ON THE first floor of her sparsely furnished house, Insha Mushtaq, 22, sits by the window, receiving guests who trickle in to congratulate her for clearing the Class 12 exams. In Seddow, Shopian, the evenings are still chilly and Insha sits wearing a maroon phiran with her head covered, dabbing her moist eyes with her scarf. "They water all the time," she says, smiling. In 2016, as unrest boiled over in Kashmir, Insha was among seven people who were blinded in both eyes as a result of pellet injuries. Over 1,000 people who had sustained injuries to their eyes as security forces had used pellet guns to quell the protests. After seven years, during which she had to fight back some of her deepest doubts, Insha has now scored a big, personal win: she cleared her Class 12 exams, the results of which were declared by the Jammu and Kashmir Board of School Education on June 9. That day, on July 11, 2016, as protests broke out in the lane outside her house, Insha, then a Class 9 student, had barely opened her window to peer out when a volley of pellets hit her, leaving her screaming in pain. Insha spent the next year making multiple rounds of cities and hospitals - AIIMS in Delhi and Aditya Jyot Eye Hospital in Mumbai - before doctors declared that there was little chance that her eyesight would be restored. Insha says she decided she had to get on with her studies. In November 2017, she took her Class 10 exam with the help of a 'writer'. As the wounds gradually healed, Insha, a student of Government Higher Secondary School in Seddow, temporarily moved to Srinagar, where she enrolled in DPS School's Learning Resource Centre. It's here that she spent three years learning Braille. “My education was disrupted by all that happened and I was only able to sit for my Class 12 exam this year,” she says. Two employees of Srinagar-based NGO J&K Centre for Peace and Justice (J&K CPJ) helped Insha study for the exams. “I kept audio recordings of their lectures and then took notes in Braille," she says. Insha, who says she dreams of becoming an IAS officer, plans to pursue her graduation through the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) so that she can also prepare for the civil services exam. Insha's mother Afroza is proud of what her first-born has achieved. “If it was a limb (that she had lost), she could have found a way around it, but this was just so hard her. As much as it pains me that Insha had to go through all this, I am very happy. She isn't too happy with her 73 per cent score, though," laughs Afroza, a homemaker, whose younger son is in school. Insha's father Mushtaq Ahmad Lone is a government employee with the state transport department. As a relative offers to help Insha move downstairs, Afroza says, “Let it be. She can do it herself.” Nadir Ali, head of the NGO CPJ that helped Insha with her Braille and school lessons, says his team spent a lot of time devising a teaching method. “Since Insha was not visually challenged at birth, she had to learn Braille and mobility all over again.” The NGO also helped her get some Braille equipment and a laptop that has text-to-speech software for reading. Insha says she now prefers her laptop to her books in Braille - “they are too tedious”. Though the results have eased the pain of the last few years, Insha says she can still feel the pellets in her forehead and her face. "The doctors have told me they will stay under my skin but unless they come in contact with an organ, they are largely harmless. I guess I have to learn to live with them," she says.
