Curfewed Night

Beautifully written, brutally honest and deeply hurtful. Khushwant Singh.Basharat Peer was a teenager when the separatist movement exploded in Kashmir in 1989. Over thefollowing years countless young men, seduced by the romance of the militant, fuelled by feelingsof injustice, crossed over the Line of Control to train in Pakistani army camps. Peer was sent off toboarding school in Aligarh to keep out of trouble. He finished college and became a journalist inDelhi. But Kashmir-angrier, more violent, more hopeless-was never far away.In 2003, the young journalist left his job and returned to his homeland to search out the stories andthe people which had haunted him. In Curfewed Night he draws a harrowing portrait of Kashmirand its people. Here are stories of a young man s initiation into a Pakistani training camp; a motherwho watches her son forced to hold an exploding bomb; a poet who finds religion when his entirefamily is killed. Of politicians living in refurbished torture chambers and former militants dreamingof discotheques; of idyllic villages rigged with landmines, temples which have become armybunkers, and ancient sufi shrines decapitated in bomb blasts. And here is finally the old story of thereturn home-and the discovery that there may not be any redemption in it.Lyrical, spare, gutwrenching and intimate, Curfewed Night is a stunning book and an unforgettableportrait of Kashmir in war.