Kashmir - A dream or reality?

- Gayatri Raina

My father many times tells me tales about the Kashmir of his childhood in chowgam, one of the oldest villages in Kashmir valley.

He tells me about the school he used to go to, the friends he made, how he with his brothers would stroll through the chinars during buen with kaangdris in their pherans.

He narrates about these cricket matches they used to have. Quite a serious matter that used to be. Matches with friends, between schools, or against the neighboring village and many a times pandits vs Muslims. It used to be a spectacle. A highlight no one would shut up about for weeks.

Till date he finds winters in Kashmir reside in his heart as his first love. The vast wash of white glittering under the sun ,with the Dal nearly frozen and the Himalayas. There aren’t enough words to do justice to what my dad feels whenever he talks about the mountains in winters. And of course the spring with flowerbeds stretching all over the horizon. How could you really fall in love with another place?

He would tell me that the village didn’t consist of families rather just one family in different houses. Pandits and Muslims breaking bread together, sharing happiness and grievances , living in harmony as one.

Maybe that’s why Kashmir was known as “ heaven on earth” . It isn’t about the scenic beauty. No, it never was. It was about peace. Coexistence. Versatile ethnicities with harmony. That was the idea of heaven.

But since good things don’t last  long, Kashmir faced three things – Article370 , various wars between two giant nations  and exodus of Kashmiri pandits.

These three things made the Kashmir of my father’s reality into a memory. But now with article 35 on row makes me fear for what if this memory now turns into a dream he wish he hadn’t woken up from?

A rather famous story called “The dog of Tetval” by saadat Hasan manto summaries this whole article. A dog shows up at the Indo-Pak border, goes to the Indian post, gets fed and the Indians give the dog a rather peculiar name. The dog being merger animal, completely ignorant of the geo-political tension strolls into the Pakistani post where he is considered as a spy and claimed him to be a Pakistani dog and was ordered to deliver this message to the enemy. When the dog obediently reaches the Indian border he is kicked out with cusses and stones for being unfaithful to the country. The poor dog, stuck in no man’s land, for recreational purposes,  receives gunshots from Indians for being unfaithful and from Pakistani from not doing his job correctly.

Guaranteed I don’t have much knowledge in the political field to come to a concrete conclusion but I do know this much that the dog has been injured for years and there might come someday when the dog won’t be there anymore.