It was around 11:30pm on that freezing night when somebody knocked at the door.
Brother: Mom, should I open the door somebody is thirsty out there.
Mother: No…No… Stay back. Don’t make any noise. These are jihadi’s…shhhhhhhh!
Then there was a span of deafening silence and then a gunshot squeezed the remaining life from him. It was my friend to whom I talked this morning. We had chatted for hours, laughed… and now he was no more… butchered by these crusaders of Islam. This bloodshed has now become a routine of our lives.
Every day is spent choking amidst this excruciating violence and the fear darkness of each night brings with it terror and despair. I can’t remember the last time I closed my eyes, thinking of something pleasant and waking up in peace. But still there was a hope, a scintilla of optimism somewhere deep inside the core of my heart that things would become normal again. Sometimes in your life you don’t see a point in believing something but still you do….Blind Optimism perhaps. But the violence continued and so did the brutal and hair raising incidents. People were brutally killed and dismembered, eyes were carved out, limbs and bones were broken and women were stripped naked and mauled. This is how the Kings of yesterday became Paupers of today.
They sealed our lips, curbed our conscience and smothered our soul in an astounding mysterious silence. Curfew was imposed in the valley, schools were shut and offices were closed, life came to a complete standstill. At the end of each day there was only one respite “Thank God it wasn’t us”. Frightened pigeons were what all Kashmiri Pandits(KP’S) felt like. The path to” Azad Kashmir” began to be paved by the blood of KP’S.
Then one day while I was washing utensils, I heard kids dreaming and discussing about their aims in life. It was really moving because I knew that the future was dark and obscure here in the valley.
But how could I break their gently knitted dreams? I could neither leave them in this territory of agony and terror nor could I move them to some unfamiliar place where there was no guarantee of safe and secure future. The choice wasn’t to be made between heaven or hell but to choose a better hell. When the spineless center and state government failed to bring any relief we were forced to leave Kashmir, The land of our ancestors.
We stood lame as our settlements were razed to ashes. Families became disjointed. Some of us didn’t even know in which city, town or village our kith and kin had taken refuge. Such was the misery of KP refugees that three four generations of literate enlightened KP’s lived cramped and crumpled into one room or torn and tattered tents. The wounds caused by the loss of home and homeland were still afresh. What could we do? How could we bear the indignity and insult to which the women folk were subjected to? How could we pull ourselves out of a morass of depression and mounting tension eating into our entrails and sapping our vitality? And how we all kept our mind and soul together was a miracle.
Those were the days when each and every one of us emerged a hero. Gathering strength from the cruelties done to us, we all started our life from zero. Some walked miles in the scorching heat to find a job while some spent sleepless nights to plan the future of their kids. Without hope but with firm belief in Almighty’s Grace we strived hard and found our way. Kashmir has been and is still a troubled part of our country. It’s time when we all raise from our comfort inns and fight against any injustice done to it. They call it paradise but for me it will always be home.
“One equal temper of heroic hearts made weak by time and fate but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find but not to yield”. – Lord Tennyson