The Farewell That Broke a Decade of Silence in Kashmir

By Sadaf Masoodi

I am almost done with the overwhelm that life creates in one messy a mind, like mine. I hinged on absolute numbness for a while but I wanted to come back to my old self and did. 

Now it is again hard to contain myself, but even if you were not as much of an emotional mess, how would you feel if you lost a teacher suddenly who was one whole part of your childhood?

The tastes of memory are tricky. They change, and so does the force of memory. You never know when, or how, it may suddenly inundate you, and what long lain fragments it will yield.

The last time I saw Ishtifar ma’am was almost a decade ago. She taught me in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades. After that I rarely met her. But when the tens of ghosts seemed to leave me as I howled over her cold, pale body, I felt like I had been meeting her every single day and I had never departed from the little peit on which she taught me, sitting across on the other side. I loved her and feared her every day, even after the tuition stopped. 

Ishtifar ma’am used to come home to tutor me. She loved me, but she absolutely hated my war with numbers and mathematics. I never knew how to do maths right. 

During one vacation, when she wasn’t coming home to teach me, my term results came and I scored a seven out of 50 in maths. I was in the fifth grade. I was secretly relieved that school and tuition were off because I wouldn’t have to face her wrath immediately.

But she arrived at our home the very next day, just to shove some sense into my maths-blind mind. Abu was equally disappointed and had stopped talking to me. When I mentioned it to her, she changed her stance, and made it very clear to Mamma that I wasn’t that bad enough to deserve Abu’s cold silence.

I love how she laughed. It was the most unique laughter. The tip of her tongue would instinctively graze her upper lip, and her shoulders would dance to the rhythm of her laughter. She was so full of energy and intelligence, but that only faded, year after year, after her marriage.

The teacher who taught me neat handwriting, science, and english and Schrödinger’s equation, feared being seen as helpless after her divorce. She had emotionally fought far too much, so she clung to the marriage, albeit on paper alone. She probably knew she no longer had the same energy she would need to face the cruel, ugly world as a divorcee, she navigated, with brilliance. 

The ghosts of memory lamented as they were being exorcised from me when I sat next to her disjointed body, in disbelief of how Allah could suddenly take her away without having given her the closure of her sufferings. I heard a woman cry out, “Sharam kerthai, sharam daar koori.” Her suffering didn’t deserve this wailing  ‘praise.’ 

I often think about how abusive marriages drain women of life, slowly and relentlessly, like water wearing down stone until the woman they once were survives only as a memory. Ishtifar ma’am always comes to mind.

I wanted to call her and talk to her, but I never knew what to say. A decade of life stood between us, or so I thought. I never knew how to reach out. I wondered if she would be surprised to see how her shy little girl had changed so completely.

More than worrying about what she would think of how much I had changed, I wondered how I could hold the pain of a woman as strong and brilliant as her. I knew the conversation would eventually turn to her suffering. Somehow, even without staying in touch, I always carried her pain in my heart. I felt it in my bones.

Even then, she remained the same fierce woman in my mind. She was the teacher who laughed loudly, spoke her mind without fear, took pride in her hard work and brilliance, and never gave up. 

She raised her son on her own, kept working, and refused to surrender until a car struck her on July 18, bringing that extraordinary life to an end.

Now she sleeps beside her dead father. She chose dignity while living, she chose dignity in death. She chose her resting home, not many dead married women get to choose their burial by the side of their fathers. 

I remember once waking up with my fevered head resting on her lap. She gently planted a kiss on my cheek. She had come home, like she did every day, to teach me. I was asleep because I was sick. She had her own ways of loving me. I knew I was important to her, until marriage consumed, among many things, one such thing that was once important to her.

She met Mamma once, after she had stopped tutoring me, and shared how she had broken down on a street when she saw a little girl who resembled me. 

Whenever I wonder why it has never truly bothered me when people leave my life, where I found the self-love that anchors me, or why I carry a deep sense of worth, I remember what she once told my mother. She had broken down because she missed me.

I was there when she got engaged. I was there when she got married. I was there when her father left for the pilgrimage. She kept me near, on all her special days. I am important to myself because I was important to Ishtifar ma’am. 

I remember how she set aside all her work when her father had to leave for the pilgrimage and sent me to her neighbours’ asking them to tend to my ugliest frostbites. She came over, had me dip my frostbitten toes in a hot water tub.

She teased me, loved me, and made me feel important. She appreciated every little thing I made for her, like the origami “I love you Ma’am.” She hugged and kissed me and my younger brother when we made the place warm with kanger and blankets folded one over other during the harsh winters, before she arrived for the tuition.

But it had been a decade since I had seen her or spoken to her.

No, this is not one of those shallow quotes about love. You do not have to speak to someone every day to love them from a distance. Even after nearly a decade apart, I felt as though I met her every day. I still believe I can write about the feelings she must have carried through all those years when we were not in touch. 

A living part of her stayed with me, somewhere deep in my heart. I cannot explain how. It simply did.

It still feels like a coincidence that the news of her death reached me, and that I saw her one last time after a decade, on the very day she returned to her Lord.

In a way, she called me to meet her. It was her final reminder that I still held a place in her heart.

Five days before she died, I suddenly felt I had to invite Ishtifar ma’am to my brother’s wedding. Guilt washed over me when I realised she did not even know I was married. I kept wondering how she would feel. 

In my mind, I apologised to her over and over, explaining how everything had happened so suddenly, how small the wedding was, and why I had never reached out. The guilt stayed.

Five days later, I was begging her to get up and listen to me. I wanted her to complain, smile, and see how unbridled her shy little Sadphi, as she called me, had become. 

I begged her to return to the place where she had always lived, deep in my heart, distant but alive, instead of becoming a memory carried by an obituary.

I never learned the equations from Ishtifar Ma’am as well as I should have, but she taught me something far greater: what survives every attempt to erase a woman is her loud laugh, the dignity with which she lived, the son she raised with unwavering love, and the grave where she now rests beside her father.

I knelt beside her on the day of her burial, and years of memories broke open at once: home tuitions, frostbitten toes, laughter, scoldings, jokes, and a love that had survived a decade of silence.

It still feels as though she called me for one last meeting, leaving behind one final reminder that I had always mattered to her.

Some people leave the world, others never leave the hearts they shaped. Ishtifar Ma’am will always be one of them.

I will carry her story for as long as I live. Until we meet again, InshaAllah, in the shade of Jannah.

• The author is a senior scribe and scholar whose work focuses on memory, gender, cinema, and health. She has worked with ActionAid Association, served as a National Gender Fellow at IT for Change, and is a Laadli Media and Advertising Fellowship awardee. She can be reached at [email protected].