This is about life as a teenager in 1990s Kashmir. It is very beautifully written. It is extremely heartbreaking and eye opening.

A moving and thought provoking memoir. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for a review.

This is a beautiful yet heart wrenching memoir filled with tales of girl living under a near constant siege. The accounts are so close to home that they hit in an unexpected way. I took my time with this book just so I wouldn’t feel overwhelmed with emotion! Not the typical genre I would read but it was insightful and eye opening!

“Rumours of Spring” tells an account of Farah Bashir growing up as a girl in Srinagar in the Kashmir Valley in the early 1990s. After 1989, the city she lived in came to be the focus of separatist insurgency against the Indian administration in Jammu and Kashmir. She begins her story by recounting the death of Bobeh, her grandmother, in 1994 as she went home from the high school final test. The death of her grandmother created a vacuum in her family, as she was the oldest matriarch and the one the family respected the most.

But running counter to the tragic death of Bobeh, death has become a common event in Kashmir at that time, with people both armed and civilians alike dying every day from military crackdowns and skirmishes. The newspaper ran headlines recounting the statistics of people who died on a particular day. But Farah Bashir found comfort in the obituaries section in the newspaper. It gave her some peace of mind knowing that people could still die from natural causes—like her grandmother did—or other causes such as illnesses and accidents. Something that probably people who live in a society far remote from a conflicted territory would take for granted.

In between the funeral procession of her grandmother, Farah Bashir recounts some memories from her childhood, describing how even living inside a conflicted territory on death’s doorstep, she still had some happy moments with her family and friends. All while describing how daily tasks such as taking the bus to school or visiting her aunt’s house could be riddled with anxieties due to so many uncertainties on the road. A must-read, for those who want to get to know Kashmir and how it feels like to live there in the 1990s.

certainly thought-provoking alas i found the author's implementation of a non-linear timeline ultimately distracting.

Rumours of Spring by Farah Bashir is a memoir of the life in Kashmir during the 1990s.
It revolves around the death of her grandmother, Bobeh. While death looms around every corner of Kashmir, this book is a simple yet heart wrenching of life amidst violence and militants...

'When they left, they left behind nothing but misery that was pasted on the floors and walls of our house. A misery that couldn't be wiped away'

During this global pandemic and everybody confined to their homes, I simply cannot believe people trying to compare WWII situations or any war and protesting that they don't have any freedom while your are protesting without being shot at! I strongly recommend everyone reads this haunting but deeply enlightening book.
There were beautiful urdu lines and couplets that have been very well explained in the last section of the book, not making the language sound foreign at all.

Many thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins Publishers India for allowing me the opportunity to get an early copy of this novel!

A remarkable debut about being a girl in Kashmir. Terrifying in places, The pages almost turn themselves and when I was finished I couldn’t stop thinking about the story.

“Every window in our house seemed to have been assigned a specific role, each one had numerous tales to tell.”

Farah Bashir shares memories of her childhood in Kashmir, where the simplest things we take for granted are fraught with fear. Beautifully written and impactful.

Heartbreaking and tender, Rumours of Spring is a memoir that was obviously written with enormous love and grief. Coming face to face with her Bobeh's death, Bashir recalls her childhood in the war torn Kashmir through the eyes of her young self. While lush, I have to say I felt the prose was a bit stilted at times, but it is Bashir's debut, which is a feat of its own. There was also an instance I should mention of the author using the G slur, which is completely unnecessary and stupid considering we're in 2022, and I ask the publisher to remove it prior publication

Rumours of Spring is not a great book, nor is it a bad one. It's the kind of book that falls smack dab in the middle of the scale. It is neither as far-reaching as Rahul Pandita's Our Moon Has Blood Clots, nor as indulgent and self-pitying as Basharat Peer's Curfewed Night - two of the best-known memoirs about the Kashmir conflict.

Author Farah Bashir propels her book via a disjointed narrative, which is spun from a pivotal incident in her life, one she constantly comes back to over the course of the book. The narrative hobbles what is otherwise a distinct story, though one might disagree with the softness Bashir shows towards the terrorists (at least it's not Peer's hero-worship of them, eh?). For a change, this is a woman's view of a conflict zone where the slightest alteration in temperature can lead to mayhem.

The lack of length is troubling - if there ever were a memoir that needed to dig deeper, needed to go further, it was this one. The little Bashir has written, while far from flawless, is an interesting peek into 90s Kashmir as seen by a young woman, be it the view she holds of the central forces in Srinagar or the comings and goings of known people, sometimes permanently.

The real problem is the incident which serves as the pivot for Bashir's recollections, and the disjointed narrative which never really comes across as a deliberate decision. It lacks finesse in that sphere, and is poses something of a challenge for someone approaching the book.