Home and Beyond
For Wiscomp – Women in Security, Conflict Management and Peace
(August 2007)
Home and Beyond
I grew up in government owned houses in Delhi. The houses kept changing, but they were always in Delhi. The world was ‘the house’ and vice versa. In this house my parents and their three daughters, out of who I am the youngest survived rather amicably until we grew up and yearned to step out and search for our place in the world. Around this time in the late eighties, our father chose to retire from the Army to be with us in Delhi where our mother served as a government medical doctor.
What followed were years of constant friction between a couple struggling to raise their three daughters and the three of us who had each other for company. We are another middle income family living out of Delhi.
We lived with the common identity of being an Army officer’s children and that our mother was a doctor. We knew that our parents had their ‘roots in Kashmir’ and that most of our relatives lived in Jammu who often visited and who we would visit on some special occasion, the parents willing but us children, out of compulsion. Photo albums would keep us acquainted with our father’s experiences of serving the Army, our only trip to the Kashmir valley as a family of five in 1987 and our mother’s memories of the Srinagar of snow, strawberries and family relationships, where she grew up in the 1950s and 60s.
As I turned 15 or maybe when radio and television sneaked in comfortably, the world within the house grew uncomfortable. I wanted more than rich Kashmiri food and nostalgic photographs. I grew more ambitious about what lay beyond, something felt amiss, and it was definite that I had to look for a voice to help me communicate with the world beyond the ‘house’ ; little did I know this would become my life’s calling to wade through the chaos that lay deep within. By the time I reached college I became conscious of this ambition but wondered whether it had some purpose or was it for the sake of itself. This dilemma got stronger in the years that followed when I joined the journalism programme at Lady Shriram College and finally stepped out of the routine of the Army school and the house.
College gave me different eyes and was perhaps the first time that I began communicating with my parents about what their journey in life had been and how it might have affected our growing up.
I tried to understand our father’s reasons for the insistence on security and the desperation to educate his daughters. I observed that each of us children felt a need to develop our artistic talents in some form. I realized I had received greater opportunity in following my ambition being the youngest member of my generation amongst my father’s entire family that was displaced from Muzzafarabad (now in Pakistan administered Kashmir) following the violent external aggression on the region in 1947.
Until, then, all I knew of 1947 was what they taught in text books – the partition of India into India and Pakistan. The contentious history of the 1947 attack that led to the first war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is a history that is not often cited while discussing the puzzle called Kashmir.
All through October in 1947, when India was independent and Kashmir was not yet a part of India or Pakistan, Muzzafarabad was amongst the villages that were plundered by Pakistani state sponsored tribal raiders’ in the first war over Kashmir.
My father’s ten year old eyes matured with unwelcome sights of the horror that was.
Serving as a communications engineer in the wars between India and Pakistan that would follow in 1965 and 1971, the most troublesome memory that would cloud his mind every time he felt alone was perhaps, seeing his own father being shot dead during the 1947 raid.
Young eyes in Kashmir still grow up with their own share of horror and the trauma of conflict and displacement persists.
When college was ending a series of rare opportunities emerged that broke the ice between my parents and me and a barrage of questions that had never scratched my mind left it brimming with restlessness. I was chosen to visit Lahore along with the student delegation from Lady Shriram College. Apart from the naiveté of visiting abroad to an unreachable country, I didn’t know what was in store and how it would impact me. My parents were glad at what they felt was a rare opportunity. It was the first time I lived away from home, even if for just a week.
It was a week that surprised me. What had felt like an unreachable land felt like ‘home’ instead.
In the months that followed, university students from Pakistan traveled to India and we sat together for the first ever conflict transformation workshop organized by Wiscomp. I now realise how the experience impacted me personally while I was trying to assimilate the perceptions of peace and conflict I grew up with, conditioned by news reports, my parent’s experiences and an Army background.
Following the conference, when I spent a year abroad for study, away from the comfort zone of home, the thought process had begun. The angst of finding answers had set in. I knew it would take me somewhere that would make me more knowledgeable about the conflict within. Internal Conflict, I now feel is both a consequence of a larger conflict - in our case the burden of displacement as well as the cause for another conflict - in my case, that between me and my parents.
When I got back to India, I was invited to the second conflict transformation workshop that now invited peace practitioners and media professionals from South Asia.
By now, I realized that more than anything that my ambition wanted from me, I wanted to spend time with my parents and with the thoughts that had now surfaced from my core.
In this deep tunnel, I have spent the last five years groping, perhaps what I was going through was also a tug of war between emotion and the intellect which was slowly being scratched and of understanding my place in the world before stepping into it with some purpose.
This tunnel led me to seek skills that weren’t part of my ambition in my growing up years - reading, writing and storytelling. I was more a product of the image oriented generation until then.
It made me feel a need for a culture that I could call my own.
It’s taken me on trips to Jammu on my own and with my parents to meet with our relatives, to record experiences of an eyewitness of the 1947 attack as well as of a relative who traveled across the line of control from Srinagar to Muzzafarabad when the bus of peace connected the two cities for the first time in more than fifty years in October 2006. Ironically during their visit across, nature played truant and a massive earthquake tore through the region. According to the eyes of this relative who survived the calamity, the region suffered massive physical damage yet again, even greater than the raid itself.
Could this be nature’s indication to leave past events behind and secure the present and future instead?
Most importantly, the journey within has given me a sense of belonging to something beyond ‘home’ and to a great extent, calmed the conflict within.
This awareness has opened a channel of communication between my parents and me and while my thought and action may not be sufficient yet to change some deep rooted perceptions and experiences about conflict their generation lives with, we have grown to communicate peacefully and that I feel is success.
Occasionally, I continue to face the wrath of the ‘other’ that resides within our own psyche, in my case – ambition. But, the truth that contains it is that there is no greater feeling of contentment than the experience of a personal transformation towards peace.
This transformation for me took place mostly through the Wiscomp experience. All I can share for now is this beginning of my story. My political opinions are still being shaped but I am better aware and prepared to take on external journeys towards peace, now that I have physically stepped out of ‘home’ even though ironically, I feel more homeward bound than ever. I hope in the next few years what has changed within will be communicated through my life or work and that I will be able to participate in our collective journey towards peace.
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