“His brain had splattered across the entire car.” These words, uttered by Vihaan’s parents, shocked the core of my being. Vihaan, a young schoolboy, an only child, who, upon entering the cusp of teenagehood, had his entire life forcefully snatched away. While mortal, not much was left of the spirit of his parents’ life either.
House after house, as the delegation proceeded, I witnessed the uprooting of lives and homes. Individuals from different religions — Sikh, Muslim, Hindu — all met a similar and most painful fate. We had the opportunity of conversing with the families, and each of the martyred lives reflected definitive simplicity, who had been faulted to death as collaterals. The troubled families were promised compensation in return. They say that money is used as a medium of exchange, but for the first time in my life, I could witness its exchange for a life.
What ensued in the five days of the visit were learnings that changed the entire course of my life, and all that had been taught to me. As a fairly educated individual from a reputed institution, all that I was taught about the regions of Jammu and Kashmir seemed contradictory. I saw madrasas housing tourists during the six-day war, helping the Indian defence personnel to the best of their capacities as diligent citizenry and, most importantly, showing undeterred allegiance to the ethos of the Indian subcontinent. My faith in the mainstream media eroded completely after this visit. These individuals are tainted as militants, anti-nationals, when the reality is completely the opposite.
In Deri Dhara, a village in Rajouri, I met a family with three adult daughters, close to my age. All smart and ambitious, but whose eyes spoke silently of a deep weariness and defeat, in contrast to their completely destroyed house during the cross-border firing.
As a 28-year-old who visited Kashmir as a part of this delegation, I could see, in sudden contrast, the life I had been granted the privilege to live, and those of young Kashmiri women — as abled — being deprived of the same. The urban areas scream of the same agony, albeit housed in the peripheries of the touristy Dal Lake that lets those outside harbour a false illusion of modernity. Their education is halted due to the myriad curfews, unrest, and most importantly, a genuine threat to life, anytime and by anyone.
On our way to Poonch from Rajouri, our car was stopped by a group of army men who wanted to inquire about our commute, and at that moment, a strange fear crept into me. Anything could happen and no one would ever know. Another instance was while driving to Shopian; while passing through a quarry, there was a sudden noise of blasting from the stones; the Kashmiri with us remarked whether the shelling had started again.
Another night, there was a thunderstorm in Srinagar, and I woke up in the middle of the night from the depths of my sleep, thinking the war had begun again — in a feeling that can only be explained as ‘this is it’. All this in the seven days I was in Kashmir. This was my temporarily lived reality there, and it scares me to think of those who continue to live there with such uncertainty.
We were told that 31 innocent civilians had lost their lives. Thirty-one lives, each like all of us, who do not live to see today like the rest of us do. I reiterate — it could have been any of us, anywhere — in Baisaran, Rajouri, Poonch, Uri — it could very well have been the case that the thunderstorm I woke up to was actually a full-fledged war. I write this piece today in the deepest gratitude that I was not a victim to such a war, but there are still those who live in Kashmir who can never say this with complete certainty.
A Kashmiri friend recently and rightfully mentioned that thousands of pages of books have been written about the Kashmir conflict, and they will never do complete justice to their lived realities. I agree. However, the weary eyes of the girls in Deri Dara speak of a reality that can never be captured by multitudes of pages, but also convey the entirety of their truth.
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