Unsaid Goodbyes…

Indu
Most painful goodbyes are the ones that are never said.
I have read this quote somewhere and it resonates so deeply with me especially when I think of Kashmir.
I was around 9 years old when we were forced to leave Kashmir. I wasn’t even told that I was being taken to a safer place. The memories of that moment and the long journey from my hometown to Jammu are so blurred, that I often wonder if all that really happened. It is as if someone had cast a spell and all I remember are the bits and pieces of that eventful night.
Whenever I have tried to recall that night, I remember random scenes, pictures and moments like flashbacks from some movie watched ages ago. I always felt as if I had watched this whole chain of events from a distance and not really been a part of it, not lived those moments. Now that I think about it, I guess this is the way our defense mechanism works. For a child, all that would have been so overwhelming with a myriad of unexplainable emotions – confusion, fear, insecurity – that the brain took over and shut down all the senses, so that even though physically you were going through that journey of escape, your mind and your heart recoiled into a shell where you could feel nothing. Only one feeling prevailed- a sense of danger hanging over throughout this journey.
I remember it is dark. Fast asleep, was woken up perhaps quite late at night. My father took me and we climb onto the back of a truck. My insides feel as dark as outside, as I have no idea of what is happening. I don’t recall my mother saying anything to me. The truck moves and all I can remember is my father telling me to stay quiet and lay low. There are more people around us or perhaps not, all I see is shadows. I can sense my father’s fear and as children do I too just absorb that fear like a sponge. I had no idea why we were afraid or who we were afraid of. Some whispers in the dark now and then, and we continue moving for a long time. I have lost all the sense of time drifting in and out of sleep until the first rays of dawn fall on us.
I vaguely remember someone conveying a message that we were safe now. We had left Kashmir behind. We could stretch, move, stand. You never know the importance of freedom of being able to simply move, unless you have been frozen like this for a long time. At this moment, completely oblivious to the fact that we had been perpetually exiled, uprooted, and were now officially “migrants” or “refugees” (in our own country), I just felt relieved.
As baffling as it sounds, I don’t remember much after reaching this safe zone. Even though I have tried to tap into this memory several times, it fails me yet again, and all I can remember is perhaps a change of vehicle. (Our minds sure work in their own mysterious ways ??)
Whenever I try to relive this whole event, I am lost. A child perplexed, without someone explaining what is happening (forget about why is it happening). An event, that will impact everything in your life, unfolds itself, without anyone explaining it to you. There is just no mention of it. Perhaps as adults, no one thought that this is something that needs to be explained to a child, or perhaps they themselves weren’t able to comprehend it at that time.
The repercussions of what transpired were even more complicated. As a child, it took quite a long time to grasp that we were forced to leave our homes, to migrate and it took even longer time to understand that this wasn’t temporary. I feel unequipped to put this emotion into words.
This uprooting which will always be the most impactful event for me and so many others can never be explained. We had lost our anchors, our reference points in life, left in a vast unknown sea. Sometimes sinking, sometimes floating, we have since been trying to keep ourselves afloat.
Since then we have traveled around, made many places our new abodes, but my soul still wants to walk those by-lanes of my lost home, wishing to be there one last time, painfully wishing that at least I could say a Goodbye.
It is very true that life moves on. Some of us were fortunate enough to get a good education and stable lives but there were many others who struggled to just fulfill their basic needs and lost themselves in this exodus. Irrespective of which one you are, there is suffering. Because when you are forced to leave your homes overnight – never to return back, your souls are bruised such that nothing can heal them. There is a void inside us, which we keep pushing to some corner in our hearts and pretend that we have filled it, we are over this, but it stays there forever.
That is why, even after decades have passed, a picture of snow clad mountains in your lost homeland that you come across casually, has still the power to bring an avalanche of beautiful memories, pain, and longing. And sometimes the courage you need comes from such unexpected moments. That one moment on the internet watching a picture of season’s first snowfall in Kashmir, made me write Memoirs of Kashmir.
These short stories I will share are the usual growing up stories of a child in a beautiful village of Kashmir. I have for long resisted the urge to share these stories as I felt they don’t make an extraordinary narrative. Well, sometimes magic lies in the ordinary. What makes them sublime is that they reflect the void in the heart of a child, created by wishes that could not be fulfilled. All these stories are incomplete. And the void in these stories symbolizes the voids in the hearts of all those people who had to leave their homelands.
I share these stories with a hope that people will understand that fighting over territories doesn’t involve a mere piece of land. There is flesh and blood involved. There are people. There are innocent kids, who don’t know any other place other than you are snatching away from them. There are generations whose all memories are on this piece of land. There are countless dreams, aspirations, and hopes all tied to this land.
However when you force people to leave the only home they have ever had, you might get that piece of land, but you can never own it or cherish it as a prized possession. Because in doing so, you have killed the soul of that land, which is always the people who lived there. What made this piece of land so special was all its people who despite their different beliefs lived in harmony with each other and in harmony with the beauty nature had bestowed it with. Without all of its people, it is just a barren land – a heaven slowly turning into a hell.
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