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Salman Nizami
Jabina, Fatima and Saleema are victims of the cycle of violence that has left a trail of misery in Jammu & Kashmir. They have lost their land and men. Once well-off and happy, they now live wretched lives in a village far away from what used to be their home
Jabeena, Fatima and Salima come from Kralpura village of Kupwara district in Jammu & Kashmir. They have known each other for long. Jabeena, who is Fatima’s mother-in-law, is in her early-50s, while the two younger women are in their 30s. All three look considerably older. Fatima’s face is deeply wrinkled; Salima is very thin and listless.
All the women are widows, their husbands were killed in violence that has plagued the State. Together with nine children, all aged under 15, they share two rooms in Langate village. The stench of faeces and rubbish is overpowering. Jabeena and Fatima share one room with Fatima’s two young daughters.
On one wall, high up in the style of Kashmir’s Dal lake, Gulmarg, Pahalgam pictures, hangs a single photograph of a young, scholarly-looking man in spectacles and traditional Kashmiri dress. Though there is very little light, the picture stands out, for there is nothing else in the room, beyond a neat pile of mats and quilts in one corner, and two burqas hanging on a peg. “That is my son”, says Jabeena. “He was called Mushtaq Ahmed, he was killed in action. There was a bullet in his chest and another in his kidney.”
Jabeena, Fatima and Salima are internally-displaced people, made homeless by years of conflict. Now, as widows with no living male to help them, they are among the most destitute people in Kashmir. They are also too poor to travel, where (as women alone with small children) they do not feel able to reclaim the land and house they have lost. Salima’s husband, Mustafa, died in 1998.
The family, was preparing to flee to safety with other villagers when a stray bullet hit him as he was carrying a first load of belongings out of their house. “There was no hospital to take him to,” says Salima. “I simply held him in my arms and he died. We just sat there staring at him, because we couldn’t believe it: One moment he was alive, and then he was dead.” The other neighbours left for neighbouring Langate after the attack; Salima and her four children stayed behind to bury Mustafa, and thus were forced to make the journey to safety alone.
“The house was deserted. It took us a week to build a new home at Langate, land owned by some known person to my father and to shift from Kralpura to Langate. I had to carry my youngest child on my back. We left behind us a good and happy life. We were all farmers, and we grew vegetables including beans, wheat, cucumbers, and tomatoes. We had apple and apricot trees. We managed well. The children went to school.”
When Salima and her children arrived in Langate, she found work doing washing for the more prosperous families, officers, and began spinning and sewing quilts, skills she had used for the family at home. She found a room in the same building as Jabeena and Fatima. “Land on the river side at Langate was empty. We simply moved in, cleaned it up and built a small home of mud with a thatched roof and started living here. But when the landlord returned, he told us that we have to pay `300 per month for each room; now I wonder every month how to pay the rent.”
Salima’s rent buys her a single room, some five metres square, which she shares with her five children. It has a mud floor, a wooden ceiling and a window without panes. This looks out over a now derelict courtyard, which must once have been airy and pleasant but is now little more than a rubbish heap. Here they have the use of an open latrine and a small extra area used as a kitchen. Salima’s eldest son, who is 14, sells Kashmiri handicraft in the market, but curfews and strikes have reduced his earnings to nothing.
Apart from the little Salima makes from her sewing, the family has no income. I asked her what they eat: “For breakfast and lunch, we have bread, and sometimes a little tea. For dinner, I cook potatoes and sometimes the cheapest rice. Sometimes, I have to buy the food already cooked because it is very hard to find fuel. The children search for pieces of cow dung to use as fuel.” At night, a very small kerosene lamp gives them a few hours of light. The children are healthy; say the three women and some of them at least are now going to school.
The women themselves do not look well. Jabeena has a constant ache in her few remaining teeth, and Fatima suffers from recurrent bouts of untreated malaria. They think constantly about returning to their village, Kralpura, where they were once prosperous and safe, but fear that they would never manage to make enough to stay alive. “Our houses are no longer standing,” they say. “Even the rafters have gone, stolen for firewood during militancy times. Without men, we cannot reclaim our fields. At least in Langate we make a little money by sewing.”
Jabeena and Fatima cry when they talk about Hussein, saying that he would have looked after them, and that they had pinned all their hopes on him. “If he had lived”, they say, “We would have gone home. We would have been all right.” Few months back Fatima travelled back to Kralpura, to see if she could find Hussein’s grave. But she found that the village is still under curfew and protest demonstrations, therefore she had to return without seeing where he was buried.
These hapless women have lost everything — husbands, land, homes. They are entitled to nothing and they have nothing. What little money they manage to earn goes into food for the children. It is hard to see how they will survive. Daily Pioneer
--The writer is a free-lance journalist based in the Kashmir Valley.
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Jabina, Fatima and Saleema are victims of the cycle of violence that has left a trail of misery in Jammu & Kashmir. They have lost their land and men. Once well-off and happy, they now live wretched lives in a village far away from what used to be their home
Jabeena, Fatima and Salima come from Kralpura village of Kupwara district in Jammu & Kashmir. They have known each other for long. Jabeena, who is Fatima’s mother-in-law, is in her early-50s, while the two younger women are in their 30s. All three look considerably older. Fatima’s face is deeply wrinkled; Salima is very thin and listless.
All the women are widows, their husbands were killed in violence that has plagued the State. Together with nine children, all aged under 15, they share two rooms in Langate village. The stench of faeces and rubbish is overpowering. Jabeena and Fatima share one room with Fatima’s two young daughters.
On one wall, high up in the style of Kashmir’s Dal lake, Gulmarg, Pahalgam pictures, hangs a single photograph of a young, scholarly-looking man in spectacles and traditional Kashmiri dress. Though there is very little light, the picture stands out, for there is nothing else in the room, beyond a neat pile of mats and quilts in one corner, and two burqas hanging on a peg. “That is my son”, says Jabeena. “He was called Mushtaq Ahmed, he was killed in action. There was a bullet in his chest and another in his kidney.”
Jabeena, Fatima and Salima are internally-displaced people, made homeless by years of conflict. Now, as widows with no living male to help them, they are among the most destitute people in Kashmir. They are also too poor to travel, where (as women alone with small children) they do not feel able to reclaim the land and house they have lost. Salima’s husband, Mustafa, died in 1998.
The family, was preparing to flee to safety with other villagers when a stray bullet hit him as he was carrying a first load of belongings out of their house. “There was no hospital to take him to,” says Salima. “I simply held him in my arms and he died. We just sat there staring at him, because we couldn’t believe it: One moment he was alive, and then he was dead.” The other neighbours left for neighbouring Langate after the attack; Salima and her four children stayed behind to bury Mustafa, and thus were forced to make the journey to safety alone.
“The house was deserted. It took us a week to build a new home at Langate, land owned by some known person to my father and to shift from Kralpura to Langate. I had to carry my youngest child on my back. We left behind us a good and happy life. We were all farmers, and we grew vegetables including beans, wheat, cucumbers, and tomatoes. We had apple and apricot trees. We managed well. The children went to school.”
When Salima and her children arrived in Langate, she found work doing washing for the more prosperous families, officers, and began spinning and sewing quilts, skills she had used for the family at home. She found a room in the same building as Jabeena and Fatima. “Land on the river side at Langate was empty. We simply moved in, cleaned it up and built a small home of mud with a thatched roof and started living here. But when the landlord returned, he told us that we have to pay `300 per month for each room; now I wonder every month how to pay the rent.”
Salima’s rent buys her a single room, some five metres square, which she shares with her five children. It has a mud floor, a wooden ceiling and a window without panes. This looks out over a now derelict courtyard, which must once have been airy and pleasant but is now little more than a rubbish heap. Here they have the use of an open latrine and a small extra area used as a kitchen. Salima’s eldest son, who is 14, sells Kashmiri handicraft in the market, but curfews and strikes have reduced his earnings to nothing.
Apart from the little Salima makes from her sewing, the family has no income. I asked her what they eat: “For breakfast and lunch, we have bread, and sometimes a little tea. For dinner, I cook potatoes and sometimes the cheapest rice. Sometimes, I have to buy the food already cooked because it is very hard to find fuel. The children search for pieces of cow dung to use as fuel.” At night, a very small kerosene lamp gives them a few hours of light. The children are healthy; say the three women and some of them at least are now going to school.
The women themselves do not look well. Jabeena has a constant ache in her few remaining teeth, and Fatima suffers from recurrent bouts of untreated malaria. They think constantly about returning to their village, Kralpura, where they were once prosperous and safe, but fear that they would never manage to make enough to stay alive. “Our houses are no longer standing,” they say. “Even the rafters have gone, stolen for firewood during militancy times. Without men, we cannot reclaim our fields. At least in Langate we make a little money by sewing.”
Jabeena and Fatima cry when they talk about Hussein, saying that he would have looked after them, and that they had pinned all their hopes on him. “If he had lived”, they say, “We would have gone home. We would have been all right.” Few months back Fatima travelled back to Kralpura, to see if she could find Hussein’s grave. But she found that the village is still under curfew and protest demonstrations, therefore she had to return without seeing where he was buried.
These hapless women have lost everything — husbands, land, homes. They are entitled to nothing and they have nothing. What little money they manage to earn goes into food for the children. It is hard to see how they will survive. Daily Pioneer
--The writer is a free-lance journalist based in the Kashmir Valley.
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