We lived in Srinagar.
For us the Bund, Polo ground & Emporium gardens were like our own back yard. I learnt walking in Polo Ground & the Emporium Gardens. So did our daughter. Emporium gardens, with the backdrop of Shankracharya hill, especially during the spring time would be fascinating, with Chinar trees providing cover from the skies above. Natural growth of innumerable white daisy flowers on the grounds of this garden would always overawe me, as they do even today.
My parents, brother & sister, neighbours & guests would often visit these parks whenever the weather in Kashmir would get hot, by Kashmir standards, in summer. Cool breeze of these magnificent & open places would provide the much needed relief. Today all these places are cramped.
As I grew up, one of my fascinating hobbies was to walk on the bund from Abi Guzar to the Zero Bridge & back. River Jehlum provided an exhilarating backdrop to my walks. Bund was much more spacious & well maintained then. The small Shia mosque on the bund was always fascinating which during those days was an open wooden platform under a canopy of Chinar trees protruding onto the river side. Ahdoos Hotel, Pestonji Building (now a huge mall) along with the white wooden horse & the Lloyd’s bank (now J&K Bank) were the other remarkable land marks. The forecourt of Capt. Prakash’s dental clinic & the Srinagar Club, which again had a wooden jetty extending on to the river side, were other fascinating places.
From the Lloyd’s bank you could take a ‘shikara’ ride & cross the river Jehlum to reach the other side right in front of the Convent School.
During my lonely walks or walks with friends & later with my wife & subsequently with our daughter too (in a pram of course) we came across a poor ‘Gujjar’ gentleman, who would make his living by asking alms in the name of Allah from the passers-by. He had very sharp & distinct feature. He would sit in front of the Lloyd’s bank on a worn out jute mat looking for alms. This person was not a Kashmiri & to my understanding was either from Rajouri or Poonch. Every time we passed by him he would ask for one rupee as ‘bakshish’ from us. We too got habitual of him & would normally give him one rupee whenever we passed by. He was a pleasing personality with longish beard & trimmed moustaches in Muslim Gujjar style & would wear a white “pugri (turban)” tied in a circular shape on to his head. As time passed he also started keeping an account of our absence from walks, which was not very often & on subsequent dates he would ask us for the ‘arrears too’ saying that he had not received one rupee on a particular Thursday or Saturday or may be a Sunday. We also thought it better to keep him happy & would dispense with whatever calculations & amount he would ask for. So, our world on the bund was happy & mesmerizing & his world too seemed to be happy as he would always greet us with a very broad smile, ask us about our welfare, and then extend out his hand expecting a rupee. Occasionally, the convent school going girls, passers-by or shikarawallas would also drop a few coins into his extended hand.
And then the things started changing. Unknown to anyone, Kashmir was changing and tragically was not going to be the same again. Militancy started raising its head & knocking on the doors of the Kashmiris. Rapidly it became a movement, right or wrong, I leave it for the future historians to judge. Till date, however, it has caused mayhem & much of the blood has been shed of poor & innocent people. At the same time a lot many people have made it a thriving ‘business’. The death, the tragedy, the mayhem & the ‘business’ are all visible to a discerning eye, an eye that has seen various phases of Kashmir politics, the happy ones & the tragic ones too . Innumerable people have died & many more have lost their home & hearth. So many people have been crippled.
Kashmir is a unique place in the world where scars of militancy & economic development have more or less kept pace with each other.
Soon things started getting scary. Large scale violence, killings, firing, blasts, massive protests, shut downs & curfews became an everyday affair. Nights became scarier with loudspeakers from practically all mosques in the Valley simultaneously exhorting people to rise & join in the ‘struggle’. For them their ‘deliverance’ was expected to be the ‘very next day’. Every section of Kashmiri society was impacted. Our walks on the bund became infrequent. We preferred to stay home & that too in some corner where ‘nobody’ would ‘find us’. And one particular day, when I did venture out alone, I found that our acquaintance of such a long time had vanished from the bund, leaving his torn out jute mat behind. I was worried & not sure as to what had happened to him. This was early 1990.
Time passed, unprecedented things happened in Kashmir over a period of time & we found ourselves in Jammu.
This was 1992.
Summer had started making its presence felt. Me, my brother in law & one of our friends got down from matador bus near Vivekananda Chowk in Jammu on our way to Residency Road. We walked past the bifurcation point of the road that leads to Raghu Nath Temple & another in the direction of Kum Kum Sharma’s pathological lab. There was heavy rush of traffic. ‘Durbar’ was still in Jammu & there was a huge rush of people. People from every ethnicity of J&K together with ‘migrants’, those had arrived from Kashmir, could be seen on this stretch of the road. Some ‘migrants’ from Kashmir could be heard bemoaning their plight & others drying their forehead with handkerchiefs & towels. And mind you summer had not actually arrived in Jammu yet. One of the common discourse of the ‘migrants’ those days was that they owned multi-storeyed houses in Kashmir with orchards or beautifully laid out lawns where as in Jammu they were living like beggars in torn out tents provided by the Government. They would talk about it, which actually was true, without bothering if anyone was listening to them or not. You could hear this talk while travelling in buses, while shopping in market place or where ever you would find a group of people discussing something. I thought this was their way of telling people that they were from well to do backgrounds & were not always like this. This was their way of asserting their identity. This was something like a child, who got admission to a new school, telling his classmates that he was a brilliant & friendly person with so many credentials to his credit.
We too were feeling uncomfortable with the heat & dust of Jammu & that too walking up the slope of this road.
From a distance, sitting under the shade of one of the buildings I saw a familiar figure. I tried to figure out who this was. He saw me too. He got up, came running towards me, stretched his hand out to shake mine & flung his arms to embrace me. It was unbelievable, we were in total embrace. My friend & brother-in-law were bewildered at the sight of a beggar embracing me & me responding too in an equal measure. For them it was an unkempt & untidy beggar embracing me but for two of us we were long lost friends of the Bund Srinagar. They could neither understand it , comprehend it, or believe it. Some passers-by also gathered around us for some moments as if trying to be a witness to the scene.
The same ‘Gujjar’ gentleman, with whom we had developed some sort of friendship while taking walks on the Bund, Srinagar was in total embrace with me & we were hugging each other. Tears swelled in his eyes. He was wearing the same ‘pugri’, wearing the same beard & moustaches & had similar worn out jute mat under his feet. He had same twinkle in his eyes. He enquired about the welfare of my wife & daughter & all other family members. He was pleased to know that all was fine with us & praised Allah several times for his mercy. I asked about him & his family. He had no family.
He told me that during one of the very violent demonstrations in the Srinagar city, during the month of January, he was lucky to have escaped from his perch on the Bund. There was firing somewhere & all hell broke loose. He had to run for his life. He had to walk several kilometres to reach the other side of Jawahar Tunnel to safety. From Banihal he could find a bus that brought him to Jammu. While escaping the Valley he had to pass through or sometimes alongside the demonstrators & many a times walk on the roads that were completely empty because of curfew restrictions. He was thoroughly frisked by security forces at several places & non availability of an identity card did not make things easy for him. He also heard sound of gun shots & blasts at several places during his journey to Banihal. In some places he was able to get a lift in auto or pickup van from some kind hearted people for short distances. Some policemen too gave him a lift in their jeep for short hauls.
After narrating his story he squatted on to his torn out jute mat once again, extended his hand out & once again started asking for ‘bakshish’ in the name of Allah!!! How could have I disappointed him. How could I have disappointed him, this ‘Gujjar’ friend of mine, my old acquaintance & well-wisher from the Bund, Srinagar.
JAGMOHAN SHARMA 