Ghosts of ISIS and meeting Sartre in Srinagar Coffee House

I have saved the boarding pass of every flight I ever took to America. Sometimes, when I am sitting with my father in our house in the suburbs in Delhi, I take them out from a leather folder as craftily as a seasoned salesman puts outs his merchandise for display. One day Father picked up one, read its contents carefully after putting on his eyeglasses, and then said: "So, Mohammed Atta must have used a similar boarding pass?"

I didn't know what to tell him.

After the terror attack in Paris, when we spoke, I felt his voice quivering over the phone. After a few minutes of conversation, there was a pause after which he said: "Don't go to any concert hall there!"

Every time I have been in America, I have tried to show only good things to Father. On the Skype call that he takes once in two days on my niece's laptop, I move my camera around to show him what visiting-scholar apartments look like. I try to show him the enormity of buildings around me; I tell him how nobody honks on roads here (except in Manhattan!). I send him the pictures of stacks of food in departmental stores; I tell him how there is order everywhere and how everyone waits in queue. I don't think he understands the gravity of Ferguson. I have never told him about the cold "Sir" at the airport security that feels like that menacing dog in Abu Ghraib. I do not tell him about the depressing pharmaceutical ads on television. I do not tell him about the "Mister, Mister, one dollar, Mister" calls around the corners. I have always tried to create a picture-perfect place in America for him. Let there be one place in this world that he can make peace with, I tell myself. But in spite of my rosy tint, he remembers Mohammed Atta; in spite of how much reassuring I seem from here, he knows how one bullet can shatter much more than a spleen or a lung.

That is because of how our home came crumbling down eleven years before the twin towers did, and our Mohammed Attas are still out there - they have not even let us mourn at our Ground Zero. How do I describe that feeling? How do I tell my friends here that Delhi can never be my home? Or any other part of the world, America included. How do I tell them about the apple tree in front of my home in Kashmir, my beloved Kashmir, when there are millions like me, from Syria and elsewhere, who are hugging their olive trees in their dreams in far-off, alien lands!

Should I begin like how Hannah Arendt said a forlorn émigré Dachshund would speak in his grief: "Once when I was a St Bernard…"

Paris is a moveable feast, as Hemingway called it. So everyone's heart beats for it. Even the hobby horses who romanticised terrorism in Kashmir as some sort of Arab Spring have their Facebook DPs draped in the French national colours. They are sending virtual bouquets of roses to the sites of terror. They are cheering as a man plays John Lennon's "Imagine" on a portable piano on a Parisian street. They are saying Paris will rise; France will rise, because it is home to Sartre.

We had our Sartre, too, in Kashmir. His name was Jawahar; he was a fan of Sartre and sat in the coffee house in Srinagar, quoting from the books of his favourite author. His friends had fondly nicknamed him Jawahar Sartre. In 1990, the coffee house was bombed by people carrying the same hatred in their hearts as the ones who shot people inside the Bataclan. Soon afterwards, the Kashmiri Sartre lost his home. He is in exile now. You can see him sometimes at the Delhi Press Club, sitting by himself, nursing a solitary drink, quoting Sartre almost in a whisper: "I hate victims who respect their executioners."

As the ghosts of ISIS haunt the refugees in Europe, here is hoping they have been able to carry relics from their homes to remember their past lives. When we left Kashmir in 1990, we couldn't carry any. We have no photographs; the images of our past turn sepia only in our memory. I went back in 2007 to click a few pictures of our home that is now occupied by someone else. The new occupants had stored onion and garlic in our erstwhile bookshelf.

I wish we could have salvaged some of those books. That is why I have an obession to keep everything - including the boarding passes of flights I took to America. May it remain picture perfect in Father's memory. May Mohammed Atta remain an aberration.