A Visit To My Birthplace
A Visit To My Birthplace
Bent on my knees, hands raised in prayers, teary eyes I couldn't help but scream, overwhelmed by extreme emotions of misery, helplessness, deprivation. I sobbed there seeking answer from Almighty.
This is not just my story, this is what all from my community have gone through.
Hell broke loose in Kashmir and we Kashmiri hindus were cornered to move out of our homes on the occasion of baisakhi 1990, when the rest of the country was sitting in the coziness of their homes eating delicacies,
We were famishing physically but our souls were fed with threats and calls to vacate our homes or face consequences.
Picked and packed just a few very important things, we locked our homes doubly checking and comforting our frightened souls that this all will be over in few days. But alas.
Even decades after we were tossed and our birth place snatched, the urge to see the birth place was so intense that I planned a trip to Kashmir.
My home was situated on the country side, so we landed at Srinagar and started the onwards journey by car.
I was just only few meters away from my home, when I saw the place which used to be the mazar of Sufi saint where every morning I used to pay obeisance, I was taken aback seeing it, I rubbed my eyes in disbelief as each brick and wooden plank was broken and taken by the miscreants for their own use.
"Can humans become so inhumane." I asked myself. Each piece of love respect and faith was systematically desecrated and demolished.
I bowed at that place which was still sacrosanct for me, took a handful of that "mitti" in my handkerchief and lifted myself with great effort.
With the prospect of ravishing the sight of my dear home, I took long steps.
It was a spacious three-story residence with a country side ambience no boundaries, all covered with greens.
I was still half a mile away from my home when I saw two-three familiar faces, I asked them to take me to my home. My joy was palpable, I could feel my heart pounding faster, my old legs could even beat Milkha Singh at that time. The rush of emotions was giving me illusions I could see my own little self, playing and dancing.
Just as I was walking with all the images in my head, these men stopped at a place and said
"This is your HOME".
I trembled, my knees went feeble, it was nothing but a hillock of cowdung smelling all around.
They showed me the geographical spot and said THIS IS YOUR HOME. I started crying and sobbing, they left giggling.
There was nothing left to revisit, to recollect to bow, my birthplace had gone to the terrible travails of the most cursed creations.
It was the newest structure of that area, it was my pride. But now razed to the ground, torn limb by limb, it was eating the dust.
Every window pane door and wooden frame was extracted and used to build an Islamic school nearby.
I was agonised,pain was traveling in my body with blood, I sobbed there for few minutes, then gathered myself and started taking "Parikarma" of that broken structure as if it was still my temple. I touched each brick and plank and tried to calm my turbulence with the solace of that motherly touch. I saw the broken chulha of my kitchen, pieces of my broken study desk, and an old family photo which might not have been of any use to them. It was buried underneath a box. May be for years it was waiting for me to be taken out. It was my only connection with my home.
The house I had revered in my dreams the people I had carried in my bosom were nothing more than a pile of trash, living dead.
My umbilical chord with my home was snapped
I was disinherited of all that I held close to my heart.
Everything is blown away. I now belong to nowhere, no place to be called my motherland, my birthplace, bereft of all my being, I am now just a pile of cowdung.
I BELONG TO NOWHERE.