A littte girl in Qazigund, known as the Gateway to Kashmir. According to a Reuters report (2008) more than 42,000 people have been killed in Kashmir since the emergence of militancy in 1989
For a mother, it is heart-breaking when you hear it the first time but, in Kashmir valley, you soon learn to accept that your four-year-old understands you can’t take him out to buy a toy “because a terrorist can kill us”. You slowly get used to the fact that Bob the Builder no longer fascinates him as much as his new-found game of militants and guns. Of Army salutes, identification cards and strange men with live bombs that lurk behind toy cupboards and have to be dragged out at gun-point.
You get used to living with this loss of innocence the same way you get used to living without multiplexes and shopping malls, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut; and casual drives decided on the spur of the moment, just because it’s a lazy Sunday, the man you love is smiling into your eyes and and the rain clouds are adding the right amount of romance to your life.
If you live in the beautiful valley, you soon learn there’s a price to pay for it. The bogeyman in your baby’s life is as real to you as it is to him. You can no longer urge those little feet to enter a dark room by looking into those trusting brown eyes and saying “terrorists don’t exist” just like you once made him do it by saying “ghosts don’t exist”. You can’t explain to a little boy why someone who doesn’t even know him might want to hurt him. Even if you believe in it, you can’t explain to him the intellectual concept of how one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter; and why people want to kill each other when there’s only one life to live.
In the lush green hills, where pine trees carpet the slopes with their fallen leaves, colourful birds sing in the trees and wild flowers splash the landscape with what appears to be a sprinkled palette of pastel paints, you get used to eyeing every bearded man in a phiran with involuntary suspicion. You start weighing every casually draped shawl on a stranger for the possibility that it could be hiding the outline of an AK-47. You jump at every loud crack because you fear it might be a gun shot and you don't want to pick up a ringing telephone because you're scared it might be bringing bad news. You are so consumed by the desperate desire to live that you actually stop living.
At night, when the lights of distant hill villages sparkle in the dark like a hundred fireflies, the wind whistles through the trees and crickets call in the yellow moonlight; what makes you hold your breath is not the sheer beauty unfolding before your eyes but the thought that one misguided act of violence might suddenly take it all away.
And that brings us to the reason why this little piece was written. Only those who live in terrorism affected places understand that it finds its victims, not just in the people killed or maimed by its cruel hand; in the families it destroys; or in the brave but dead boys in uniform whose pictures appear in newspaper remembrance columns almost every day up north. Terrorism finds its victims in all the nations rich and poor that spend precious time and resources, first promoting and then trying to stifle it. It finds its victims in all of us whether we live in villages on the Indo-Pak border or a high rise in New York. Because it teaches us to live in fear, in distrust of another human being and another culture. Rather than enjoy and revel in the charming novelty of difference, it makes us eye with suspicion anyone who doesn’t look or behave like us. It takes away reasonable thinking and makes us hate a religion, a country, a person who dresses and talks a certain way.
Terrorism finds its victims in all of us and not just Kashmiris like old and greying Parveena Begum, who ran away from Doda many years back after seeing the bodies of four young village boys shot in an encounter and, after a failed marriage and three children, now works as house help in Udhampur. Not just milkman Salim who takes a yearly holiday around Independence Day because he’d rather live than be killed delivering milk when bombs are expected to go off. Or, sixteen-year-old fair and fragile Kanta who does pedicures for a living and cannot understand what the Kashmir problem is about when in her tiny village near Srinagar, Hindus and Muslims live together in perfect harmony despite eating meat cut by different butchers. And, yes, little children who don’t understand the reasons behind an act of terrorism yet. But whose lives fall under its extremely ugly shadow.
Phiran: A long woolen robe worn by men and women in Kashmir.
Nobody lives here anymore. There was mass exodus of Kashmiri pandits (Hindu Brahmins) from Kashmir in 1991 when militants unleashed ethnic cleansing and threatened to make it an Islamic state. They are are now being asked to return
The crystal clear waters of Manasbal, the deepest lake in Kashmir valley (42 feet).
A Bakkarwal boy with his herd of sheep. Bakkalwals are nomads who keep moving with a change of seasons. They are getting increasingly marginalised as the world considers itself more "civilised"
Pashmina goats that are indigenous to the high altitudes of the Himalayas
Anywhere for a fine dining experience
Waiting for peace to return
The poppies still bloom
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