"A house that could never become a home"

Kamal Hak 

Looking at my three-storey house across the narrow lane from a well-manicured park, I see patches of faded paint and falling tiles striking discordant notes on the walls it is not that I haven't been aware of the blemishes dotting the face of the house These have caught my attention a number of times earlier also but I haven't been inclined to pay attention. For me it is only a house, which could never become home.

I have been living around the national capital for twenty five years now. This is the place, which along with thousands of others, gave me refuge in 1990. when during the course of one single night on 19 January our world turned upside down. This was the most dreadful night a minuscule religious minority could ever confront with. This was the night which we hoped would never end. The macabre eruption of simultaneous bone chilling frenzy across the mosques, streets, and roads of Kashmir seemed a replay of the Holocaust During that cold wintery night when the temperatures usually run at sub zero levels in the valley, we could never stop feeling the vetness in our underclothes due constant abnormal sweating.

All of us in my family huddled together in a dark corner of a room, which we thought could provide us some security in case the marauders decided to pay us a visit. People usually fight their fears of the dark by brightly. illuminating their surroundings. That horrible night we feared light. The light threw up a possibility of being witness to our own death while as darkness meant meeting the end in a swift bout of gunfire without even getting conscious of its impending arrival. We survived the gory night. The new day brought with it the scary thoughts about the welfare of all friends and relatives. The communication system went awry and minds became heavy with apprehensions. It took as a while to realise a majority of Kashmiri Pandits had used the darkness of the cold nights to run away to the safety of Jammu. All that was left were the empty houses with cupboards full of clothes, beds draped with appropriate winter linen and kitchens well stocked with essentials. While abandoning our homes at that time, it crossed nobody's mind that 25 years later some of us would be writing these pieces and the homes we left behind would become part of our historical memory.

The house in front of me is, for all others, the testimony to my Kashmiri Pandit trait of fortitude and hard work. True, for a person who, 25 years back. along with his wife, found himself being asked by a courteous Sikh truck driver to alight at an unknown place in Delhi, it could be a matter of great pride. It perhaps is. But, scratch the vulnerable surface of my pride and it will only reveal a reluctant compulsion behind the spilling of sweat and blood for it.

It was past the midnight hour then but unlike the impenetrable darkness of the nights back home, Delhi at this time appeared full of light and life. The Sikh driver went his away and I began the journey of my struggle for existence. At that time it never occurred to me that 25 years later I would still be looking for that beam of light, which could pierce through the darkness in my homeland and create a window for my return. That night in Delhi, we had nowhere to go. I pooled the money in my pockets with what was lying in my wife's purse. It added to a total of around rupees three hundred and fifty. The threats to my life had forced me to run away from my home in the dead of a wet night. The atmosphere back home had been scary but the prospects now appeared mightily frightening. My wife had insisted she would give me the company, but we had found no option but to leave our one-year old daughter behind. We had no friends, relatives or acquaintances in Delhi. We didn't know the place either. With just a few hundred rupees on us, we had our first brush with despondency. I found some open space on a nearby pavement. Under the open sky, with not even a sheet to spread beneath us, I and my wife tried to catch some winks in three days. I kept awake the whole night. I could sense my wife was also very far way from getting some sleep. For the entire night, I couldn't find courage to either look towards her or speak with her. This pavement in Sriniwaspuri became our sleeping space for next three nights and we didn't dare breaching our silence.

Today I live in my own house with much more space than that of what my father shared with the families of his three brothers in our ancestral home in Srinagar. My father and his brothers used to live in a large joint family in which only the married people had the privilege of having a separate room. Being the first one to get married in the third generation of the family I had a separate room to me and my wife.

That house no longer belongs to us. But, it remains home not only for me but for the entire clan who are now spread across the world. My visits to Srinagar remain incomplete till visit my 'home'. I am not sure how destiny will treat me in future but one thing remains firm with me. That crowded house, where I was born will never seize to be home for me. I am not too sure about the house that I now live in this Delhi suburb.

(A political, social activist and man of letters, the writer paints sentiments with his prose).

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Courtesy:- Kamal Hak and February 2015 Koshur Samachar