During my first interaction with a group of women labelled “half-widows” – women whose husbands are not officially declared dead, but termed “missing” – from Dardpora in 2003, it was difficult for me to fathom how a man could simply “disappear”. Of course things have become clearer now, but that first time was numbing, to say the least.
Amongst this group of women from Dardpora was Rafiqa, a woman in her mid-twenties, who looked stunningly beautiful in her salwar-kameez detailed with Kashmiri embroidery. I can recall my conversation, with an eager-to-talk Rafiqa, to the last detail even to this day. Her husband had been picked up, presumably by the security forces, and taken away, never to return. She was left behind with two children, both below five, and nothing but memories of her husband. Her in-laws turned her out from their house, and other men from the village harassed her day and night. She did not want to burden her parents, but had no choice but to return to their house.
Amongst other things, her biggest regret was that she and her husband only managed to have two children before he “disappeared”. She didn’t want to “retire” so soon. She had wanted many more children. I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to suggest a second marriage to Rafiqa. The Indian government does not provide any relief to half-widows before seven years from the date of the ‘disappearance’ of their men, and if the women choose to re-marry before those seven years, they are not entitled to any official relief or assistance whatsoever. Until recently, the government had provided relief only to a few hundred half-widows.
For Rafiqa, as for most women of Kashmir, the conflict has been doubly fatal, as they haven’t just borne the wrath of the conflict but have also been treated as objects of use and amusement, both by militants and Indian security forces.
I was meeting her again, after a gap of many years, during my current visit to the valley. In trying to find her own Azaadi, she had fought the battle of survival ferociously. The journey had been long and painful. She had visibly aged, but was still stunning, and in control of life. It was difficult to imagine how she must have toiled and fretted over re-building it bit by bit. She seemed reluctant to talk about it. I decided to go with Rafiqa to her village, Dardpora.
Dardpora, the “village of widows” in Kupwara, is nestled in the mountains and is very close to the LoC. Its name comes from the Dardi tribe which inhabits the village. Ironically, it also symbolizes dard, or the pain and suffering, that the women here undergo. Even though I had been to the village before, going with Rafiqa was a different experience. She had been born and brought up in Dardpora, and had been married to a man from the same village, Suleiman.
In the early 1990s, when militancy was just setting foot in Kashmir, three militant groups – Al Barq (mostly comprising Gujjars), HM, and the Kashmir Liberation Force - became operational in the area. A fratricidal war between the three groups and clashes with security forces claimed most of the
men in this village. Prior to that, the hostility between the two prevalent communities – Gujjars and Kashmiris – had taken the lives of many male members. As a tragic and sad after-effect, those who were left in the village were mostly women and children, women whose men had either died or had gone ‘missing’. Women whose husbands went ‘missing’ began to be known as ‘half-widows’.
Hussain drove the two of us up to Dardpora. It had snowed the previous day, an unusual phenomenon for the month of November. After four hours of a journey full of twists and turns on long, winding roads through thick forests of unparalleled scenic beauty, we reached the outskirts of the village, beyond which we had to make our way on foot. Hussain wasn’t too happy about this, but once he realized Rafiqa and I wouldn’t be deterred, he reluctantly parked his vehicle and followed us – a gesture which deeply touched me. His job was simply to take me to places, not to worry about my whereabouts and safety. But over the years, Hussain had donned the mantle of being my guardian angel in Kashmir: ensuring I ate my meals, called home and informed my family of my well-being, and didn’t get too “adventurous”.
Rafiqa took us to her parents’ house, where she had been living along with her two children after her husband went “missing” and the in-laws turned hostile. Having spent some time talking to Rafiqa’s mother and sharing tit-bits of information about my work in general, I expressed a desire to walk through the village. “Yahan par charon taraf dushman hai. Kisi par bharosa nahi kiya ja sakta,” the elderly woman told me. Everyone here is an enemy. No one can be trusted…
Hussain made his exit at this point, and Rafiqa and I spent the better part of the afternoon walking aimlessly around lower Dardpora exchanging pleasantries with the village folk. Most of the widows in the village were very young, between twenty-one and forty-five years. Most had large families, with school-going children to support. Earlier, Gujjar women would go to the jungles to chop firewood that they would then sell, and Kashmiri women would cultivate the land or earn a meagre income from handicraft orders. Now, widowhood had become the dominant marker for these women. They were harassed by security forces and militants alike, not to mention the daily struggle of having to fend for themselves and their children.
It came to light that there was once a time when there was not a single house in Dardpora that did not house militants.
Women had a choice between willingly marrying the militants or being forcefully carried away. After the men/militants were killed, the women did not remarry because of their children. They also said that nobody wanted a woman with children from a previous marriage. Since livelihood means were scarce, and it was only women left behind in Dardpora, prostitution could not be ruled out. I had to be very gentle about asking them if they had been harassed by security forces or government officials. They denied that this was happening, and indicated that as they were now liberated from all men, issues of rape, battering and assault were no longer relevant.
The basis of my interactions with the women in Dardpora, as anywhere else in Kashmir, had to be trust, which I had to work upon. Rafiqa was going to help me with that. My first interaction with the Dardpora women had taken place in Srinagar many years before. We had invited a group of twenty women from the village to stay with us for a two-day “trauma healing and reconciliation” workshop. For the Dardpora women, it was strange to be away from the village, stranger still that they didn’t have to look after the house, cook, clean and manage the children. What was worse was that there was someone else who was happy to cook for them and feed them! A shikara ride on the Dal lake, which we all take for granted as part of the deal when visiting Kashmir, put these women in a state of utter confusion and deep, far-away thoughts.
In trauma healing, symbolism plays a crucial role. During the course of the workshop, it was important for us as the team conducting the workshop to establish an act of symbolism that we could relate to as ours, as belonging especially to our group – the Dardpora women and the team from Delhi. We tried to get the group to do several things: sing, draw, do an exercise wherein we divided the group in pairs. Nothing seemed to be working. It was an intense and extremely challenging experience to even get the women to talk. All they wanted was some money, and be allowed to go back home to their children. “Caring and sharing” was a concept alien to them, and they didn’t think much of “talking”.
Amongst other things, conflict teaches people survival tactics. An important part of that is to be able to say things the other party wants to hear. So the Dardpora women said the “right” things which were meant to move us women from Delhi
After day one of the workshop, as I was talking to the group during dinner, one of the women took me aside, and putting my hand inside her pheran, told me she had no breasts as the militants had simply chopped them off! My instant reaction was denial. How could this be possible? However, it was.
In Kashmir, thousands of women are going through an identity crisis owing to the phenomenon of enforced disappearances, which leads them to the status of half-widows. For such women, each day begins with the hope of their men returning, and ends in despair. While officials put the number of enforced disappearances between 1,000 and 3,000, according to human rights activists at least 10,000 people have been made to disappear by state agencies, mostly by armed personnel, in the last twenty years. Many of them were young men, and their disappearance has left behind 2,000 to 2,500 half-widows.37
The official version on these disappearances is bleak. Most men are either taken away under cover of darkness, or picked up from somewhere where nobody can identify the person or even know the location from where the disappearance took place. The ones taken away for questioning on the pretext of a “crime” or “violent incident” are said to be kept under tight security where neither their families are allowed to meet them nor are they given any legal assistance. Year after year, they remain missing, and the government does not say where they are.
Most half-widows are women from lower-income families and mostly dependent on their husbands.
During the seven-year waiting period, the women’s rights to their husbands’ property are often threatened. As is common, there is little or no support from the in-laws. Even after the completion of seven years from the date of disappearance, the women get a meagre amount of money for their sustenance. Half-widows have no recourse to justice or provision of aid, especially in the form of employment. Many NGOs, both local and national, have opened schools for these women where they are taught stitching and embroidery, and at times, given sewing machines. This is hardly enough or practical to help the women out of their plight.
When I had visited Dardpora after the two-day workshop in May 2003, there was a certain sadness that hung around the place like a gloomy cover. It seemed like life itself was dishevelled, unkempt and lost. For the inhabitants of Dardpora, mostly women, their days revolved around a few fruit trees, farming land where they cultivated some rice, and perhaps a small income from a room or two given out on rent. There was one school with only one old man acting as both schoolmaster and mentor for the fifteen-odd children of all age groups who came there.
When I visited Dardpora the second time, Master sahib was happy to see me again, this time with Rafiqa. During a long chat over a cup of noon chai, the salty tea for which I had finally acquired a taste, he told me how it was important for the women of Dardpora to have exposure to the outside world and interact with people beyond the village.
When word spread that the ‘madam’ from Delhi had come, some of the women from the village came to greet me. I was delighted that two of them were from the same group I had met earlier in Srinagar, and what’s more, they even remembered me! After exchanging polite banter, I was ushered into one of their homes and offered tea and blankets to keep me warm. On the way, I noticed a small stitching school. There wasn’t much progress in the village in terms of development, but the gloomy cover had certainly lifted. Even the school premises looked impressive and had an air of self-importance about it.
However, not much seemed to have changed in the lives of the women. They were still waiting to hear news of their missing men; reports still emanated of them being tortured by militants and security forces for the same reasons; they continued to wonder where their next meal would come from.
Rafiqa and I made our way back to her parents’ house, and by now, her father and her two children were also home. While the mother and daughter got busy with preparing the evening meal, and the father entertained a group of his friends, I tried to talk to the children. They responded by bringing their school bags and displaying their books. I asked them if they liked school and what they did there. “We study, and we play terrorist-terrorist, and sometimes when one of us can’t be found by the others, that child is considered ‘missing’." The ease with which the children said this sent a chill down my spine.
Almost all children in Kashmir have been affected by the conflict – while some are the children of insurgents, there are others who have lost their parents to the insurgency. Some have been physically affected by the conflict, a victim in a violent incident; others have been badly affected psychologically. While the children in far-flung areas like Dardpora undergo formal education courtesy NGOs and some government infrastructure, there is little or no exposure to the outside world, particularly due to lack of interaction with people outside their own area.
In such a situation, how do children cope with the trauma of conflict?
The answer was in front of my eyes: they do so by playing games like “terrorist-terrorist”. I have often wondered how their innocent minds address the issues of fear, hatred, anger, rebellion, trauma, disaster, compassion, reconciliation etc. Do they ever get healed? How do the children react to being identified as ‘victims’, and how does it affect their growing up? How does conflict affect their interactions with each other, particularly during extra-curricular activities? Again, I had no answers.
I mentioned this to Rafiqa as soon as we had all retired for the day after a delicious meal of haq (locally grown spinach) and rice with yakhni (meat cooked with spices and curd). She was not surprised. According to her, it was not just hers but most children of Kashmir who played such games and spoke in this manner. She also mentioned another “favourite” game Kashmiri children played: during firing, which is a common feature of everyday life here, children derived thrills by trying to establish whether it was the sound of rifles, AK-47s or some other gun!
I only had to slightly encourage Rafiqa to tell me her story, and she began telling me what had transpired in her life. Suleiman and Rafiqa had gotten married in the village ten- odd years ago and had begun their family almost immediately. Suleiman was a porter, and there was a rumour that he, along with twenty other men from the village, was involved with a militant group and helped them in various ways. Rumour also had it that since Kupwara was very close to the LoC, one of the routes that militants on both sides used to cross the border was through Dardpora.
Rafiqa said Suleiman had been warned a couple of times by the armed forces that he was under watch and his daily activities were being closely followed. One day, Suleiman left home in the wee hours of the morning, even before the darkness of the night had given way to the sunrise. He told Rafiqa he was going for work, and she knew better than to ask more.
Suleiman met up with his acquaintances in the deep cover of the forest, and together they set out even deeper.
They were to meet up with foreign militants and bring them to safety. However, security forces had come to know of this movement, and had been keeping watch for a few days now. Suleiman was oblivious to this. Suspecting nothing, the group moved on. Soon enough, there was an ambush; the security forces had formed a ring around them. Caught unawares, the militants fared badly in the clash, and most of them succumbed to the bullets. The few who survived tried to run away into hiding.
When Rafiqa heard persistent banging on her door, and that too only a few hours after her husband had left, she immediately sensed trouble. She opened the door to find a badly injured Suleiman almost collapsing outside the house. She got him inside, and helped him to bed. He refused her offer to bring Khan Chacha who acted as the village doctor, even though he had no medical background. But once Suleiman lost consciousness, Rafiqa immediately went and fetched the old man. She wasn’t very happy to note Chacha’s expression on examining her husband.
After treating four bullet injuries with whatever could be used as equipment from within the house, Khan Chacha administered Suleiman some local herbs as medicine, and told Rafiqa in no uncertain terms that his chances of survival were bleak. He suggested that if and when Suleiman recovered from unconsciousness, he should not be allowed to move at all. With a promise of coming back to check on Suleiman, he left. Rafiqa was lost. She knew that word would soon spread around the village about Suleiman and his injuries, even though Chacha would not be the one doing the talking. She didn’t know what to say to her children and Suleiman’s parents. However, she knew she had to move her husband away from the house because the security forces would come looking for him any minute. This she did with the help of Chacha and some other elders; Suleiman was moved to an abandoned and well-hidden cave in the forest.
In a few weeks’ time, when Suleiman had regained and lost consciousness several times before finally coming about, and when the whole village including his parents and children knew what had transpired, there was an air of discomfort all around. Suleiman insisted on going deeper into the forest to make contact with the foreign militants to find out what had happened that morning. Rafiqa and the others could not stop him. The inevitable happened: Suleiman left the cave one afternoon after a bitter argument with Rafiqa, and that was the last she saw of her husband.
She had not expected him back soon, but when Suleiman didn’t return even after three weeks, Rafiqa declared an emergency. She tried to make contact with Suleiman’s friends, some of whom had gone out that fateful morning to help the militants. This was no easy job. It involved sending out signals and messages in the most discreet and strange manner, then waiting for days at an end to get even the most insignificant response. Months passed, and Rafiqa turned from a homely, simple woman into a messenger between different stakeholders operating in Kupwara, involving not just members of militant outfits but also security forces. Despite this, she failed to get any concrete piece of information about Suleiman, and soon, her husband, like many other men from within and outside Dardpora, was termed “missing”. This left her a half-widow, someone who didn’t know whether her husband was dead or alive.
In trying to get any news about Suleiman, Rafiqa had many a time ruffled a few feathers here and there, and had also made many enemies. In order to placate them, she sometimes had to compromise sexually so as to avoid trouble. Before long, she was joined by other women who had similar backgrounds. Soon, Dardpora became known as the infamous village of half-widows whose women were aware of shorter routes in the mountains of Kupwara. They guided both militants as well as security forces through these routes, and in return demanded favours which otherwise would not come their way. Sexual manipulation became a common game played out in the region.
It was early morning by the time Rafiqa finished her story, almost six years since Suleiman had gone “missing”. I didn’t know what to say to her, and sensing my discomfort, she suggested we get out of bed and have some tea.
Excerpted with permission from The Land I Dream of: The Story of Kashmir's Women, Manisha Sobhrajani, Hachette India.
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Amongst this group of women from Dardpora was Rafiqa, a woman in her mid-twenties, who looked stunningly beautiful in her salwar-kameez detailed with Kashmiri embroidery. I can recall my conversation, with an eager-to-talk Rafiqa, to the last detail even to this day. Her husband had been picked up, presumably by the security forces, and taken away, never to return. She was left behind with two children, both below five, and nothing but memories of her husband. Her in-laws turned her out from their house, and other men from the village harassed her day and night. She did not want to burden her parents, but had no choice but to return to their house.
Amongst other things, her biggest regret was that she and her husband only managed to have two children before he “disappeared”. She didn’t want to “retire” so soon. She had wanted many more children. I wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to suggest a second marriage to Rafiqa. The Indian government does not provide any relief to half-widows before seven years from the date of the ‘disappearance’ of their men, and if the women choose to re-marry before those seven years, they are not entitled to any official relief or assistance whatsoever. Until recently, the government had provided relief only to a few hundred half-widows.
For Rafiqa, as for most women of Kashmir, the conflict has been doubly fatal, as they haven’t just borne the wrath of the conflict but have also been treated as objects of use and amusement, both by militants and Indian security forces.
I was meeting her again, after a gap of many years, during my current visit to the valley. In trying to find her own Azaadi, she had fought the battle of survival ferociously. The journey had been long and painful. She had visibly aged, but was still stunning, and in control of life. It was difficult to imagine how she must have toiled and fretted over re-building it bit by bit. She seemed reluctant to talk about it. I decided to go with Rafiqa to her village, Dardpora.
Dardpora, the “village of widows” in Kupwara, is nestled in the mountains and is very close to the LoC. Its name comes from the Dardi tribe which inhabits the village. Ironically, it also symbolizes dard, or the pain and suffering, that the women here undergo. Even though I had been to the village before, going with Rafiqa was a different experience. She had been born and brought up in Dardpora, and had been married to a man from the same village, Suleiman.
In the early 1990s, when militancy was just setting foot in Kashmir, three militant groups – Al Barq (mostly comprising Gujjars), HM, and the Kashmir Liberation Force - became operational in the area. A fratricidal war between the three groups and clashes with security forces claimed most of the
men in this village. Prior to that, the hostility between the two prevalent communities – Gujjars and Kashmiris – had taken the lives of many male members. As a tragic and sad after-effect, those who were left in the village were mostly women and children, women whose men had either died or had gone ‘missing’. Women whose husbands went ‘missing’ began to be known as ‘half-widows’.
Hussain drove the two of us up to Dardpora. It had snowed the previous day, an unusual phenomenon for the month of November. After four hours of a journey full of twists and turns on long, winding roads through thick forests of unparalleled scenic beauty, we reached the outskirts of the village, beyond which we had to make our way on foot. Hussain wasn’t too happy about this, but once he realized Rafiqa and I wouldn’t be deterred, he reluctantly parked his vehicle and followed us – a gesture which deeply touched me. His job was simply to take me to places, not to worry about my whereabouts and safety. But over the years, Hussain had donned the mantle of being my guardian angel in Kashmir: ensuring I ate my meals, called home and informed my family of my well-being, and didn’t get too “adventurous”.
Rafiqa took us to her parents’ house, where she had been living along with her two children after her husband went “missing” and the in-laws turned hostile. Having spent some time talking to Rafiqa’s mother and sharing tit-bits of information about my work in general, I expressed a desire to walk through the village. “Yahan par charon taraf dushman hai. Kisi par bharosa nahi kiya ja sakta,” the elderly woman told me. Everyone here is an enemy. No one can be trusted…
Hussain made his exit at this point, and Rafiqa and I spent the better part of the afternoon walking aimlessly around lower Dardpora exchanging pleasantries with the village folk. Most of the widows in the village were very young, between twenty-one and forty-five years. Most had large families, with school-going children to support. Earlier, Gujjar women would go to the jungles to chop firewood that they would then sell, and Kashmiri women would cultivate the land or earn a meagre income from handicraft orders. Now, widowhood had become the dominant marker for these women. They were harassed by security forces and militants alike, not to mention the daily struggle of having to fend for themselves and their children.
It came to light that there was once a time when there was not a single house in Dardpora that did not house militants.
Women had a choice between willingly marrying the militants or being forcefully carried away. After the men/militants were killed, the women did not remarry because of their children. They also said that nobody wanted a woman with children from a previous marriage. Since livelihood means were scarce, and it was only women left behind in Dardpora, prostitution could not be ruled out. I had to be very gentle about asking them if they had been harassed by security forces or government officials. They denied that this was happening, and indicated that as they were now liberated from all men, issues of rape, battering and assault were no longer relevant.
The basis of my interactions with the women in Dardpora, as anywhere else in Kashmir, had to be trust, which I had to work upon. Rafiqa was going to help me with that. My first interaction with the Dardpora women had taken place in Srinagar many years before. We had invited a group of twenty women from the village to stay with us for a two-day “trauma healing and reconciliation” workshop. For the Dardpora women, it was strange to be away from the village, stranger still that they didn’t have to look after the house, cook, clean and manage the children. What was worse was that there was someone else who was happy to cook for them and feed them! A shikara ride on the Dal lake, which we all take for granted as part of the deal when visiting Kashmir, put these women in a state of utter confusion and deep, far-away thoughts.
In trauma healing, symbolism plays a crucial role. During the course of the workshop, it was important for us as the team conducting the workshop to establish an act of symbolism that we could relate to as ours, as belonging especially to our group – the Dardpora women and the team from Delhi. We tried to get the group to do several things: sing, draw, do an exercise wherein we divided the group in pairs. Nothing seemed to be working. It was an intense and extremely challenging experience to even get the women to talk. All they wanted was some money, and be allowed to go back home to their children. “Caring and sharing” was a concept alien to them, and they didn’t think much of “talking”.
Amongst other things, conflict teaches people survival tactics. An important part of that is to be able to say things the other party wants to hear. So the Dardpora women said the “right” things which were meant to move us women from Delhi
After day one of the workshop, as I was talking to the group during dinner, one of the women took me aside, and putting my hand inside her pheran, told me she had no breasts as the militants had simply chopped them off! My instant reaction was denial. How could this be possible? However, it was.
In Kashmir, thousands of women are going through an identity crisis owing to the phenomenon of enforced disappearances, which leads them to the status of half-widows. For such women, each day begins with the hope of their men returning, and ends in despair. While officials put the number of enforced disappearances between 1,000 and 3,000, according to human rights activists at least 10,000 people have been made to disappear by state agencies, mostly by armed personnel, in the last twenty years. Many of them were young men, and their disappearance has left behind 2,000 to 2,500 half-widows.37
The official version on these disappearances is bleak. Most men are either taken away under cover of darkness, or picked up from somewhere where nobody can identify the person or even know the location from where the disappearance took place. The ones taken away for questioning on the pretext of a “crime” or “violent incident” are said to be kept under tight security where neither their families are allowed to meet them nor are they given any legal assistance. Year after year, they remain missing, and the government does not say where they are.
Most half-widows are women from lower-income families and mostly dependent on their husbands.
During the seven-year waiting period, the women’s rights to their husbands’ property are often threatened. As is common, there is little or no support from the in-laws. Even after the completion of seven years from the date of disappearance, the women get a meagre amount of money for their sustenance. Half-widows have no recourse to justice or provision of aid, especially in the form of employment. Many NGOs, both local and national, have opened schools for these women where they are taught stitching and embroidery, and at times, given sewing machines. This is hardly enough or practical to help the women out of their plight.
When I had visited Dardpora after the two-day workshop in May 2003, there was a certain sadness that hung around the place like a gloomy cover. It seemed like life itself was dishevelled, unkempt and lost. For the inhabitants of Dardpora, mostly women, their days revolved around a few fruit trees, farming land where they cultivated some rice, and perhaps a small income from a room or two given out on rent. There was one school with only one old man acting as both schoolmaster and mentor for the fifteen-odd children of all age groups who came there.
When I visited Dardpora the second time, Master sahib was happy to see me again, this time with Rafiqa. During a long chat over a cup of noon chai, the salty tea for which I had finally acquired a taste, he told me how it was important for the women of Dardpora to have exposure to the outside world and interact with people beyond the village.
When word spread that the ‘madam’ from Delhi had come, some of the women from the village came to greet me. I was delighted that two of them were from the same group I had met earlier in Srinagar, and what’s more, they even remembered me! After exchanging polite banter, I was ushered into one of their homes and offered tea and blankets to keep me warm. On the way, I noticed a small stitching school. There wasn’t much progress in the village in terms of development, but the gloomy cover had certainly lifted. Even the school premises looked impressive and had an air of self-importance about it.
However, not much seemed to have changed in the lives of the women. They were still waiting to hear news of their missing men; reports still emanated of them being tortured by militants and security forces for the same reasons; they continued to wonder where their next meal would come from.
Rafiqa and I made our way back to her parents’ house, and by now, her father and her two children were also home. While the mother and daughter got busy with preparing the evening meal, and the father entertained a group of his friends, I tried to talk to the children. They responded by bringing their school bags and displaying their books. I asked them if they liked school and what they did there. “We study, and we play terrorist-terrorist, and sometimes when one of us can’t be found by the others, that child is considered ‘missing’." The ease with which the children said this sent a chill down my spine.
Almost all children in Kashmir have been affected by the conflict – while some are the children of insurgents, there are others who have lost their parents to the insurgency. Some have been physically affected by the conflict, a victim in a violent incident; others have been badly affected psychologically. While the children in far-flung areas like Dardpora undergo formal education courtesy NGOs and some government infrastructure, there is little or no exposure to the outside world, particularly due to lack of interaction with people outside their own area.
In such a situation, how do children cope with the trauma of conflict?
The answer was in front of my eyes: they do so by playing games like “terrorist-terrorist”. I have often wondered how their innocent minds address the issues of fear, hatred, anger, rebellion, trauma, disaster, compassion, reconciliation etc. Do they ever get healed? How do the children react to being identified as ‘victims’, and how does it affect their growing up? How does conflict affect their interactions with each other, particularly during extra-curricular activities? Again, I had no answers.
I mentioned this to Rafiqa as soon as we had all retired for the day after a delicious meal of haq (locally grown spinach) and rice with yakhni (meat cooked with spices and curd). She was not surprised. According to her, it was not just hers but most children of Kashmir who played such games and spoke in this manner. She also mentioned another “favourite” game Kashmiri children played: during firing, which is a common feature of everyday life here, children derived thrills by trying to establish whether it was the sound of rifles, AK-47s or some other gun!
I only had to slightly encourage Rafiqa to tell me her story, and she began telling me what had transpired in her life. Suleiman and Rafiqa had gotten married in the village ten- odd years ago and had begun their family almost immediately. Suleiman was a porter, and there was a rumour that he, along with twenty other men from the village, was involved with a militant group and helped them in various ways. Rumour also had it that since Kupwara was very close to the LoC, one of the routes that militants on both sides used to cross the border was through Dardpora.
Rafiqa said Suleiman had been warned a couple of times by the armed forces that he was under watch and his daily activities were being closely followed. One day, Suleiman left home in the wee hours of the morning, even before the darkness of the night had given way to the sunrise. He told Rafiqa he was going for work, and she knew better than to ask more.
Suleiman met up with his acquaintances in the deep cover of the forest, and together they set out even deeper.
They were to meet up with foreign militants and bring them to safety. However, security forces had come to know of this movement, and had been keeping watch for a few days now. Suleiman was oblivious to this. Suspecting nothing, the group moved on. Soon enough, there was an ambush; the security forces had formed a ring around them. Caught unawares, the militants fared badly in the clash, and most of them succumbed to the bullets. The few who survived tried to run away into hiding.
When Rafiqa heard persistent banging on her door, and that too only a few hours after her husband had left, she immediately sensed trouble. She opened the door to find a badly injured Suleiman almost collapsing outside the house. She got him inside, and helped him to bed. He refused her offer to bring Khan Chacha who acted as the village doctor, even though he had no medical background. But once Suleiman lost consciousness, Rafiqa immediately went and fetched the old man. She wasn’t very happy to note Chacha’s expression on examining her husband.
After treating four bullet injuries with whatever could be used as equipment from within the house, Khan Chacha administered Suleiman some local herbs as medicine, and told Rafiqa in no uncertain terms that his chances of survival were bleak. He suggested that if and when Suleiman recovered from unconsciousness, he should not be allowed to move at all. With a promise of coming back to check on Suleiman, he left. Rafiqa was lost. She knew that word would soon spread around the village about Suleiman and his injuries, even though Chacha would not be the one doing the talking. She didn’t know what to say to her children and Suleiman’s parents. However, she knew she had to move her husband away from the house because the security forces would come looking for him any minute. This she did with the help of Chacha and some other elders; Suleiman was moved to an abandoned and well-hidden cave in the forest.
In a few weeks’ time, when Suleiman had regained and lost consciousness several times before finally coming about, and when the whole village including his parents and children knew what had transpired, there was an air of discomfort all around. Suleiman insisted on going deeper into the forest to make contact with the foreign militants to find out what had happened that morning. Rafiqa and the others could not stop him. The inevitable happened: Suleiman left the cave one afternoon after a bitter argument with Rafiqa, and that was the last she saw of her husband.
She had not expected him back soon, but when Suleiman didn’t return even after three weeks, Rafiqa declared an emergency. She tried to make contact with Suleiman’s friends, some of whom had gone out that fateful morning to help the militants. This was no easy job. It involved sending out signals and messages in the most discreet and strange manner, then waiting for days at an end to get even the most insignificant response. Months passed, and Rafiqa turned from a homely, simple woman into a messenger between different stakeholders operating in Kupwara, involving not just members of militant outfits but also security forces. Despite this, she failed to get any concrete piece of information about Suleiman, and soon, her husband, like many other men from within and outside Dardpora, was termed “missing”. This left her a half-widow, someone who didn’t know whether her husband was dead or alive.
In trying to get any news about Suleiman, Rafiqa had many a time ruffled a few feathers here and there, and had also made many enemies. In order to placate them, she sometimes had to compromise sexually so as to avoid trouble. Before long, she was joined by other women who had similar backgrounds. Soon, Dardpora became known as the infamous village of half-widows whose women were aware of shorter routes in the mountains of Kupwara. They guided both militants as well as security forces through these routes, and in return demanded favours which otherwise would not come their way. Sexual manipulation became a common game played out in the region.
It was early morning by the time Rafiqa finished her story, almost six years since Suleiman had gone “missing”. I didn’t know what to say to her, and sensing my discomfort, she suggested we get out of bed and have some tea.
Excerpted with permission from The Land I Dream of: The Story of Kashmir's Women, Manisha Sobhrajani, Hachette India.