I’m a Kashmiri Muslim studying English literature in Indian capital, Delhi. Every working day I have to travel from my lodge in Munirka to Jamia Millia Islamia, where I’m enrolled in a Masters Programme. The place where I stay is a cluster of many-storied, seemingly illegal, concrete buildings, opposite the main gate of Jawaharlal Nehru University, another premier university.

The chokingly narrow street which leads from the main road to my lodge is often busy with donkeys, drunkards and polished prostitutes. Sometimes in the late evenings, I see the clients waiting in glazing new Innovas and plush Boleros. But they keep on disappearing away. The prostitutes are professionally punctual.

For last one and a half year I have been living in different places in Delhi. Have been traveling in its uncomfortable buses. A few days after Kosovo got its independence from Serbia, I was traveling in a shaky deformed bus to ‘my’ University. It was a February day and sun shone insidiously. As the bus with grubby seats grew irritatingly crowded and some passenger farted uncontrollably, the teenaged beetle-chewing conductor lost his temper. He started smoking and returned money without customary folding. For me it was difficult to read Said’s interview from my book, which I have got from Priyas, one of the finest PVR malls, in the southern part of the city. As it lay on my bag, over my raised knees pressing against the nude wooden back of the seat that lay in front of me and my fellow passenger. Reading Said often makes my exhausting hour long journey easy. Defending him in class gives me a role to play, renders my day meaningful and fills it with inspiration.

But that day it grew queerly suffocating inside bus. My fellow traveler, who usurped most space of the seat, was a Muslim too. A mid-forties man with a scandalous henna-colored beard and missing moustache, in rough shalwar and kurta, two black cotton plugs of the ear-phone burying deep into his hairy ears, he was drowned into radio FM. His stubby index finger bore a silvery ring, in the heart of which was inscribed the name of Allah in Arabic. I asked him to move a bit to his side. He didn’t listen to me. He was listening to music and moving his feet and looking at the smoke and shops out-side. The discolored Motto mobile phone looked small in his rough fleshy hands. I tried to continue reading only to avoid looking into his complacent haggard face. To avoid looking into the restlessly lazy crowd inside. Not to be looked back by them. Luckily I got a call from one of my friends and talked to him for almost half an hour.

Coincidentally the guy, a childhood friend of mine, was also traveling in the bus in my hometown Islamabad, while he spoke to me. Flashes of occasional groping in buses drifted past while I kept blankly looking into the restive bustle outside. I sharply remembered many gangs of teen-aged boys who purposely get into buses to nudge and elbow the breasts of women traveling in overcrowded undersized small cab-like buses. Somehow my ordeal was over. Past Hauz Khas, South Extension, Lajpat Nagar, Maharani Bagh, Julena, I was reaching the campus.

A House For Mr. Biswas. That was the novel to be discussed in the class. Our senior Professor gave us a detailed sketch about the life of the writer and emphasized its spacio-temporal dimension. She went on to lecture us that one needs to locate oneself in time, space and culture(or civilization) in order to know oneself. To know where one belongs. One always needs to define oneself vis-à-vis the other. The writer V.S.Naipaul, is a Trinidadian of Indian origin who was eventually educated in West.

After the class near the coffee-shop where people were sunning themselves, one of my class-mates asked me why is the book one of my favourites. She had caught the paradox. Said has been the furious critic of Naipaul throughout his luminous career.

Naipaul’s pain is the pain of displacement from one’s home. A House for Mr.Biswas encapsulates that pain in a beautiful form with the lucidity and richness of realism. The book is not only Naipaul’s debut for racialising but an imaginative rendering of how his father and he himself felt and lived and suffered on a tiny island(not bigger than a dot on worldmap),in the process of knowing and locating themselves. The evocation is so bare and panoramic that the urge of its craftsman is simply convincing. The later Naipaul who has been living like a cozy paying-guest, is different from an ambitious boy who left for England on a scholarship. He has to choose between India or England . He choose neither. Or if at all he choose it’s later at the cost of maligning later and everyone and everything that is non-Western.

Siad from the very beginning knew his pain. What it is, where it lies. But unable to go back and live peacefully in his home, he bore Palestine in heart and mind.He died in exile while working for his nation, before living a life of determined Palestinian nationalist. His pain was too profound to be encapsulated by the form of novel or any other strict elaborate genre. That’s why we can see its grave glimpses in the fluidity of essays only. Where the message oozes through all opacity of language and strikes us with a rational cogency.

While I thought of saying all this to my Delhite friend, she excused herself as she got a call from her friend. She kept on talking for a while. Everything looked dazzled with clarity as I also sat sunning myself. Looking at the students around and sipping sugary tea against her. The feeling that Kosovars are all jubilation brought a deep smile to my tea-touched lips. In her blue jeans and Benetton Tea-shirt, she sat opposite me. Looking askance. Was I smiling at her new braided hairstyle? We left for another class to be lectured on National Culture.

When I came back, I slept in my disordered room for an hour or so and then drank a pack of apple juice(manufactured in Himachal Pradesh) and read a few pages of Istanbul. I felt a deep longing for Srinagar,the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir.My village lies at a distance of some sixty kilometers in the south of city. But still I felt that no city could be mine if not Srinagar . The city where perhaps I’ll find my own voice.

In a fit of convulsive despair, I went to J.N.U. and gulped down some rice and vegetables and rushed to Priyas which at some ten-minutes walking distance. While I was walking on the edge of footpath, I remembered that the passenger worked in a buthcher’s shop in Batlahouse. Batlahouse is another unplanned agglomeration of burnt-out dirt-plagued buildings, a Muslim locality around Jamia Millia. Before coming to Munirka I used to put up near by and often went to Batla House for buying mutton. The mutton shop where this guy with scandalous beard and missing moustache worked, is one of the most thriving shops there. Some Professor from Jamia Millia has written an Urdu poem praising the shop; The great quality mutton it serves, alluring the customers from far and wide. Even I liked the way the missing moustache man cuts the meat and places it in silvery disposable plates before wrapping the pieces into a huge green leaf and then into a polythene bag. The Professor’s imagination couldn’t help capturing the spectacle. The poem encased in a glass frame hangs on the fly-infested wall behind the man. Stands singularly as an artistic statement, a mark of cultural achievement.

It was almost eleven when I reached Priyas and most shops were closing. Priyas which during day, is a surrealistic setting flushed with growing Indian upper middle-class energy looked sinsterly calm. My solepsicm sharpened.I went to back-street where a girl and a boy where drinking beer in front of the Jammu and Kashmir Bank. I walked past and looked at two dogs which were jumping flambyuoantly in the surrounding drowsy romance. Suddenly I saw a Kashmiri friend of mine waving at me from inside the glasses of a big cafe.

I went inside and found him extremely happy. Only a few people were inside. The guy who has come up from the valley to work here seemed to relish the city. I enquired about the reasons of his unusual gaiety.

He passed me a new issue of Outlook magazine in which Arundhati Roy’s new talk delivered in Turkey , has come up. He said, his innocent eyes glowing optimistically, that he likes Arundhati and her position on Kashmir .

I agreed and we came out. The cafe was the last to be closed. We talked for some time. Then hugged each other promising to meet once more.

I was walking the narrow street and again looking at the lip-sticked girls coming out of it. But when I reached my room and was all to myself, I grew intensely sick and lonely. I called the friend with innocent eyes and said,

‘There is no doubt that Kashmir is a military occupation of India but progressive voices like her get lost in the larger din of pervasive jingoistic clamour. It only scratchs along the margins of Indian mainstream discourse on Kashmir . Dude! There is no point being happy. We need to make radical departures. India, anyways, is different from Sartre’s France …………’

The bucks in my cell phone finished. Only after an hour of restlessness, I was able to sleep. The idea of Kosovo’s indepence returned but only with the feeling that the day after I once again would be late for my classes.