Fire on the mountains

“Well, our Parsis celebrate it too, they brought it from Fars,” I volunteered. “It is the day Kurdistan was born,” they said, referring, as I later found out, to the revolt of the Kurdish people against the Assyrians way back then (the century of the Buddha!). We shared sour laddoos of hard, dried yogurt, a popular Uzbek snack. I remember I said something silly about how Indians loved ‘curds’ and they even wrote it down, laughing. I never saw my wayfarers again, but I too noted a name they gave me: Kavah. In the Jewish faith, ‘kavah’ means “awaited for”. To the Kurds, it is the name of a national hero. The legend goes that an evil king called Zohak (whose name now symbolises cruel tyranny) had enslaved the Kurdish people. Kavah, a blacksmith beloved of the people, led them to Zohak’s gates. Like Krishna with Kamsa, Kavah overcame Zohak’s guards and dragged him off his throne. He killed him with a hammer blow. Fires were lit on top of the mountains to let the people know that Zohak was dead and freedom was theirs.

Since that day, the first day of spring, Nevroz has been an article of Kurdish faith, celebrated across its partitioned regions (except in Turkey, where it’s apparently been banned since 1923). Self-immolation — so painfully familiar to Asia as a mode of protest — has been the way many young Kurds have chosen to celebrate Nevroz. In 1988, four days before Nevroz, over 8,000 Kurds were reportedly killed by chemical weapons, at Saddam’s bidding. Nobody said anything, though all the ‘crusaders’ of today knew. They also knew that Kurdistan has the world’s sixth largest oil reserve and rich mineral deposits. As the mountains burn again, is this 2614-year-old nation praying — in both northern Kurmani and southern Sorani dialects — for its awaited one, its Kavah?