The Books We Burn in Silence

The Books We Burn in Silence

The chinar trees of Srinagar loomed like ancient scribes, their leaves hissing secrets in the August breeze as Zahra wove through the Chinar Book Festival’25. Stalls burst with stories, their pages exhaling ink and mingling with the smoky tang of kahwa from a nearby vendor. For Zahra, an avid reader, books were her rebellion against the occupation’s chokehold, a shield against the valley’s pulse of violence. She darted between tables, her fingers brushing worn spines, until A Dismantled State:


The Untold Story of Kashmir After 370 by Anuradha Bhasin caught her eye. Its cover promised raw truth. She grabbed it, paid with a quick nod, and hurried home, craving its secrets. That night, she curled up under a flickering lamp, devouring pages that sang of Kashmir’s scars, each word a defiance of the silence outside.


The next morning marked the sixth anniversary of Article 370’s revocation, but that morning it also brought Zahra’s carefully crafted world among her books to it hunches. A news alert scorched her phone: 25 books, including A Dismantled State, banned for “false narratives.” The voices of Arundhati Roy, A.G. Noorani and others were now contraband, outlawed under the guise of security. The festival, a beacon of stories, turned into a hunted ground. Zahra’s chest tightened, fury and grief colliding.


She scrapped plans to revisit the nine-day event, instead crouching by her bookshelf, heart pounding as she hid her forbidden titles. The banned books stared back like wounded friends, their absence echoing in the chinar trees’ mournful rustle outside.


A few days of fearfully guarding her treasured pieces filled with gloom felt like chains. News of raids on various bookshops, the local libraries, and a few homes made her uneasy. Determined to break free, Zahra slipped back to the festival before it folded. At a weathered stall, Chacha Inayat, a bookseller with eyes like deep wells of untold tales, observed the young girl’s plight. Her eyes like many others were filled with unrest and a longing as she looked around the book stalls.


She moved to his stall, absentmindedly tracing the various titles. Chacha Inayat had known her and her love for books from its earlyages. Vowing to save her withering soul from this devastation, he pressed a crumpled note into her palm. It had an address and a time for that evening. Her pulse quickened.


Zahra stepped into a dim room where young readers whispered over torn pages of banned books, memorizing Kashmir’s identity. Aamir held a smudged photocopy. “Ban it, and everyone wants to read it,” he said with awe. Leila added, “Nazis burned books, American schools ban stories, it’s a global cage.” Chacha, silent watcher of lost voices, slid a file marked THE SILENCED. Inside were photos of Iqbal, Rahi, Agha Shahid Ali, and slain journalist Shujaat Bukhari. “They don’t just ban paper,” he rumbled.


“They ban the soul—the lullabies, lakes, and blossoms that keep a people alive.” Zahra’s throat burned. “Why punish words though?” she choked out. Chacha’s gaze hardened, the file heavy as stone. “A story’s a world. A poem maps a people’s soul. Burn it, and you erase them, swapping their memory for a map’s cold lines. Our words live in the messy, human truth. That scares the ones who crave control.” His voice surged, reciting a poem from a jailed youth, each line a blade:


For eons upon eons, they always took the same route: Lock the paper, ban the pen, and turn it all to soot. Silence every press, strangle every sigh; Cage the songbird, banish every lullaby. But then, the mountains learnt to cry, Memories turned to ink, truth soared high. They banned the alphabet and purged the stories out, Yet the void on the shelf, always there to shout.


The verse cracked the air. Zahra’s tears turned to fire, her hands itching to act. They plotted to safeguard their Identity, their history, their Kashmir. PDFs, secret trades, a web to defy erasure. Her heart thrummed with fear and fierce resolve, mirrored in the group’s defiant eyes. That night, Zahra perched on her balcony, the valley hushed but for a muezzin’s distant call. A forbidden page glowed under her phone’s flashlight, its words pulsing with Kashmir’s truth. Her phone buzzed with passages swapped, plans sparking.


The chinar trees swayed, their leaves clapping for the stories that refused to die. In that electric quiet, Zahra vowed to keep the words alive, a rebellion kindling to light the dawn.re and history, the question remains: when will justice arrive for the people of Kashmir?

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