Not ready for reason

Whenever an alley dog barks in the dead of night or a vehicle pulls off a road near her house in south Kashmir’s Shopian town, Hajra abruptly wakes up and peeps through the window of her withered house to see if her son has returned. Next morning she narrates it to her husband, who gives her an earful with furrows deepening on his brow: “He won’t return, why does this not dawn on you? He must have died if not been killed...” After that a strange quiet falls on the septuagenarian couple for some time

During the fall of 1991, as Hajra recounts, when the mighty Chinar trees had started shedding their leaves, her elder son Javid Ahmad Gandroo (20) was pursuing graduation at a local college and preparing for his exams. Dressed in new black trousers and a blue shirt, one afternoon he left for college and went missing.

The family searched frantically for him everywhere but found no trace of him. They first suspected that he may have crossed the border along with other local boys to receive arms training. But after a few months, they got a confirmation from informed sources, including the police — who had already registered a missing report — that he had not joined any militant outfit.

Not long after, Hajra, who takes anti-depressants to keep herself going, survived a paralytic stroke amid the rat-a-tat of machine guns and scenes of violence and gore.

“Her treatment drained every penny I had somehow saved out of my meagre income,” says her husband, Gh Mohmmad Gandroo, who worked as a class IV government employee.

The tribulation of the family did not stop with this. Fate had another monumental tragedy in store for it. Their younger son, Showkat Ahmad became addicted to drugs and succumbed to it in October 2014, leaving behind his young wife and three children.

His wife Fahmida ekes out a living by working as a cleaner in the government sub-district hospital in Shopian on a paltry pay of ₹2,000 per month. “We are living a hand-to-mouth life,” she says.

In conflict zones, people who disappear mysteriously rarely come back alive. Most of them get killed and their bodies are either interred in unknown locations or disposed of through other means, says a Valley-based human rights group on condition of anonymity. In 2011, the Jammu and Kashmir Human Rights Commission conceded that 2,156 unidentified bodies were lying in mass graves across three districts of north Kashmir.

But Hajra is not ready to listen to reason. She stills waits for her missing son. Though she finds solace in her grandchildren, she wishes the government would locate her son.

The writer is a Srinagar-based journalist pursuing a fellowship with the National Foundation for India, New Delhi

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