|
The valley of anonymous
graves
A
rusty chain shuts the mite-eaten wooden door. The knock is not
answered. “She won’t,” a neighbour says, pointing towards the pale
candlelight flickering from a windowpane. “But she is there. It’s
already evening and she has nowhere else to go”. He asks us to
follow him and shouts loudly several times as he takes us into the
backyard. She peeps through a window, and silently comes to the
door.
The
door opens into a tiny room, its mud walls painted blue like a Sufi
shrine. A tiny room in a large rundown three-storey house.
Deep inside Habba Kadal, where streets run like snakes through a
cluster of concrete blocks, even the buzz of Srinagar’s dense
downtown does not break the silence in Mughli’s lonely world. She is
nearly deaf and never hears the knocking on her door. For years,
there have been no visitors, particularly after sundown.
One
morning—she thinks it was in September of the first tehreek
(militant struggle) several years ago—her teacher son Nazir Ahmad
Teli left for work. She never saw him again. And Mughli became one
of the first of the several thousand women whose young sons or
husbands disappeared, a majority of them after being picked up by
the police or security forces. A group of people sharing the same
pain—the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP)—says
10,000 men have vanished since a counter-insurgency assault began in
the Valley in the 1990s.
Mughli, who doesn’t remember her age, says the shock of her son’s
disappearance broke her. “He was born after my husband divorced me.
I had no one in the family. I didn’t marry again and brought him up.
He was the only reason for my life,” she says. “He had never stayed
away from home, not even for a single night. Each day he would
return from school and give me a hug. I am still waiting. I want to
hug him once. If they tell me he is dead, I would hug his grave. I
don’t know what happened to him and this pain, this uncertainty is
unbearable”.
She
takes off her thick glasses and wipes the tears with the corner of
her shawl. “Every time I tell this story I feel as if a sharp knife
is lacerating my wound again,” she says. “These walls are my only
companion and they don’t ask me anything”.
Her
words are barely audible.
“I
waited and waited for him that evening. When the sun went down and
it was dark, I knew something was wrong. He would always come
straight home after work,” she remembers. “I called my neighbours.
They came and tried to console me till late in the night. I spent
that night awake, looking at the door—he didn’t return”.
When dawn broke,” she goes on, “I went to the police station. They
asked many questions. I knew nothing so they took down my son’s
name, his picture and our address and wrote a report, promising to
come to my house with news of him. They never came.” Then, she says,
someone told her she needed to go to “bigger officers” for help. “I
went everywhere. I went to every office in Batamaloo (J-K Police
headquarters). I waited for hours outside the gate, pleading with
the policemen to let me in. I put my pooch (the head scarf) at the
officers’ feet. They would listen and then say they didn’t know
anything”.
Mughli looks around, pushes her hands to the floor and stands up.
Then she rummages through a cardboard box and takes out a photograph
of her son—a black and white picture of a man who looks about 30.
For
days, says Mughli, she would leave home in the morning and walk to
Lal Chowk (Srinagar’s city centre). “I would stop people on the road
and show them my son’s photograph, hoping someone will say they had
seen him,” she says.
She
says she even went to politicians to ask for help. “Nobody helped
me. Nobody told me whether he was alive or dead,” she says. “Each
one of them (in the government) promised to help me in my search.
And my hope is alive”. She also filed a petition in the court. “My
case is still going on. But there is no progress.”
Now
a neighbour has told Mughli about a carpenter called Abdul Rehman
Padroo from a South Kashmir village who had disappeared in a similar
fashion. Padroo was picked up by Ganderbal Police in Srinagar,
allegedly shot dead, dubbed a Pakistani militant and buried in a
graveyard in Sumbal. “My heart started sinking again. I feel my son
too is lying in an anonymous grave somewhere,” she says. “I felt the
pain of that family. They are still lucky to find out that their son
has been killed. At least, they could give their son a decent
burial.”
In
fact, the Association of Parents of Disappeared which was set up to
search for their missing wards, has now turned to group
catharsis—the families of the disappeared meet, share their common
stories and help each other cope with the trauma.
And
apart from the recent Padroo case and the Pathribal fake encounter
where five villagers were killed in March 2000 after being dubbed
Pakistani militants, there have been at least half-a-dozen cases
where families were able to locate their missing sons — buried after
being killed as foreign militants in fake encounters.
“I
heard there are many such graves in Sumbal,” Mughli says. “Do you
think there is a way I can find out?”
But
then she answers her own query. “Even if he is dead, I won’t be able
to recognise him after so many years.” Her glasses are again wet
with tears. “I don’t go to meet anybody now. I drag myself to the
shrine and pray everyday. It makes me feel lighter.”
In
her lonely day, those are the only moments of relief.
“I
have few relatives but they are busy with their lives. Who will have
time for this old woman?” she asks.
And
as night falls, the room looks like a cave in the corner of a large
dark house. There is a knee high wooden panel dividing a traditional
hearth where few aluminum pots lie around a gas stove. “This house
was once full of people. Now it is empty,” she says. “This was our
kitchen. Now it is everything for me — I eat, sleep and pray here.”
Mughli says she has never gone upstairs since her son went missing.
“His room is there. And that day I had arranged his things and
cleaned the room. I could never have the courage to go there again.
It is locked”.
In
her despair she once tried to commit suicide. “One afternoon, I was
thinking about him and I felt there was nothing left in my life,”
she remembers. “I left home and went straight to the bridge (on the
Jhelum river) and was about to jump in when some shopkeepers saw me.
They brought me back home. Perhaps I didn’t want to die either.
Perhaps God has sent me to this world to suffer alone.”
“Once I was a little princess and God had given me a diamond, my
son. Why did you give me a son, if you were to take him away,” she
says, her vacant gaze fixed on the flickering candle. “One day I
thought it is all over. Then I heard about a boy who returned home
after he had been missing for 12 years. He told his family he was in
a jail. This gave me hope — maybe my son is alive somewhere in a
jail and will return before my death”.
She
says her son comes to her in her dreams. “He calls me in my dreams.
He tells me he is alive.”
Someday, she hopes, she will wake up and find him really there.
7 February 2007
|
Read Also
