Silence in "I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight”"

Silence seems to become an imperative device in “I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight” in communicating themes of loss and pain, of lamenting an alternative reality that leaves this pain behind. A silence that is manifested in the physical and the spiritual, the living and the dead, in the inversions of polar binaries represented in the poem where darkness is preferred over light and insanity over sanity, and finally in the land that seems to have given up entirely.

In the very first stanza Shahid presents a “city from where no news can come” despite the chaos that seems to swallow it and along with the identities of the people. His imagery depicts a time when the deaths of the Kashmiris have become silent as well, where the ghost is insistent upon not telling his father of his death and becoming another “unburied boy in the mountain”. The land once associated with paradise breeds a silent grief where mothers cannot mourn, and families may not lament their estrangement from their loved ones. Instead the people speak “unheard” and in this quiet cannot be identified separately from “the hundreds of pairs of shoes”.

He then emphasizes the loss of religion, and more than that the loss of the comfort it provides. The image of the men “clutching gods” and leaving is hence an embodiment of the silence of religion. It also emphasizes that while people and houses burn in Kashmir every day, the silence becomes an acceptance of the death and loss that surrounds them. And once silence becomes so deeply instilled within the life of the freedom fighter then preference for darkness only emblematizes the effect of that silence, where the days are marked by blood staining the Himalayas and nights provide a solace and distance from the disturbing images.

It is only fitting then, that silence must be overcome in the shadows, that it is the voice of the shadows that persists and moves through Kashmir in search of a voice of hope and possibility and perhaps this is why the shadow must take it upon itself to “find its body”. The shadow tells the writer that “each night put Kashmir in your dreams” because that is a place safe from destruction, untouched by the pain. Hence “I have been cold a long long time” could in fact symbolize the poet’s hope of a future where Kashmir will be revived from the ashes.