State of Trauma

Her eldest son Mohammad Maqbool Mir was allegedly picked up by the security forces; his body was found in a hospital in

Gulmarg, some distance away. Her second, Abdul Rashid, took to arms and was killed in an encounter. Son-in-law Abdul Gani went to look for him on hearing of the shoot-out and died in the cross-fire. And her youngest, Mushtaq, was killed by militants.

Still, Sara Mir doesn’t think it’s a subject to discuss with strangers. But then granddaughter Sumaiya, 11, mentions her fainting spells in school. And the tears being held back so sternly spill over.

No Escape
‘‘She was just six months old when her father died. So she has no memories of that time. But she saw the way her uncle Maqbool was tortured and killed. Those memories never seem to leave her,’’ Sara weeps softly.

‘‘Sumaiya has been brought home unconscious from school so many times. But her scores are perfect,’’ says her mother Haleema, 35, who lost her husband Mushtaq within 18 months of marriage. The voice is a curious admixture of pity and pride.

Then worry takes over, as Haleema recounts how Sumaiya suffers nightmares, so much so she is terrified of falling asleep. It’s a classic symptom of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a condition becoming more familiar by its acronym with every passing day in the Valley (see Eight and Erratic).

The quiet agony of the youngest member of her family touches Sara somewhere indefinable, dredging up memories she’d rather keep locked away. ‘‘My husband died when I was barely 35, my youngest son was just three. Life has been a struggle ever since,’’ she whispers.

Over a quarter-century, Sara guided her family to a level of affluence, acquiring 50 acres of paddy fields and apple orchards. ‘‘We recovered. In fact, everything seemed to fine till the turmoil started.’’

For the family, the chaos came home when Abdul Rashid, then 30, took up the gun in 1990. ‘‘He was the first to die. I admit it, he did wrong, but after that, everything that could go wrong went wrong,’’ Sara says, making no effort to check the tears.

‘‘We heard he was involved in an encounter some distance from the village. So my husband Abdul Gani went to look for him—and he was hit by a stray bullet,’’ recounts Sara’s daughter Hajra, 50. ‘‘There were 200 people there, and the bullet chose him.’’

Coming Home
Fifteen years later, the Mir family residence at Dona Mohallah in Sariwarpora, a small hamlet 35 km from Srinagar, is referred to locally as the Widows’ House.

‘‘It is sowing season and look at us, we are doing all the manual work since there’s no man in the family,’’ Haleema laughs bitterly. ‘‘To think that once upon a time, we used to hire wazas (cooks) to cook for the 100 labourers working on the family property!’’ adds Jana, Maqbool’s widow.

With 12 children to feed, the five women find it tough to get by on the Rs 1,600 they receive every month from the sale of apples. Much of their land has turned fallow and incomes have dropped drastically.

Much more stressful, however, is the state of the children. If the adults in the family complain of heart problems and hypertension, the school-goers’ performances are erratic, nightmares are routine and a carefree childhood is an alien concept.

The Mirs are not the only such family in Sariwarpora, though they may be the only one to have lost all their men. A village of 100-120 households, it is also home to Ahsan Dar, chief of militant group Muslim Mujahideen. Which explains the high number of militants in the area, as also the large security presence.

‘‘So encounters are routine, so are civilian deaths in cross-firing,’’ says Mohammad Ali, a villager. A large number has also been killed in inter-group rivalry between the Muslim Mujahideen and the Hizbul Mujahideen, also active in the area.

The martyrs’ graveyard in the heart of Sariwarpora is where 65 of the village’s young men lie buried. Most of them, says a villager, died after Dar broke away from the Hizbul to launch his own outfit. ‘‘The number of deaths just increased after that,’’ he says.

Missing Men
Every family in Sariwarpora has lost at least one member. Haleema, Sara’s youngest daughter-in-law, lost her father to a stray bullet. Her younger sister Mehmooda had to give up her studies and her mother has never recovered from the shock.

‘‘There is not a single family untouched by the violence,’ says Sohail Ahmad, a class XII student who lives down the road from the Mirs. ‘‘We were a family of 14, I was the youngest. Now there are just nine of us and I am the eldest male.’’

The dead were somebody’s sons, fathers, brothers. ‘‘So there’s a huge socio-economic impact of their deaths,’’ says Zahida Bano, a social worker working here for three years.

Invariably, it is the young girls who are the worst-hit. ‘‘Most of them have had to give up their studies to support their families and help educate their younger siblings,’’ adds Masooda, another social worker who was born in Sariwarpora.

Concurrently, there’s been a rise in illnesses. ‘‘Everybody complains of one ailment or the other. The most common are hypertension, heart problems, even severe depression and unbearable headaches,’’ say the social workers.

Psychiatrists and other experts agree this is in line with war-stress situations anywhere in the world. ‘‘Women are always the worst-hit in turmoil. Most of the patients reporting to our hospital are women with severe depression,’’ says Dr Arshad Hussain, registrar at the Psychiatric Diseases Hospital, Srinagar.

The depression, says Dr Hussain, usually sets in years after the trauma episode. ‘‘Women generally display remarkable strength and resilience in the beginning, taking care of their families and otherwise occupying themselves. So there is no immediate onset of stress disorders. It is after their families stabilise somewhat that the women report symptoms of depression.’’

Just as it has happened with the Mir family. The children have grown up; most of them are studying. Two of them have funded their own education and attend college in Srinagar.

Sara occupies herself with Sumaiya’s welfare. ‘‘Life has to go on, there’s nothing to be done about it,’’ she says, requesting help in accessing the monetary compensation for the death of her youngest son. ‘‘All the papers are ready, I don’t know where they are stuck. His widow is so young and the daughter is growing up. They need the money.’’

And as for Jana, Amina, Haleema and Hajra, they’d rather not waste time thinking. There’s a household to run, children to feed, work to be be done.

And the long sleepless hours of darkness to face.

Eight and Erratic
Mahrooq is singing a song.
If you don’t know the language, you could be forgiven for thinking it’s a melodic poem.

Listen closely, with a little knowledge of Kashmiri, and suppress the shivers. The little girl is singing a dirge, Rayet goom janana (I have lost my beloved).

Three years younger than Sumaiya (see main story), Mahrooq (name changed) has been a regular at the Psychiatric Diseases Hospital, Srinagar, for the past two years with symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and childhood mania, including erratic behaviour, bouts of anger and unexplained crying spells.

‘‘Four years ago, the child was sleeping when yet-unidentified gunmen broke into their home. She woke up to the sound of gunshots, rushed downstairs to see her mother bathed in blood. The child asked her what was happening and the mother replied that she was going to die, and passed away within a few minutes,’’ says Dr Mushtaq Margoob, professor and head of a psychiatric unit at the hospital.

Since then, says the doctor, the child reacts abnormally to the colour red.

Mahrooq, of course, is not the only case. The hospital has seen a surge in childhood mental disorders over the past few years; Dr Margoob’s junior Dr Akash Yusuf Khan studied 60 such patients between December 2003 and December 2004.

‘‘And those were just the children with PTSD, demonstrating avoidance (of people or places), re-experience of the trauma, insomnia and their effects in everyday life. Other children who have suffered trauma may not fit into the classic definition of PTSD, but their effects are far-reaching,’’ says Dr Khan.

The study, which has been presented in various international fora, shows that the majority of the children to either witness trauma, experience it or hear about it from others were girls (57.5 per cent).

The first impact is on school attendance: 71.4 per cent become irregular, while 21.4 per cent drops out altogether.

‘‘Most of these children will need help to become normal, functional adults,’’ says Dr Arshad Hussain, registrar at the same hospital, who has seen 1,327 children in an NGO-run clinic over the past year and a half. ‘‘About 20 per cent of them have PTSD, but the scars of violence are widespread.’’

According to A G Madhosh, social scientist and former dean of education at Kashmir University, the most vulnerable was the 6-14 age group. ‘‘Another vulnerable group is made up of children living in orphanages. They are always thrown together with a similar group of people. That hardly helps their personality. Besides, being in an orphanage adds to the stigma they face. They grow up timid and isolated; the isolation may even take the form of religious extremism.’’

Dr Margoob agrees. A study conducted by his hospital in one orphanage shows that 37 out of 103 children reported PTSD.

‘‘Though we have to applaud the efforts of all the people who run these NGOs, we have to bear in mind that removing a child from home after an episode of trauma adds to the problems,’’ says Dr Margoob.

Experts are of the opinion that the government needs to streamline efforts to identify and help the victims. ‘‘Each school should at least have a teacher-counseller who can spot and aid a child when he or she needs help the most,’’ says Dr Rouf Ahmed of the Jammu and Kashmir Yateem Foundation.

Toufiq Rashid