Lost in the Valley

Kus Os Kiyazi Morukh Te Lash Kut Kerhas, Hatas Kathas Chae Kuni Kath Kahbar Te Khamoshi
(Who was he, why was he killed, where is the body, the only answer is, who knows, keep silent).
- Rehman Rahi

Rehman Rahi, recently awarded the Gnanpith, the highest literary award of the country, writes poetry that reflects the beauty of the Kashmiri language and the pain and suffering of its people.
Kashmir the crown of India, now lies broken into several pieces. Failed to preserve its beauty in its true form; the valley now stays flooded with blood and tears. When mourning replaces singing. Where the grief crosses all barriers of language and takes the shape of protest.
Regipora village of Kupwara district is now called a ‘Martyrs Graveyard’. The graves of foreign militants, as the police like to put it, bear serial numbers on metal plates. Mutilated beyond recognition, people claim that these are the bodies of innocent people gone missing in the past two decades. “Whenever someone comes searching for his relative, we allow him to see the photos of the bodies. If someone recognises the body, we give him the serial number of the grave,’’ says a police officer.
The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) based the allegation on the report of a fact-finding mission in Uri district, Facts Underground which found 1,000 nameless graves in Uri alone. It alleged that many of its wards who went missing in the past 20 years might be buried in unnamed graves.
In last 17 years Rehman Rahi has been the foremost voice of the pain and agony of Kashmir. After the series of disappearances recently rocked Kashmir, Rahi has written about the agonising situation in his poems.
But things in Kashmir just keep getting worse. The nameless graves scandal was dug open in 2007 when five graves of alleged “foreign militants” were discovered in Ganderbal district to be of civilians picked up by the police’s anti-militancy Special Operations Group and killed in fake encounters.
This expose led to widespread protests across Kashmir. For half widows like Tahira Begum, a term coined by the Kashmir media in the mid-90s for a woman whose husband’s whereabouts are unknown, the news about unnamed graves in Uri could simply collapse their whole world.
But one has to inhabit the world that one was in, which is now shattered. How does one rebuild the ordinary?
Tahira’s husband Tariq Ahmed Rather had left his village in Baramulla for Delhi in December 2002 and has been missing since then. When police investigation failed to provide any information, she had Tariq’s name entered in the APDP’s list of the disappeared.
The APDP came into being in 1994, after parents of disappeared people decided to jointly demand information about their missing sons. The association estimates the number of those missing in the state at a staggering 10,000. Figures from the government vary in the range of 1,000 to 1,500.
When law sanctions violence, whom does one go to with hearts full of anguish?
The APDP members assemble in public parks on the 10th of each month carrying photographs and wearing headbands with the names of the missing.
With law and media failing to live up to its expectations, it is the literature that comes to the rescue of sufferers?
Literature can do justice in a way that law can’t.
Similar questions are raised by Amitava Kumar in his narrative, ‘Husband of a Fanatic’. While traveling across Kashmir, he comes face to face with a half-widow. It is through her story that he finds about more about the sufferings of the people associated with the missing in Kashmir.
“As a journalist in Kashmir, I have filled columns of newspapers counting the dead in dozens, collecting the pain and suffering in lifeless words. As a poet, I tried to sing the pain of my countrymen and women, the wails of mothers whose children were snatched from their beds, the government employees kidnapped by militants for being ‘informers,” recalls Murtaza Shibli, a Kashmiri journalist working in London.
All Kashmiri youth are suspected militants. They are picked up from their homes and are either killed in fake encounters or go missing. When the military itself unleashes violence upon people it is supposed to protect, whom are the people to go to for shelter and safety?
“Kumar comes across as a one-man intelligence service in the cause of peace, conveying the viewpoints of ordinary people,” says Neelum Saran Gour in a review for Times Literary Supplement.
With the memories of once ‘paradise on earth’ still fresh in Shibli’s mind, she recalls how they bid farewell to the dead. “We call them shaheed or martyrs; wailing women sing to them and shower candies and flower petals and rose water. We bury them in their own clothes, whether torn by bullets or shrapnel. We erect tombstones carved with Urdu verses

"Aa yay thaey hum misle bulbul sair-e-gulshan kur cha lay
Lay low mali bagh apna hum tove apnay ghar cha lay"
(I came like a bird, but abandoned your garden
O gardener, take your garden, I have left for home)