Curfewed Night by Basharat Peer

From The Week of February 20, 2011

In this gripping memoir, Mr. Peer brings to life a part of the world which, while familiar to us in name, is, for most of us in the West, nothing more than disputed ground on a distant continent. For Mr. Peer, however, Kashmir is home: where his parents raised him, where his grandparents loved him, and where his community nurtured him into adulthood. Though it has been contested ground since 1947, it was, in his youth, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, a largely peaceful place where the author and his peers underwent adolescences not unlike those experienced by teenagers in the developed world. But with the acceleration of violent posturing between India and Pakistan in the late 1980s, and through into the 1990s, Kashmir became a proxy state, neutral but mutually claimed ground in which armies from both sides skirmished in a kind of Asian cold war which obliterated Kashmir's civil society and triggered an exodus of native Kashmiri to other lands.

Curfewed Night is an exceptionally moving piece of journalism. Mr. Peer's understated narration permits the reader to be a vicarious witness to an underreported tragedy of cold war, the fallout that lands on innocents ground up between the gears of two massive and conflicting states. There are political opinions here, as Mr. Peer leaves little doubt of his resentment over the Indian crackdown which was a deathblow to his homeland, but this is primarily a chronicle of one boy's coming of age in a time of tension and strife. First, he watches some of his friends radicalized to fight in a hopeless war, then he feels the terror of having his honorable father and his proud village both put squarely in the crosshairs of Indian reprisal. By the end of his adolescence, it's clear that he has been changed forever.

This is an old story that has, and will, be told of many lands, places destroyed because of quirks of politics and geography that fatefully entrap them between agitated behemoths. I doubt, however, many of such accounts have been composed with such pride, sadness, empathy, and passion. In exposing the price he paid for watching his homeland sundered, Mr. Peer teaches those who read this book a lesson about the consequences of national conflict and national policy they won't soon forget. (5/5 Stars)