SCENE TWO Kindness ۲۲

A Place of Descent

Parveen resides in a village named Sehri, which translates as “plateau” or “place of descent.” The village appears anything but flat to the unacclimatized eye, yet so many have invested their lives here. The village is far from the nearest jeepable road (there is only one road, really), and it takes me a good three hours to access her home via a series of steep and twisting walking trails. I am incapable of navigating these trails on my own and am always accompanied by at least one of my research assistants, all of whom call the pahars their home. We often joked about how their responsibilities also included helping me traverse these pahars, in addition to more “intellectual” work. Only later did I realize that the knowledge they carried in their bodies—the muscle memory and acumen needed to safely and rapidly navigate these trails—is intellectual work.

Whenever I would show up at Parveen’s home, she would jokingly dismiss my heavy breathing and sweaty back: “Oho! You must be coming straight from the gym. I didn’t even know our village had a gym!” She would then offer me rolls of tissue paper to wipe my face and a jug of cold water while patiently waiting for me to catch my breath. Breathing is challenging in the pahars for all sorts of reasons.

Sehri is the only home Parveen has ever known. This is where she married, raised a family, and wants to be buried. “It is a privilege to die at home,” she shared. The walls of her home are painted in vibrant hues. Her daughters have attempted murals on a few of them, usually flower collages and geometric shapes. Parveen’s house is surrounded by her family, both immediate and extended. The entire neighborhood comprises her kin of various degrees of separation. “Everyone is always in your business, we constantly feel under surveillance, but we also feel a little safe,” Parveen’s daughter laughed.

Parveen and her now-deceased husband were cousins, and during their marriage of some forty-one years, they successfully raised nine children here. Parveen recalled the long years of cross-border firing:

Life was difficult back then. Our family would take refuge in the bunker. We spent much time there in complete darkness. The Indian army would fire at the mujahideen from across the LoC, and the Pakistani military would retaliate, placing us in the crossfire. We hardly had enough to eat. The men would try to sneak into town at night, frequently on foot but occasionally in a jeep with the headlights turned off to prevent detection by the Indian army. Other times, someone would go ahead of the jeep with a white cloth to guide it across the dangerous terrain in the dead of night. My husband and son would barely make it back to the village with a sack of wheat when the firing would restart. There was an unspoken custom at the time: that whosoever leaves home to travel to town would bid farewell to their family as if it was the final departure [death]. We never knew who would return home and who would return to the Creator. I can’t tell you how often I bid my husband and son the final goodbye.

In most moral registers, the mujahideen remain a contentious entry, but they did provide an important route for a certain kind of political subjectivity. Most people living along the LoC backed the mujahideen in their fight against India’s occupation of Kashmir, which peaked in the 1990s. Local men, because of their mastery of the pahars, chose to work with the mujahideen as foot soldiers, porters, and guides. They aided them in overcoming the LoC’s forced separations, which for most Kashmiris do not have any essence to begin with. After all, these imposed separations are part of the “colonial strategy to limit the potentiality of any efforts directed at Kashmir’s sovereignty.”²³

Even if residents did not directly engage in battle, they readily provided shelter, food, medical assistance, and clothing; those who could not afford these offered prayers and moral support. Noor, whose father worked as a porter during the time, remarked: “Everybody was implicated with the mujahideen. We all gave whatever we could and contributed according to our circumstances. There isn’t a single household that didn’t support them; at the least, we welcomed them into our villages.”

Aiding the mujahideen based on one’s position was a way to contribute to the freedom and dignity of Kashmiri kin across the LoC. Everyone paid a heavy price for this. Using the pahars as their base, the mujahideen crossed the LoC to launch attacks on the Indian military and other targets. In retaliation, the Indian army regularly opened fire on villages, accusing them of harboring cross-border terrorists and putting civilian lives at risk. The Pakistani military subsequently reacted.

In most reportage on Kashmir, assisting the mujahideen is the primary way the political life of the pahari people is depicted. This narrative is one of erasure; it devalues the ethical. It is not so much how the pahari people helped the mujahideen that is fascinating but how they held their ground—maintained and extended their illaqa—in a time of instability when exodus and outmigration were likely easier.

This is the context in which Parveen established herself as a midwife. She recalled: “It was challenging to even return home from the clinic. It takes over an hour each way. Often, I would be stuck at night at the facility, waiting for the firing to stop.” She explained: “These were the conditions; I had no choice but to hold my place. It was impossible to enter or leave this area during that time; everything had to be done right here: births, weddings, funerals—life didn’t just stop.”

After the earthquake, which quickly followed the welcomed cease-fire, life was no less complicated. Parveen recalled:

The cost of food increased dramatically. For Rs. 20 [twenty rupees], we could only obtain a little sachet of salt. Sometimes we ate; other times, we didn’t. Unpredictability is a way of life in the pahars. Our house was destroyed, but we received some money for rebuilding. That day, I was on duty. The health unit building collapsed; there was dust and rubble everywhere. We were all in a state of panic and didn’t even recognize each other. It felt like the Day of Judgment. At the time, my children were very little. I was concerned that everything had vanished, even them. Many of us were shifted to the camps, but life there was beyond humiliation. We returned home as fast as we could.

She continued: “Then came the floods. If something used to cost Rs. 5, it now went for four times as much. We were cut off from the nearest town. We boiled vegetables and fed them to our children. We couldn’t even afford any spices. I witnessed the water sweep away friends and family. We rarely found any bodies. On one side, there was water, and on the other, there was a landslide. The floods damaged our crops and fields, and we have yet to recover—it’s been years.” Each calamity impacted the clinic, chipping away at its foundations. The World Health Organization eventually stepped in to adopt the health facility. Parveen continued to work at the clinic undaunted.

Laughter Is Medicine

Parveen is a midwife at the only clinic in the vicinity of her village. The clinic is classified as a “basic health unit” based on the limited services it offers. At the time that we spoke, the World Health Organization was supporting the facility, but it ultimately falls under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Health. The health unit looked rather grand; it consisted of a series of small buildings gradually rebuilt after the monsoon floods. However, most rooms remain empty as there is a continued shortage of trained staff and equipment. At the time, the clinic employed only three medical staff: a clerk, a compounder, and Parveen, the midwife. The facility does not have a resident doctor. According to the villagers, the staff has risen, through experience, to the “ranks of a doctor” in the eyes of the locals.

The patient load can be rather heavy, given that there are no other health facilities in this stretch of mountains. The military maintains a field hospital farther up in its cantonment and accepts civilian patients. Usually, the sick will filter down depending on the complexity of their medical needs; they start at the health unit only to be referred to the military hospital, which in turn would refer the patient’s family to the next better-equipped military-run health facility all the way down to Rawalpindi—Pakistan’s garrison city. In a chain of command, sickly bodies make their way down the pahars to the plains, from rural to increasing degrees of urban, from the shambolic clinic to the state-of-the-art, from civilian to the military. Pahari bodies have become accustomed to changing hands this many times to cover their most basic needs.

Securing the midwife position was no easy task for Parveen, who had no medical training before joining the health unit. More than two decades ago, when the government identified the need for a health facility in this stretch of the pahars, they reached out to the local residents for land. Parveen explained:

My family and some extended relatives donated four kanals [a measure of land] for the health unit’s construction. We sold the land to the government at a modest price with the understanding that each one of us would get permanent employment at the health facility. After the facility was built, none of us got jobs. I fought them in court and worked unpaid as a midwife for fourteen long years before I was finally put on a government salary. My relatives still don’t have a job. They are bitter toward the government but also toward me. They take up every opportunity to harm my family and me. They go out of their way to do so.

Parveen’s employment is a source of contention in the village and her extended kin. She chuckled: “People in my village are extremely jealous, especially my relatives, that an illiterate woman such as myself managed to get hired on a government salary.” Parveen did not feel comfortable elaborating on the nature of these violations but signaled that they were significant. She continued: “You know, I can’t read or write. We were altogether five children. Back then, schools were uncommon, particularly for girls. Instead, we would spend time with the goats, take them for grazing, tend to them. It was a full-time job! Only two girls in my entire village went to school: Abida Javed and Zahida Akbar. I still remember them.” The lack of formal education does not deter Parveen. She has figured out other ways to do her job: “When my supervisor asks for a file, I retrieve it based on my cleverness, as I can’t read. I have learned the different shapes of alphabets well enough to differentiate one file from the next. By looking at the file’s name, I know which one it is without reading the label. Sometimes I color code them, separate colors for each patient. My memory is excellent.”

Most of Parveen’s midwifery training has been hands-on. She has learned on the job: from figuring out the best way to mop up vomit and blood to assisting women through labor. “Birth is the most natural process,” she told me, “but there can be complications.” Parveen intervenes only when she is confident of a good outcome; when she feels that the expecting mother needs more expert attention, she refers her to the military hospital: “I am very observant and attempt only straightforward cases. I look at the expecting mother, the baby’s placement and angle, and then decide if I can facilitate the delivery. If I feel the baby is tilted or something else is wrong, I don’t even touch her; I refer the mother to the next hospital [which is a few hours away by jeep]. Other than this, I perform first aid; I apply bandages, clean patients’ vomit, clean their wounds, and drain pus. I can also make them laugh.”

Parveen believes humor, when used kindly, can make life pleasant. In some cases, it can even make people feel better. For her, it is medicine and a good way to keep the universe intact. She smiled: “Life is a gift no matter the circumstances one finds oneself in, and I must spread joy. When a patient comes to me in distress, I console her. I offer her some water; I try to lighten the mood by making her laugh. I reassure her that all will be okay, and that her suffering is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. With laughter and lightness, I offer encouragement and remind the patient that she must hang on to her will to survive. Through laughter, perhaps I even lighten some of her pain.”

Gravity and levity are not at odds. If we take our mission seriously, humor does not somehow betray that mission. Laughter shortens the path to connection. “The women are not always accustomed to talking about their bodies or telling me how much pain they are feeling; sometimes laughter makes it easier to do so,” Parveen explained to me. I also often found that my hosts and interlocutors connected with me through small exchanges of humor, which I now realize were also small gestures of kindness, little invitations extended to a lost and fumbling stranger. Who does not want more connection in their life anyway?

In her work on Palestine, Lisa Bhungalia talks about the productive work of humor.²⁴ She explains how humor can unhinge existing power relations and established hierarchies by calling into question the rationalities that underpin our social world. She draws us to an aesthetic that refuses the authorizing force of power: disavowed but not opposed. The disavowal is a reminder that other political orders and possibilities exist.

I consider Parveen’s gift of levity part of her acquired “medical training” and what makes her an excellent midwife. We often met at the health unit after her shift. She gave me a tour of the dispensary; its shelves were empty except for a few bottles of antiseptic, some gauze and bandages, and blister packs of over-the-counter painkillers. “We don’t even have the necessary medicines,” she told me solemnly. “Sometimes laughter is the best medicine; sometimes that is all that I can offer.”

Death Is the Best Remembrance

Some years ago, Mir sahib, Parveen’s husband, died from a heart attack. Parveen described that day as the worst day of her life. She recalled the days leading up to his departure: “He informed me precisely fifteen days before his death that he dreamt of a man calling out his name. The man in his dream kept on repeating: ‘Prepare yourself for the journey [of death].’ Mir sahib said to me: ‘We live in a world of false promises and deceit.’ He then laughed, with so much gusto and energy, as when he used to laugh when he was a young man. The deception was that he died and left me alone.”

Parveen remembered her husband with an intense longing. Her voice quavered as she described their time together:

My Mir sahib was devoted to me. He wouldn’t even let me collect firewood, and I rarely cooked. He looked after me the way a mother looks after her favorite child. He waited for me halfway between our home and the clinic; we would walk back together. This was our daily ritual. He was also a good father. He was once posted far away from home when he was in the army. Despite the cold and the distance, he would trek through heavy snow to see his children. I feel so lost without him; he has abandoned me, leaving me alone. I feel so desolate.

Parveen’s closeness with Mir sahib has not faded since his departure. She shared:

In the evenings, after I am done with the clinic, I go into villages to check on expecting mothers, especially those who aren’t well enough to travel to the health unit. I provide advice, distribute some medicine, and administer necessary injections. This isn’t part of my job; it is volunteer work. Sometimes, when I am at home, women come and fetch me if there is an emergency. I don’t accept money from anyone, but in my heart, I pray that the spiritual rewards of this hard work will reach my husband. He was a generous man; I do all this for him.

Parveen continued: “I keep his memory alive. Every time I pray, I remember him. Every time I eat something delicious, I feel him next to me. He is always with me. When someone wrongs me, I forgive them and hope that the reward of granting forgiveness will bless my dear husband’s soul.” Parveen’s continued devotion to Mir sahib indicates that their intimacy is only increasing. The relationship between the dead and the living also requires maintenance. Both continue to hold the capacity to mark each other greatly.

Parveen helps us understand repair as the minutest of gestures that convey regard for the other, unconducive to visual spectacularism or our narrative expectations. She draws our attention to those unnamed, subtle gestures that convey care and consideration but are rarely centered in our reading of the world and are easy to dismiss. Her laughter and humor in comforting her patients is one form of this caring labor, as is her volunteer work and continued devotion to Mir sahib. She shows us that these delicate acts unfold in the crafting of moral spaces within existing relations and the creation of new socialities altogether. Her commitment to Mir sahib after his departure extends relationality beyond the living, a sociality that exceeds this world.

The Surveillance of Care Labor

Small acts of kindness and care contrast with the macropolitics of welfare that one expects from the state but rarely receives, such as adequate healthcare and looking after. As already described, hospitals and health services are lacking and intensely desired in the pahars. Much healthcare has been outsourced to the military, which maintains throughout the country a parallel health infrastructure, often superior to what is provided by the Pakistani government. This is one way the military commands loyalty and retains its hold in the pahars. It is not uncommon for residents to refer to the Pakistani government as corrupt and careless and the military as an ally. This feeling was cemented in the earlier days when the Pakistani army demonstrated regard for residents by constructing bunkers for civilian use and, when possible, warning of the Indian army’s imminent attacks. The Pakistani military tacitly supported the mujahideen for many years until the landscape radically shifted following 9/11, when self-determination was lumped together with cross-border terrorism.

Parveen’s care labor is twofold in this overall context of disregard and opportunism: minimally “paid” labor in the basic health unit and her “unpaid” informal work in the community. The former is driven by the state’s denigration and feminization of care work in general, the latter by an unobligated and altruistic desire to embrace the worries of others in a context where the state does not care or does not care enough. Both forms of labor are interconnected; Parveen transforms care work from the professionalized and privatized sphere to an egalitarian, public good. She also shows us that care work, even if inward-looking (such as volunteering in the memory of Mir sahib), is ultimately communally shared. I cannot help but think of the exploitation and coercion embedded within these interlocking forms of labor, where Parveen feels compelled to pick up the state’s slack. In contrast, the state quietly distances itself from its caring responsibilities.

Once seated in Parveen’s home, I noticed a group of women worriedly hovering at the entrance, seeking an audience with Parveen. There was a sense of urgency to their presence; they quietly talked among themselves, hoping to catch the attention of Parveen, who was seated with her back to the door. One of the women finally knocked, apologizing profusely for interrupting us. Parveen took her out of earshot; I could sense this was an emergency. “I must leave immediately,” Parveen said to me in a grave tone.

When we met another day, Parveen confided that a young girl had gone into premature labor, and those women were from her family, desperately seeking help. “I often have to drop everything and go,” Parveen sighed. “I am like the ambulance: people call on me at all times of the day, and I feel compelled to drop everything and rush to them. If I don’t go, what will happen to the women? There is no one else to call. If I don’t go, what will people say? That she let an innocent woman die. How do I decide which life to support and which to let go of? If I don’t go, what will Mir sahib think?”

“It is not that I always do much when I arrive at the scene of a birth,” Parveen explained. “Most of the time, I just hold the mother’s hand, encourage her, offer her sips of water, wipe beads of sweat from her forehead. My presence gives people a sense of confidence.” Parveen feels deeply compelled to respond to every cry for help. She feels this is part of her accountability to her community and her departed husband. This weighing-down responsibility, or the feeling of it, is a type of surveillance.

Care can also be thought of as a form of coercion that forces “subjects into new forms of surveillance and unpaid labor, to make up for institutional neglect,” as care is inseparable from systemic inequality and power structures.²⁵ These forms of surveillance can include unspoken norms of accountability that may not always extend in one’s favor, such as Parveen’s inability to turn people down. So much so that “relations of dependency care can be cruel as much as loving.”²⁶ “It is exhausting,” Parveen confessed, “but this is also an act of sacrifice.”

Small gestures of care, kindness, and compassion are personal sacrifices that help sustain a moral community and a sense of continuity in the face of turmoil and change. In her work on intergenerational trauma in Vietnam, Merav Shohet shows us that not all sacrifices are grand bloody gestures, nor are all sacrifices by choice.²⁷ Sometimes they are enforced, or people feel unable to look the other way. Sacrifices rework ordinary ethics. Shohet also notes that it is usually women who feel compelled to put themselves up for personal sacrifice to knot the domestic together and, in the case of Parveen, also to keep the social intact. The weight and burden of the pahars have fallen on Parveen.

Small Things, Big Feelings

Parveen is quick to burst into laughter and quick to burst into tears. It felt comfortable to be vulnerable in her presence. She holds within her warmth and an invitation. Parveen helped me understand that we first and foremost feel the world; there is no need to be afraid. And perhaps we can access the world slightly differently if we allow ourselves the full force of feeling.

Parveen’s aliveness is a source of life for others. She shows us that within the atmospheres of collapse are also atmospheres of conviviality. And while acts of kindness and compassion are generally understood as forms of regard for one another and as forms of reciprocity, they can also be thought of as gestures without expectation, helping us sidestep the surveillance of care work. Several people confided in me the number of lives Parveen has helped save: “She is a godsend; she makes life a little easier for all of us.”

“Why do you think that the smallest gestures are the most striking?” Parveen inquired one day. “It is because they take the hardest work and effort. Behind their smallness is a huge investment. They bring a little zing of joy into our lives. Small things we do for each other don’t make us feel indebted. We think this is such a minor gesture; I surely don’t owe that person something in return. Yet they do it anyways: again, and again. In smallness, there is selfless devotion. The smallness is in itself the act of kindness.”

It is the small things that Parveen misses the most about Mir sahib: “When I pack up from the health unit to return home, and Mir sahib is no longer waiting to walk back with me, or when I have a splinter in my finger, I miss him dearly. But I bring him back to life when I do good things for others. I also remember him through the smallest of actions.”

A tiny village in India switched off its streetlights for over a month to protect a bird’s nest and its hatchlings; a robin built its nest in the main switchboard.²⁸ In the wake of a tsunami, a man in Japan installed a make-believe phone booth that attracts thousands of people who arrive to “talk” to their loved ones killed by the waves.²⁹ These are remarkable actions. As Parveen pointed out, the smallest gestures are the most striking. The “small” holds a “quiet advocacy in which the quotidian and the mundanity of everyday life can be appreciated as both ordinary and extraordinary.”³⁰ The “small” compels us to form a different relationship with scale.

Affordances of the Political

Audra Simpson writes that the heuristics of recognition, repair, resilience, resistance, and revolution are all chronological diagnostics, “containers for describing the political.”³¹ She explains that the political describes “distributions of power, of effective and affective possibility, the imagination of how action will unfold to reach back to that distribution for a re-sort, but also for a push on what should be.”³² Politics is the “unexpected newness, precise possibilities” that emerge through ordinary everyday engagements as people carve their dwellings in the world.³³ “What are the ways that the world claims you? And how do you respond to this kind of claim, from the position that you are in?”³⁴

Politics captures negotiations over the value of human life and the sort of life people may or may not live.³⁵ It captures the contestations of “living together in and through the spaces that this sharing constitutes.”³⁶ Arguably, these contestations are relational and expressed within the realm of social action, constituting “individual and collective, official and mundane, rational and affective, and human and non-human ways of acting, affecting, and impacting.”³⁷ Politics draws attention to coexistence and struggles for compatible forms of life.³⁸ The political also encompasses intersubjective encounters and how we engage with the world as we are rendered vulnerable by each other.³⁹

If we think about it, politics is about “redistributing insecurity” and not just merely smoothing over the “ambivalence that saturates social life about the irregular conditions of fairness.”⁴⁰An essential component of political life is tolerating ambivalence, instead of only seeking its resolution: the “vanquishing of the very contingency of non-sovereign standing that is at the heart of true equality, where status is not worked out in advance or outside of relation.”⁴¹ Alyson Cole draws attention to the politics of ambivalence, where ambivalence is not “an attitudinal void obstructing political engagement” but a “critical, liminal affect generative of politics.”⁴² Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s figure of the Nepantlera, which represents in-betweenness, Cole further states that “the instability of precarity opens the possibility for connecting with others and, more generally, an awareness of how often political options are falsely circumscribed and dichotomized, pushing us into either/or thinking in the search for certainty, stability, and security.”⁴³

The pahars are the conduits through which Parveen expresses devotion to others. Life in the pahars is gendered, permitting only particular forms of mobility and social engagement. Parveen’s volunteer midwifery practice allows her increased circulation within the pahars, enabling her to renegotiate gendered restrictions and craft additional moral spaces within the frames of allowability. Her continued enactment of devotion to her husband allows her to redefine the parameters of the pahars as permissible to her, provides a legitimate vocabulary to continue working in the health unit, and increases her presence within communities. These are extensions of her claims on the world.

Parveen’s medical services, as limited and insufficient as they may be, allow people to remain anchored in place even during the years of cross-border conflict and frequent disasters. Remaining in place and purposefully inhabiting the territory are important examples of holding ground in a climate of territorial dispute where land has become the irreducible element. In this way, one can also think of these small gestures as sites where the ethical and the political merge. Together with her husband, Parveen has raised all her children here in the pahars. One of her daughters is the first in the family and one of a select few in the village to successfully earn a bachelor’s degree. Parveen’s husband, who also never attended school, instructed Parveen before his death to invest in their children’s education as much as possible.

Repair can be thought of as a combination of “strategy, counter-narrative, performance, failure, and temporal suspension”⁴⁴ that is impossibly “suspended between direct political aspiration and trajectories of becoming directed beyond rational, foreseeable ends.”⁴⁵ Parveen allows us to recognize that the subjects of repair and politics are also subjects of desire to draw attention to the “alternative enunciative frames that individuals can mobilize.”⁴⁶ This helps us move away from fully finished forms in favor of the intermediate and processual. Parveen’s “imperfect” strivings do not necessarily lend to societal transformation and may operate within the same institutional structures, relationships, and parameters that constrain life in the first place—be it “community” or the state. The jealousies of relatives on account of her employment hint at how kinship can be constraining and, at times, enabling and resourceful. She has learned to appreciate the everyday both as a site of engagement and enchantment and trance, illusion, and danger.

A reparative reading of repair and politics does not preclude itself from any one scale of transformation. With Parveen, we are drawn to life’s grittiness, its capillaries both intimate and precarious. If repair reflects the experimentations and improvisations that quietly insist on amending, revising, or re-creating the social, the political reflects one’s inner ferocity,⁴⁷ which responds to disappointments and grievances of existing arrangements by demanding new social configurations altogether.

The Slightest of Gestures

What is it about kindness; what does it repair? Why is it so crucial to center small gestures? Attention to kindness hints at a different range of ambitions. One that insists on a differential relation to scale, the political and the ethical, and how the whiff of proximity hints at a moral presence that must be centered in how we think about repair. In many ways, the scene stands in contrast with the one centering Niaz and his experiences of betrayal. Parveen helps us consider that relations may still reinvigorate and flourish alongside the loss of reciprocity and declining faith in others, but perhaps at a different scale. This stops us short from rejecting the social entirely as only a site of disillusionment, decline, and heartbreak. Attrition and weariness are intertwined with the affective swirls of kindness, compassion, and care, which can also renew our bonds. Parveen helps us focus on the little gifts that can potentially withstand life’s slights and bitterness, readying us to live alongside incoherence and betrayal. Small gestures of kindness, care, and compassion can be thought of as reminders that we are still in this together despite everything. They have an atmospheric quality, shaping broader sociality, not just the relationships on which they are contingent.

Perhaps life can be experienced only in community, which, by definition, is inconsistent and unstable. It is the impossibility of fully reciprocating others—completely opening oneself at all costs—which maintains the social as fraught and unpredictable. Yet we hang on to each other, all the while knowing that the threads connecting us are tenuous and will likely snap at the first pull. Why is it that despite the odds, we hold others in expectation?

Kirsi Pauliina Kallio and Jouni Häkli understand caring relations as a form of the “political ordinary,” which is “animated whenever people become attentive to social power relations.”⁴⁸ Caring relations are those that are rooted in kindness, that nurture, create, and repair, and that ready us for the tasks of living. They bring attention to interdependences and connections vital for survival, yet they are often overlooked in liberal political theory.⁴⁹ Hence, attention to kindness and care is also attunement to unacknowledged political agency⁵⁰ and movement toward kindred solidarities that restructure the boundaries between morality and politics. Julie Brownlie and Simon Anderson elaborate kindness as balancing “the prosaic and small-scale with the deeply significant.”⁵¹ They continue:

Put another way, the acts and emotions associated with such [kind] deeds have a background or infrastructural quality, little noticed and yet also fundamental. Like the pavements we walk on and the electricity we use, these low-profile acts and relationships—lifts to work, bins put out, children cared for or asked after—enable other things to happen. Indeed, sometimes they enable whole lives or ways of life to be sustained.⁵²

Parveen’s acts of kindness are jolts of energy and life-saving support for those around her, particularly those teetering on the verge of the social or the brink of death, such as the sick, diseased, or injured.

Parveen often went teary-eyed when reminiscing about her husband. She clarified that these were tears of gratitude and sadness, having loved someone so deeply but having to let go so soon. The feelings were contagious; the room in the health unit where we usually met felt as if we were all in a surreal embrace. I, too, often found myself holding back a few tears. When Parveen would notice this, her face would light up, and she would comfort those listening with a humorous anecdote. Even during Mir sahib’s remembrance—and what an excellent remembrance this was—Parveen did not let go of kindness. Each time the room’s mood turned a respectful somber, Parveen would jolt us back to the little joys of life.

Like many around her in the pahars, Parveen leads an anxious and uncertain life. If citizenship is ultimately a “relation among strangers,”⁵³ Parveen strengthens rootedness in the pahars through her kindness and small gestures of compassion, which sometimes even double as “medical advice.” As a midwife, Parveen commands much respect and reverence (as well as jealousy); people often gift her clothes, money, and sweets upon the birth of a baby. One resident remarked: “After the mother, it is the daai (the midwife) who birthed you, who deserves your respect. Respect and reverence for the daai remain for the rest of one’s life.” In this way, Parveen also occupies privilege and power in the community. Her midwifery skills elevate her manifold, but her kindness and compassion draw others toward her. Her midwifery skills also place an undue burden on Parveen. At the time, she was the only midwife in the surrounding communities for thousands of women. People come to her from both near and far, often walking several hours at an end, seeking her counsel. Parveen has witnessed her fair share of death, as sometimes kindness alone cannot cure.

Through her volunteer work performed in Mir sahib’s honor, Parveen shows us that death also nurtures particular moral economies among the living, opening up further avenues of social action and relationality. Therefore, death can also be read as a possibility, not only a foreclosure. For Parveen, carrying Mir sahib in her gestures of kindness is a moral presence that allows her own continuity as well as those of others and, in a way, melds one’s devotion to a loved one with outward compassion. Parveen allows us to dissolve distinctions between the personal and the political, the intimate and the public, the singular and the social. As Wendy Brown has argued, the political need not be protected from life’s flows.⁵⁴ Parveen invites us to the granularity of life in the pahars and to those slivers of knowledge that really matter. She offers us glimpses of kindness—embodied, deeply felt, and relational labor expressed as a desire for the well-being of others. These are also efforts to regain a sense of humanity and reinvigorate the moral fabric that has been strained and ruptured.⁵⁵

One morning, I noticed Parveen dispersing a handful of grains in the air. I inquired what she was doing. She smiled: “These are seeds! I scatter them everywhere, wherever I can walk to. They bring forth flowers; they beautify the earth with all their colors. Look at all of life’s colors.” Flowers in their varying shades, fragrances, and sizes symbolize human subjectivity, and according to their social locations and specific viewpoints, they interact with public life. Through the dispersal of seeds, the public is absorbed into the private and the private into the public. Farhat, Parveen’s daughter, also loves gardening. She tends a small garden near their home. She shared: “Whenever I get free time, I immerse myself in flowers. They beautify the world and reinvigorate the mind. I think a lot about my father. I miss him. When I step into the garden, I focus on the flowers. I think about their petals. I wonder: Why do these beautiful flowers have such sharp thorns?”

Breathing Worlds

In his book Gestures of Concern, Chris Ingraham explains that mundane practices of care create the background conditions needed for broader social and political change.⁵⁶ Care practices cultivate affective communities that orient us to one another and shared futurities, providing public life some socially perceptive momentum. What kinds of worlds and atmospheres are we pointed toward? Perhaps a world where “everything breathes again.”⁵⁷

Life begins and ends with a breath. Violence is the taking away of breath. The atmosphere—stands for breath, sensation, affect, relationality.⁵⁸ Achille Mbembe writes that breathing is a fundamental right to existence, and hence, it cannot be confiscated: it “eludes all sovereignty, symbolizing the sovereign principle par excellence.”⁵⁹ Ashon Crawley explains that the imagination is necessary for thinking and breathing into the capacities of infinite alternatives.⁶⁰ Breath is a shared affect that encourages relations; breath is connection; breath is futurity.

Kindness, the minutest gestures of care, looking out for one another—put breath back in the body, creating atmospheres where breathing is a little easier. When family members arrive at Parveen’s doorstep urgently seeking her assistance or when women in labor rush to the clinic, they are already breathless. Parveen says to them: “First, catch your breath” (pehlay saans to lay lo).

The earthquake became a national event. We all felt compelled to do something. Cricket is the only other occasion where people come together at this scale. A displacement camp was set up near our home in Islamabad to welcome those from the pahars. Ammi ([my] mother) decided to volunteer. Within days, she became friends with the displaced women. They feared that their spouses would be unfaithful. After all, the camp housed so many “unaccompanied” women. They requested ammi for a tawiz (amulet), which they could make their spouses wear for Divine protection. Sensing from the veil ammi wore that she must know a thing or two about Allah, they inquired which dua (prayers) they should read for further safeguarding. They also wanted warm socks, not just any socks but ones with loose elastic—those you wear and forget that you are wearing them.