Those village elders of towering identities!

Dr Sanjay Parva ([email protected])

They were men and women of identities. And it was a time in my village when a person’s entire biography could be summoned with a gesture, a sound, or even a silence. No Aadhaar, no photo identity. No voter slip, no digital footprint. Just an old pair of khraav dragging across the fresh snow could mark a man’s presence – like a signature written in frost. Our elders, now most of them gone but still alive, were remembered not for what they possessed, but for what they emanated. Their identity was a lived vibration, a rhythm in the alleys, a texture in the wind.

One such man, whom we had in the village, was known by the sound his khraav (wooden slippers) produced. Calling an elder by his name was forbidden. All elders were uncles and all aunts poffs or maass. This uncle’s khraav had a voice of its own. In winter, when snow turned the lanes into muffled white scrolls, he would emerge at dawn like a monk from a cave – his khraav trailing behind him with a low, deliberate rasp. The rasp defined him. The sound was unmistakable: wood over snow, the earth breathing through age. Children would stop mid-play, women would pause mid-gossip, and even dogs would look up from their curled slumber. His steps wrote poetry on the snow, slow syllables of resistance to haste. You could tell the weather by how his khraav moved: heavy on wet snow, feathered on frost. It was as though he was dragging not just his khraav, but time itself. His khraav accorded him respect. And everyone will bow in reverence.

Then there was another uncle, whose presence was stitched into the very air with his voice – thick as old molasses and always stuffed, like a winter kangri smothered in coals. Even spring could not lift the density from his throat. The voice was so stuffy that younger kids would hide in distress. When he spoke – and he did rarely – it felt like someone trying to push a prayer through fog. His sentences arrived wrapped in wool, slow, weighty, full of pause. If he coughed before speaking, it was a call to attention; if he didn’t, it was a sermon. People said he once sang at Sufi gatherings. Others said a childhood pneumonia had stitched cotton into his lungs. But whatever the story, his voice remained – a slow-burning wick of presence. We didn’t need to see his face to know he had entered the street. He was felt like the pressure before snowfall.

Another uncle was not a whisper – he was the ghost of one. His voice moved like mist across the Dal on a January morning – fragile, trailing, never settling. Yet he was the most talkative elder of all. You’d see him at the lone shop in the village (which remained usually shut), narrating entire epochs of village life, but his words came as though from another dimension, always just out of reach. You leaned in, lips parting, ears straining – and still, you’d catch only the essence, not the form. His stories were like old photographs half-eaten by mildew. You never got the full picture, but you treasured the fragments all the more.

And then there was my mother’s bestie Saddr Maas – ah, she didn’t walk. She arrived. She heralded by the curling scent of burnt wood from her kitchen chores, the scent battling in the air like ancestral spirits. She wore her pheran like a robe of judgment, her presence dense as temple incense. You smelled her before you saw her. The scent filled a room like discipline. Even the naughtiest of children straightened their spines when it wafted in through the windows. We would know she had arrived long before we would see her. She wasn’t merely another mother – for mother she was an empress and prophecy, saffron and coal, sharp as salt and sacred as silence. Sometimes we felt she was mother’s personal Radio Station – she got all the news from far and wide and delivered the same secretly in mother’s ear.

Then there was an uncle, whom dad had named as jatt-goer (a happy-go-lucky person). His laughter was his identity: a cascade of wheezes that started in his belly, climbed his chest, and always ended in a fit of coughing that shook his bones. We felt shaken too. It was the kind of laugh that left people infected, whether or not they understood the joke. Once, someone tried to explain geopolitics to him. And in response, he held his cigarette between his pinkie and ring finger, took a long and angry drag and blew smoke in the person’s face. He had almost crushed the cigarette in the act. God knows why!

Old Kashmir was a mosaic of such identities – not recorded in files but echoed in footfalls, gestures, voice timbres, smells, and pauses. Before phone numbers and OTPs reduced us to a series of digits, we were metaphors carried on the lips of others. Our elders didn’t go viral. They lingered. Like songs from the radio of memory.

However, the most unique of all characters was this uncle who was eldest to all uncles. He would clear her throat exactly thrice before speaking, like knocking on the door of his own voice. The first was always dry, the second hesitant, the third full of authority. It was said that if he coughed a fourth time, someone in the village would surely cry before nightfall.

These weren’t quirks. These were passports into the sacred geography of memory. They weren’t traits. They were coordinates in time. They were identities without names. And mind it, their identities were not something they wore. They were something they became. And in reality, they were never gone. They only became the village.

An author, a communications strategist, Dr Sanjay Parva was a debut contestant in 2024 Assembly elections