A personal essay from a new book asks what freedom has meant over the decades for women in Kashmir

Words … and the controversies they create! It’s all a matter of semantics, really. The change that words bring about comes over years and across continents – by the changing of their spellings, pronunciations and, most of all, the way they tend to be used. As time goes by, a word can have several connotations.

One such word is “Azadi”. Personally, it has meant different things at different times and stages of my life.

When I was in school, it meant the freedom to choose the time to go there, the choice to call every day a Sunday, and to wear the clothes I chose each day, oblivious to the hard reality that curbs were already in place, a long time before I was born or even conceived. The stars were in motion, deciding my fate, my religion, the weight of the burden I had to bear in my life journey, even the time and season of when I would be born.

My mother was a simple and affectionate woman who was married into a family from the landed aristocracy. She suffered in silence all her life, her only relief being my tricks and boisterous laughter. There were no choices in her life;...

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