As a Kashmiri Pandit, I Guess I Will Never Like a Tent – Ever

My story starts in March 1989, when I was born, and it ends on the interim night of January 19, 1990, just when my parents held me tightly in their hands and boarded a van for Jammu. The doors to the vehicle opened the doors to our poverty, struggle, disease and neglect for the next 30 years and counting, with Kashmiri Pandits becoming India’s largest-ever population of internally displaced people. It opened avenues for successive governments to abuse our collective trauma, to give us hope like shots and take it back in insulting ways like not even trying the crimes in court. Selective outrage, even after all these years, a political cocktail, even after all these years, have done nothing for the Pandit woman who has an ailing husband to look after, a delusional mother-in-law who still thinks she lives in Chanpora, or an ignorant son who thinks he has nothing to do with Kashmir, because he can neither speak the language, has no relation to the place or even memories of his ancestral land, who still thinks it’s not Anantnag, it’s Islamabad. That’s why we are here today – against all odds, surviving, even though that means opening up the Jammu newspaper every morning to find some more people dying away from their homeland.