A Little Tale From Kashmir (a story from The Indian Express)

Muzamil Jaleel, a writer whose reportage of Kashmir I have often admired in The Indian Express, for which he writes, has filed this sad, sad, sad story today in the same paper. Two lines that I'd like to highlight are: "the group Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) say 10,000 men have disappeared since a counter-insurgent assault began in the Valley in 1990. Though the government disagrees with the APDP statistics, it has promised an inquiry several times but nothing has come of it." 

And yet, it is the same country where 80,000 Tibetans found refuge as they fled Tibet.

‘My Nazir, have you come, she said... and closed her eyes’

When the mothers of the Valley’s missing gather for their monthly mourning assembly this time, they will also be mourning a mother, who died waiting for her son to come back. Mughli — the elderly mother whose relentless fight to trace her only son had become the epitome of the struggle of the parents of disappeared in Kashmir — died on Sunday without closure.

“Maine Nazira, aave kha (My Nazir, have you come), she said and closed her eyes,” said Parveena Ahangar, the president of the mothers’ union. “For the last 19 years, she had been craving to see her son, to know of his fate. She was always full of hope.” Ahangar said Mughli’s death was especially tragic for the group. “We feel that we will die one by one, looking for our children,” she said. “Over the years, we had developed such a strong attachment with each other. This bond of mutual pain and hope has turned us into a large family. Now we are losing hope.”

Mughli’s son — Nazir Ahmad Teli — was a school teacher, who disappeared in 1990 after he was picked up by security forces, never to return. For years, Mughli lived alone in her large family house deep inside Srinagar’s Habba Kadal where narrow streets snake through a cluster of housing blocks. Old age had turned her nearly deaf but the hope that her son may return saw her spending days at the window, looking out at the door. Today, the rusty chain link that would shut the mite-eaten door of her house is locked.

One morning — she once told this correspondent — in the first September of the first tehreek (militant struggle in 1990) her teacher son Nazir Ahmad Teli left for school. She never saw him again — and Mughli became one of the first members of a tragic club of several thousand women whose young sons or husbands have disappeared, the majority of them picked up by police or security forces. Bound together by mutual pain and a shared tale, the group Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) say 10,000 men have disappeared since a counter-insurgent assault began in the Valley in 1990. Though the government disagrees with the APDP statistics, it has promised an inquiry several times but nothing has come of it.

In an interview to The Indian Express while she was still able to move around, Mughli — who didn’t remember her age — had said that the shock broke her back. “He was born after my husband divorced me. I had no one. I didn’t marry again and raised him. He was the only reason for my life,” she had said. “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 wish 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 then took off her thick glasses and wiped her tears with the corner of her shawl. “Every time I tell this story I feel as if I rind my wounds — as if a sharp knife is dipped in my wound again,” she had said. “These walls are my only companion and they don’t ask anything.” She wailed in murmurs, her words inaudible. Where did you search for him? “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 his work,” she had recalled. “I felt my heart sink and called my neighbours. They came and tried to console me till late in the night. I spent that night sitting at the window looking at the door. He didn’t return.”

Mughli had approached police officers and politicians and even visited every jail in Kashmir hoping to find her son. But nothing helped. The APDP had helped her file a petition in the court which is still going on. Mughli, meanwhile, had taken refuge in faith and every Thursday, she would visit the shrines in the city, seeking divine help.

Mughli had never opened her son’s room ever since he went missing and had even tried to commit suicide. She had said that her son comes in her dreams. “He (her son) calls me in the dream. He tells me he is alive,” she had said.

Over the years, the APDP has been reduced to a forum for group catharsis — where the families of the disappeared meet, share their stories and help each other cope. With her death, one story of pain has come to a sudden end. But it has also left a gaping wound. The mothers of Kashmir’s missing need closure and only the government can ensure that. And if Chief minister Omar Abdullah turns the poll promise of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission into a reality, there will be some hope of that.