Book Review: ,'Half Paddle Double Seat — My Kashmir Memories & More:
Author:** Dr. Inder Krishen Kilam
Publisher:** Rudransh Books Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi
Price:** ₹465/=
ISBN:** 978-93-49865-81-5
There are books that arrive as literature, and there are books that arrive as memory. Dr. Inder Krishen Kilam’s 'Half Paddle Double Seat — My Kashmir Memories & More' belongs to the second category, though at places it quietly enters the first. It is not merely a memoir of one individual; it is a family album, a cultural notebook, a record of Kashmiri Pandit middle-class life, and a gentle act of remembrance after rupture. The author himself says that he wrote it “not to be remembered, but to remember,” and this single line gives the reader the key to the entire work.
The title is charming, unusual and meaningful. “Half Paddle Double Seat” comes from the author’s childhood in Srinagar, when, being too short to ride a bicycle in the usual way, he learned to move it by using only half-pedals, and yet could carry another person on the double seat. What begins as a boyhood anecdote becomes a metaphor for life. Many people born in modest families know this condition well: resources are limited, responsibilities arrive early, but the journey cannot be postponed. One must learn to balance, move, carry, endure and still smile. This is the governing spirit of the book.
Dr. Kilam was born in Srinagar into a middle-class Kashmiri Pandit family. His early pages take us through Fateh Kadal, Alikadal, Karfali Mohalla, Karan Nagar, Mission School, DAV School, Amar Singh College and the many lanes, bridges, temples, schools and homes that once formed the breathing map of Kashmiri Pandit life in Srinagar. The book is rich in names: relatives, teachers, neighbours, friends, colleagues, mentors, domestic helpers, officials, priests and ordinary men and women. Some readers may feel the details are excessive, but that is also the nature of memory in a displaced community. A name recorded is a name saved from silence.
The early chapters carry the fragrance of old Srinagar. The author remembers school prayers, teachers, picnics, family rituals, food habits, bicycle rides, the Jhelum, Dal Lake, Karan Nagar homes, the solemn dignity of elders and the affectionate discipline of parents. He writes of his mother, Bahanjee, and father, Baboojee, with reverence. The mother emerges as a figure of quiet courage and household wisdom; the father as a responsible man who tries to hold two families together despite financial and health difficulties. Such portraits are not ornamental. They show the values that shaped a generation: restraint, education, duty, family honour and self-respect.
One of the most attractive features of the memoir is its lack of false heroism. Dr. Kilam does not project himself as a celebrity. In fact, the book’s strength lies in its ordinariness. He tells us of mistakes, fears, missed chances, setbacks, job searches and adjustments. He writes of the burden of responsibility after family tragedies, of career shifts from All India Radio to Punjab National Bank, and later to academics. He records his professional rise in PNB, where he served for more than three decades and retired as Deputy General Manager. Later, he entered academic life at Manav Rachna institutions, becoming professor, head of department, dean of students’ welfare, and also associated with community radio. The journey is steady, not glamorous; but it is precisely this steadiness that makes it credible.
The chapter “PhD@69” is among the most inspiring parts of the book. The author’s academic desire did not die even when life interrupted it. He had earlier lost opportunities, including his research plans, because of family responsibilities and later a painful litigation linked to his banking profession. Yet the urge to study survived. Completing a Ph.D. at the age of 69 is not just an academic achievement; it is a moral statement. It tells younger readers that learning is not a phase of life but a discipline of the mind.
The painful chapter dealing with banking-related court litigation reveals another aspect of the author’s life: endurance under unfair pressure. The book refers to a fabricated or baseless case connected with a bank loan defaulter, and the long legal battle that followed. This episode affected his health and disrupted his academic plans. Yet he continued. In this respect, the memoir becomes a document of middle-class resilience. Many Indian families know this story in one form or another: a decent man caught in a system, spending years proving what should have been obvious from the beginning.
For readers connected with Kashmir, the most moving sections are those that preserve the social world before the upheaval of 1990. The chapter on Malla Aziz, called “Our Man Friday,” stands out. Through Abdul Aziz, Dr. Kilam recalls a time when human relationships crossed religious lines without publicity, slogans or seminars. These were everyday bonds built through work, trust, dependence and affection. Such memories are precious because they neither deny the later tragedy nor reduce the past to hatred. They tell us that Kashmir was once lived through relationships, not merely argued through politics.
The chapter on the migration of Kashmiri Pandits is naturally one of the saddest in the book. Dr. Kilam does not write as a political analyst; he writes as someone whose family and community lived through loss, fear, dispersal and the slow pain of dislocation. For Kashmiri Pandits, memory is not nostalgia alone; it is evidence. Homes were sold, neighbourhoods emptied, temples and social networks were left behind, and generations grew up away from the soil that had shaped their ancestors. The author’s ancestral connection with Kashmir remains alive through visits to sacred places like Mata Kheer Bhawani, Hari Parbat, Zeethyaer and Shankaracharya Mandir. These visits are not tourism; they are acts of belonging. This chapter records how a community survived with dignity even when it faced hostile environment on all fronts. In this chapter, one also comes across a very evocative poem of Indra Kilam, wife of Dr. Kilam. Returning to her motherland after 1990, she holds a dialogue with the autumn Chinar:
"Which law took away our rights
we never even came to know.
Even the land we had bought
is no longer ours today.
At the doorstep of justice,
there is not even a mention of it.”
Land “slipped away from closed fists like grains of sand,”yet she tells the vermilion Chinar that spring will bloom again, even as “the autumn of our abandoned courtyard still stands there, colourless and frozen in time.” Prose and poetry together lift this chapter beyond memoir. It is testimony to loss and resilience, accusation without hysteria, grief without self-pity.
The book also includes photographs, family trees and personal records. These visual elements give the memoir a documentary value. The family tree of the Kilams, the school photographs, family images and Kashmir-related memories help the reader locate the author inside a broader social and genealogical frame. In many modern books, such details may be edited out for smoothness. Here they should be retained, because the book is partly a private archive made public.The language of the book is simple, direct and conversational. Its purpose is not stylistic brilliance. Its purpose is preservation. And in that task, it succeeds. The author’s tone is candid and sincere. He does not exaggerate suffering, nor does he hide emotion. He writes like a man opening old trunks: some documents are neatly arranged, some are folded, some carry stains, but all have value.
The foreword by Padma Shri Pran Kishore Kaul rightly notes the courage required for an ordinary person to write his life. Autobiographies are usually associated with statesmen, artists, revolutionaries, film stars or public intellectuals. Dr. Kilam’s memoir challenges that assumption. Every life that has passed through history carries history within it. The life of a Kashmiri Pandit child born around the time of Independence, educated in Srinagar, employed in radio, banking and academics, and later displaced emotionally from the land of his birth, is not an ordinary life in the shallow sense. It is an ordinary life touched by extraordinary historical currents.
The emotional centre of the book is family. Grandparents, parents, brothers, sister, wife, sons, daughters-in-law and granddaughters appear not as decorative mentions but as the structure of the author’s world. The book is dedicated to his granddaughters Meyhaa, Kaira and Inaya, and this dedication explains its real audience. Dr. Kilam is speaking to the next generation. He is telling them: this is where we came from, these are the people who made us, these were our struggles, these were our values, and this was our Kashmir.
"Half Paddle Double Seat" is not a book of grand claims. It is a book of lived truth. It tells us that memory, when honestly recorded, becomes service. Dr. Kilam has pedalled through life with effort, balance and dignity. In doing so, he has carried not only his own story on the double seat, but also a fragment of Kashmir that deserves to be remembered. It is ultimately a quiet triumph of remembering against erasure. For the Kashmiri reader, the book will awaken many personal echoes. For the non-Kashmiri reader, it offers an intimate entry into a community’s social history. For younger readers, it offers a lesson in perseverance. For older readers, it may provoke a question: have we written down our own memories before they disappear? For the general reader, it is a measured entry into a civilidation’s continuity and a community’s endurance. Every reader of the book has something to gain and something to learn from what Dr. Kilam has recorded; accordingly, it becomes a must-read.
Written without vanity and without bitterness, yet every page carries the weight of a community’s lived truth and a man’s unbroken dignity. In an age of noise, Dr. Kilam has chosen the harder path: to record, to preserve, to bear witness. This is not a volume to skim and shelve. It belongs in libraries, in syllabi on displacement and resilience, and on the family shelf beside the photograph albums. Buy it, annotate it, gift it because some books preserve literature, and some preserve a people. This one does both.
( Avtar Mota )
