Living in Habba Kadal when everyone left

There is an exceptional quality to this part of the city (Srinagar). I arrive here on a September evening, when the days have grown considerably shorter. The flickering lamps glow in the kitchens, where dinner has been cooked long ago, sometimes in the late afternoon or even earlier. Traditionally, in Kashmiri households, food is cooked early, mostly based on the power cut schedule. Like in other parts of South Asia, electricity is rationed in Kashmir despite the region being a major producer of hydroelectricity.

I walk through the narrow lanes of Habba Kadal asking shopkeepers where Suman Pandita’s house is. For there can be no confusion here; there are not many Suman Panditas around since not many Battea/Kashmiri Pandit families stayed behind through the chaos of 1990. “Go on walking straight, then take a right, you will see a newly constructed house on your right side. They have a cherry-coloured gate and a small provision store opposite the house. But why do you want to go there?” asks one of them. “Ah, I am a researcher and have been in touch with the family lately. I am trying to understand mohallae (neighbourhood) and what happened to mixed community mohallae once the Kashmiri Pandits left,” I blurt out immediately, fearing the obvious sensitivities that come around when working with a microscopic minority of Kashmiri Pandits who did not migrate out of the Valley.

The Kashmiri Pandit Sangharsh Committee, an organisation that represents the Kashmiri Pandits who did not migrate to Jammu or southwards towards mainland India, puts the number of the remaining community members close to 3,000.

A young boy who must have been born in the early 2000s joins the conversation with a certain sense of honour and tells me, “It’s naar everywhere (meaning ‘the earth is spitting fire’). Don’t you know the Battea chemist Bidroo was killed by unknown gunmen a few weeks ago in broad daylight at his shop, so we get alarmed when anyone asks around for this family. You should also research something else. The policemen in civil dress keep a watch on everyone who visits them, but unidentified gunmen still have their way.”

I walk through the guided path thinking about the measurement of the space and events of the past. I look at the height of the termite-eaten wooden lamp posts and feel that the mohalla is languishing and degenerating. The glum desperation of marginalisation and police repression reflected through the bullet holes in many of the walls of the mohalla and the inability of the inhabitants to get the structures refurbished. In some cases where renovation was done, the cheap building material tells the untold story.

I reach the door of the Panditas’ house and find it locked. A huge classic Aligarh lock gives a sense of completion to the act of locking. I hear a woman calling out to me from the kaeni (attic) of another house, asking me to knock at the back door. “They have not kept the front door open, ever since halaat (conditions) intensified in the last weeks.”

I knock at the door and give my references to Suman’s mother Phamb. She and the house cats take me to the guest room. I try to be cat-friendly to permeate the thickness of the situation. Phamb asks for my preference of tea, assuming Lipton (brewed sugar tea) would be the answer. I ask for kehva instead, which was not even offered. The kehva served in Battae households is quite different from how it is made in the households of Kashmiri Muslims. She gathers the kehva ingredients and puts them to brew in the kitchen, asking her grand-daughter to serve it once it is brewed. Phamb was my mother’s work colleague some years ago. “Your mother is a nice and simple woman; hardworking too. She has remained honest throughout the job,” while the granddaughter Veda joins in with kehva. We take our respective cups and, in a moment of absolute stillness, I deviate to the depth of the cup, the myriad ripples at the bottom. I wake up from the repetitive depth-and-ripple cycle and ask abruptly, “How was living here when everyone left?”

Phamb did not have to think a lot before she responded, “It was eerie and silent. I could not leave for personal reasons. I was a young widow with three children, had no resources to migrate out and start a new life somewhere else. Yeti aes panin jai (we owned the house), had a roof to protect my children and the familiarity of the old neighbourhood. What could a young widow do in a wopar (foreign) place? I knew how the school system worked here. I could send them to a school, if not a private one like M Das, but the public one at Babapora. And then I had the solace of the fact that if ever my son fell into bad company or smoked clandestinely in the by-lanes outside, the neighbours would inform me or correct his behaviour. What would I have done in Jammu, if Suman fell in the suhbat (company) of badmaash (licentious) Dogras,” she says in a mild manner that was self-assuring too.

All her relatives from her maiden family as well as her in-laws had migrated out. Phamb never regretted her decision of not moving out. Despite the regular jibes her relatives throw at her for choosing to live in “Pakistan”, for risking her safety, she draws comfort from the fact that her children received an education and also got into government service jobs. Now, her three grandchildren go to the poshest English missionary schools in the city. There has been a certain upward mobility for the family and they have also been able to construct a house in reinforced cement concrete.

Phamb hurries up and calls her grandson to take me to another Battea household in the mohalla. She tells me, “Everyone who stayed behind has a different story. For that matter, the Muslims who did not move out to the outer developing areas, also have a story.”

— Excerpted from ‘Yaadgah: Memories of Srinagar’, with permission from Yoda Press