the
shade of a Chinar tree.
On 29 August, after making three failed attempts in a week, Aqib managed to throw a letter wrapped
around a stone into her room. “Waiting for you at Joggers Park. 3 pm. Every day, except Tuesday and
Friday,” the letter said.
It is a risky move that can land the girl in trouble with her family.
 

“Wars and conflicts care little for love and even less for the people that it has pitched its camp in”

 This article traces narratives of the personal and emotional struggle of Kashmiris through the realm of
ordinary intimate relationships in the extraordinary situation of conflict. It attempts to explore the idea
of Dagg as a love pang, turning political under state repression. The idea of love as allowing freedom,
a safe space to turn towards in moments of crises, itself becomes a crisis. Furthermore, it argues that
here love pangs caused by separation are not self- inflicted, instead it becomes one example of a
state directly entering one’s home,hearts and suffocating the life out of private lives. The article is
driven by the idea that undelivered love letters, as felt in times of siege is a different love and Dagg,
as an expression of the relentless pain caused by this is different than doud.  The essay steers clear
from  romanticizing  this pain, nor does it indulge in victimhood.Rather,it explores how Dagg could
provide sustenance and hope becoming important for the survival of the lover. 

Since the question of lost lovers is far and wide even in Kashmir, this paper specifically focuses on the
stories from the period of communication blockade in 2019. As Kashmir was incommunicado, love
faced a crisis   and the Dagg caused has had several mental,emotional and physical implications for
the people caught in between. I shall read through some love letters,social media posts and personal
observations to understand how Dagg as an intimate love pang in Kashmir could not be separated
from the extraordinary political situation. This is not to say all pain is caused by state, but some of the
most dreadful and heart-breaking love stories are directly caused by state repression as is also
evident in cases of half widows. In locating the source of this pain in a prolonged case of conflict, state
repression seeps into everyday life.That is to say it disrupts everyone and everything.  Therefore,it
becomes important to understand resistance and survival in its everyday and ordinary form.

This paper directly tackles the question “alongside the standing paramilitary guy on the road, there is
a distraught couple stealing kisses in the nearby park”. Who will write about them? Who will
remember their struggle?” as posed by a fellow Kashmiri artist and teacher. This essay leans more
towards exploring,questioning than seeking answers. 

When political conflict and state intrusion gets seeped into the very nature of everyday life, ordinary
acts like writing and sending across love letters without any guarantee of its deliverance becomes a
remarkable form of resistance. It resists ‘the abstraction of violence’ and normalisation of pain. Love
letters and ordinary love stories in extraordinary circumstances  allow us to identify sublime forms of
resistance; which in its most basic but important form could mean  hoping,loving,laughing- staying
alive. 

This is an account written from th e point of someone who saw Kashmir with Kashmiri from Delhi, the
realities of having to live in two time zones; siege time and Indian Standard Time. For both living in
and outside, time was a blur; one entity of present,past and future. 

What do we learn about everydays and love in Kashmir  through this exploration? 

Many social media posts as testimonials included poems from the besieged land late after the city had
already adapted to silence. The nature of this silence could be expressed in a remarkable verse of
Faiz ahmad faiz is tarah apni khamoshi goonji,goya har simt se jawab aye.

No calls, no text messages, no incoming, no outgoing, a deep silence did not mean death had taken
over life. Kashmiris  became carriers of personal messages, across borders.  You could see flights
taking off in Delhi and into the black hole. 

Cadbury hoarding- 

Around one late afternoon in October, after many moons and sunrises in Seige, my recently engaged
cousin called via one fortunate landline at her place.Her finance, living a sea and a continent away
already on the line was waiting in anticipation. I was waiting for her first hello to initiate a conference
call. As she said  hello M sunai de raha hai , I kept my phone on the nightstand and resumed making
notes for my upcoming test. Their anticipation, long wait, managing time zones and long  thank yous
were always new as the first day.  Each call was precious. Uzma Falak writes in a poem, hoping to
understand the passage of time in a siege through  noting the waxing and waning of the moon, one in
the sky and another of her nails. 

One day not being able to match timings, she could not talk her partner and in utter pain wailed ab
modi ki hi kami thi is zindagi me jo mene kam musibatein nahi bardasht ki thi is rishte ko nibhane me. 

Next day, I  travelled from North to South Delhi, just for a cup of nunchai and to hear someone talk in
Kohur. Some minutes in, another phone call from a distraught Kashmiri in Australia calling to be
connected with his recently wed wife in Kashmir. 45 seconds and possession of a landline acquired a
position of privilege and luck. In times of extreme deprivation, basic breathing has a way of becoming
a luxury.

This general list of everyday struggles piled on and bursted out as a trauma when I read Basra is no
more. After 72 days of siege a young former journalist had managed to dial  his partner’s number,
only to hear that  she had passed away.He was in fact calling her on her  chehlum, 40th day of a forty
day grieving period.What fate? What curse?  What is this inexplicable Dagg he felt; extreme
helplessness and numbness. Basra was no more. 

Dagg, koshur for a distinct kind of pain; is relentless and routinized. Dagg includes Doad(illness), but
bleeds out of a physical self into emotional and psychological. Dagg has presented itself in varied
forms; but this sudden onset of pain caused by a political situation forces one to recall one’s position
as a repressed/oppressed lover .There is love and then there is love in times war.  This pain caused
and felt and not only self-inflicted, instead caused by an active participation of the state in intimate
personal lives. Love, like all essential services, was in crisis. 

Another friend had recently returned to Kashmir and had fatefully found love just before the siege was
to begin. She wrote elaborate poems and would try to send letters to her partner via her young cousin,
sometimes only to see them returned undelivered and unread. 

Agha Shahid Ali’s country without a post office was rendered paperless, nobody could write to him or
any other beloved. 

Love according to me has an archival trait, it leaves traces or evidence even when such proofs could
mean trouble. All ‘documents’ of love; letters, gifts, pictures are immensely precious and private for a
reason. Age old trope of getting caught red-handed or via these documents could mean adverse
consequences for both the lovers; especially for females. However, in this situation private
correspondence was established mostly  via strangers or newly met fellow kashmiris. The idea of
private, hope of secrecy was a privilege. People just wanted to get across their message or maybe
give and have some sense of assurance that the other person was still holding the other end of the
thread. This grief of unending suffocation seeped in and expressed itself as numb sensation. Its
sipath; to keep trying to call,send text messages and write letters in hopes of getting it across. After
some time, inactive whatsapp accounts were deleted by default and the archive in its lost forever to
people who were forced into silence. 

Then say a prayer,

so ancient, it will be heard.
Breaking free
from the curfew,
all the lovers
will meet at the Red Square
and grind
the occupation against stones.
And, once again,
they will promise each other
to spend life and eternity
together in rain, sun
and snow,
so that, after 72 days of
siege,
no one has to write
a silent obituary to Basra.
No one has to write,
she is no more.
— A manifesto for love

Female narratives were confided to me, different from publicly declared grief of males.