MAY 2017 FORBES ASIA | 59after a stray bullet killed her husband, and her in-laws kicked
her out of the house.
I pushed through the human thicket to the consulting
room. Arshad was easy to spot: a remarkably placid man of
about 30 with thick curly hair who exuded calm amid the
bedlam. Like most buildings in Srinagar, the hospital was
unheated, and Arshad had forsaken white doctor’s garb for
a leather coat and scarf. He sat at a table chin in hand, while
patients and their assorted relatives swarmed about, all talking
at once. In the space of 20 minutes, Arshad took a call on his
cell phone from a suicidal patient and handed a box of pills to
a woman who thought her murdered brother was following
her around. A former detainee, too scared to stay home alone,
wanted to talk, as did a widow who fainted at the memory of
her husband’s shooting. Meanwhile, several men desperate
to refill their tranquilizer prescriptions tried to barge into the office.
Arshad apologized to me for not serving the salted tea that is tradi-
tionally given to guests. “It’s a bit busy today,” he said dryly.
At that moment the guards let in a middle-aged man with
vacant eyes. Arshad lit up with recognition and gestured for him to
sit. He explained to me that Abdur Rashid Kawdar was on a suicide
watch. Kawdar had wandered like a restless ghost ever since he
found his brother’s body by the river, his throat slit. Then Indian
soldiers killed his brother-in-law. The murders had occurred back
in 1991, but Kawdar still feared being caught in a dragnet. Unable to
hold down a job, he visited the psychiatric clinic every day.
“There’s no sense of security in any conflict zone. Here the po-
litical turmoil undermines other things, like their sense of identity.
The sense of a solution has not arrived and that creates immense
frustration. They are in limbo,” Arshad observed.
The word “limbo” was apt. His patients were mostly civilians
caught in the middle, on a sort of existential border, a psychological
buffer zone offering no resolution or relief.
I asked him how he powered on.
He looked surprised, as though he hadn’t considered the matter
for some time. “There is a good question. How do I keep up spirits?
Seeing someone get well after six weeks gives me such satisfaction.
You have to focus on those cases.”
But what about all the people he couldn’t help? He gave an enig-
matic smile. “I can’t change the political situation.” This was 2008.
Arshad assures me conditions remain the same in Srinagar today.
Indeed, I thought, Kashmiris were right to refer to their
district as an “island” in the sky. With its geographic isolation,
challenging topography, and desperate, dangerous, unending
geopolitical quagmire, it’s indeed
like a lonely island, cut off from the
rest of the world. The hundreds of
patients I saw at the hospital were
emissaries from Kashmir’s 10 million
shipwrecked souls.
Excerpted from No Friends but the
Mountains: Dispatches from the World’s
Violent Highlands, by Judith Matloff
(©2017, Basic Books, an imprint of
Hachette Book Group)choked with lilies and pollution.
There was nothing remotely charming about getting about
the chaotic streets by car, however. Military checkpoints slowed
down traffic, so we had to budget time for random questioning by
uniformed patrols. You could wait an hour if stuck behind a vehicle
being searched by soldiers. And then there were the protests, which
could close off a street at a moment’s notice. One time we missed
an appointment because of a clash between “stone pelters” and
security forces. We made a wrong turn into a street where bandana-
clad youths had set up a barricade of burning tires; shops clanged
down their gates as the demonstrators hurled Molotov cocktails
at a truck of uniformed men. We had to wait until more security
forces arrived to teargas the lot, and by that time we just went back
to the hotel and drank tea in the chilly lobby. The sense of gloom
deepened with the low heavy clouds, whose gray matched the uni-
forms, the dirty snow, and the spirits at the government psychiatric
hospital, which I visited nearly every day for three weeks.
I intended to observe the psychic cost of repressed and denied
autonomy in a place that historically had shown no disposition for
mental illness. But I hadn’t adequately prepared myself for such an
unfathomable degree of crisis. By my visit, the psychiatric center
was drawing 100,000 patients a year. The clinic had not received
sufficient support, and the blue sign in front hung upside down on
a last hinge. Inside, it smelled of iodine and sweat. The walls were
streaked with grime, the floors with mud. Moaning and dazed
patients filled the corridors, kneeling, leaning. Some rocked back
and forth and muttered to themselves. People traveled from moun-
tain villages hours away, patients with relatives, for a five-minute
audience with my contact Arshad Hussain, a homegrown young
physician running the ward. Arshad’s resources are so stretched that
some people got a single, cursory session, with little or no follow-
up. The only thing in generous supply, surprisingly, was medication,
47 different varieties of antidepressants and antipsychotics whose
available supply was listed on a large blackboard.
My first day in the halls, we heard a loud clunk: a woman had
collapsed on the dirty floor. Her uncle tried to lift her. “She gets like
this,” he said. Her name was Farida Sunderwani, she was 34, and
like so many patients had come from higher up the slopes to see the
doctor. Her hamlet had no clinic. She experienced anxiety head-
aches so severe that she ripped out her hair. She suffered a collapseFAn Indian soldier stands guard after a gun battle with militants in September of last year.TAUSEEF MUSTAFA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES (TOP)