Tags:
Journalism of Courage
I am sitting with my mother watching the live telecast of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad Bus that has just arrived into India and will soon be crossing the bridge at Baramulla on its way to Srinagar. Simultaneously, a bus from Srinagar to Muzaffarabad was flagged off by Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi earlier in the day. My mother hasn’t moved. The intensity of what is unfolding before her has kept her riveted. ‘‘How my heart goes out to Kashmir,’’ she says, as tears well up and a flood of memories returns. On screen, the bus has just crossed another bridge. ‘‘It was bridges like these,’’ she said, ‘‘that your father, had once defended.’’
It was 1947, and a fiery young Leftist—my father Rajbans Khanna—along with Shaikh Abdullah, D.P. Dhar and Sadiq Sahab had formed the ‘National Militia’. As leader of that Militia, my father created Muhalla Committees and with the help of Kashmiris, defended the bridges from the onslaught of raiders across the border, getting no help from Raja Hari Singh of Kashmir, who had escaped to Jammu having locked up his armoury.
The bus winding its way through Baramulla is greeted by rejoicing crowds on the street. Now, Mufti Mohammed Syed being interviewed by NDTV, says, ‘‘The old Kashmir is back’’. Gulam Nabi Azad says, ‘‘Nobody can stop the momentum of the people.’’ Mehbooba Mufti now says, ‘‘The walls are coming down and the borders will disappear… the dream is coming true.’’
‘‘They are coming back home,’’ whispers my mother. I had been with her 10 years ago, when she went to Rawalpindi for the first time since she had left it as a little girl. I remember her standing in front of her old home with both hands plastered on the front door, and then falling to her knees and weeping uncontrollably. I had accompanied her as she tip-toed—as if on sacred ground—from room to room finding the corner on the kitchen floor where her mother had given birth to her.
We had both hugged and then cried. She had come home. On screen, the bus reached Srinagar and the passengers were alighting. A band played in the background as the media crowded the screen and one could catch only a glimpse of the passengers who have braved the journey. An elderly man in his eighties is heard saying, ‘‘Today I feel 12 years old.’’ NDTV is now interviewing two brothers who are meeting after 50 years. They look alike but know nothing about each other.
Once speaks ‘Pushtu’ and the other ‘Punjabi’, they cannot stop hugging each other. ‘‘It has been a line across our hearts and not just a line across the border,’’ they say. Wanting to share the moment with her family, my mother asks me to call her younger sister Harshi Anand in Delhi. ‘‘We are going home, Harshi,’’ she whispers and I burst into tears.
How am I to explain the sense of longing and loss that I had seen my mother hide from us all these years ever since I was a little girl? A brave woman from a brave generation, who held no bitterness only precious memories of a childhood left behind. Uprooted twice, once from Rawalpindi where they moved to Srinagar’s beautiful Wazir Baug with her maternal uncles Balraj and Bhisham Sahni, only to leave it once again, as it disintegrated bit by bit, day by day into a valley of fear and stillness. She had secretly kept a little bit of Kashmir alive in her heart by starting the Caf‚ Samovar in Bombay where she was to start her new life all over again. Now on the TV screen, a young Indian Army Officer is being interviewed on how the bridge of peace, the ‘Aman Setu’ was built across the river Jhelum in just 10 days. On screen, we now see the shikharas on Dal Lake. My mother, in her minds’ eye is now on one of those shikharas on her way to the Convent School. Now Sonia Gandhi is addressing the crowd that has gathered to welcome the brave travellers. ‘‘In the coming times, new routes to peace will come,” she says, ‘‘We will never bow to terrorism.’’ My mother looks at me with shining eyes, ‘‘The people have decided, a dream has become a reality once again,’’ she says.
The floodgates of hope have been opened by a simple bus journey; there is no turning back now. There is talk of a bus now from Srinagar to Rawalpindi. I know one person who will be on that bus—my mother.
