A House That Was My Home Once

After all these years, memories of many things have blurred but that place I used to once call home is still very vivid. Creaking timber, the farm, everything.

A lot had gone into making that house a home, as I can imagine is true for each and every one of us.

My father, late Pt. Shridhar Bhat left his ancestral home in Wagam, a quaint little village 15 miles south west of Srinagar in the mid-forties of the last century. It was a quest of an urbane atmosphere and good academics for his son Jawahar that moved him to Srinagar. A posting in the city with the revenue department was at best a secondary reason.

To start with, my parents lived in a spare house of his in-laws in Habba Kadal. Two more sons, Rattan and Chand, and a daughter, Sarla, were born in this house.

The children stepped into adolescence and studied in a nearby school.

After the marriage of his eldest son and my brother, our maternal uncle decided to sell his property and move to Jawahar Nagar, a newly developed colony in Srinagar. My father also rented a house in Jawahar Nagar, in the hopes of finding a suitable plot in the area to construct a house. For years, that was not to be.

We would visit our home in Wagam on festivals and especially on Shivratri all those years.

In 1963, an earthquake flattened the villages in and around Wagam, and even our home could not survive the wrath of nature. Around the same time, the new land reform law meant that the land tillers would now get ownership of half of the land belonging to the landlords, big or small.

Having lost the land and the house in the earthquake, my father decided to sell whatever was left of either. He couldn’t have cultivated the land on his own and more so because of our academics and his job requirement.

What these events, however, did was to make him more determined to construct a house in Srinagar. Little away from the city limits, he purchased two canals of land. The place was called Chanapora.

My father and eldest brother Jawahar, who had started working by then, laid foundation of the house on one of the auspicious days. It was the beginning of autumn.

They toiled for months together to build it brick by brick, sourcing construction material and especially the timber for doors, windows and its panes, and the designer ceilings and the angular roof. We wanted to shift there before the onset of the winter and so we did.

Our house was the first that did not belong to the local Muslims of the area.

All our relatives were unhappy for having gone too far away and that too in a place where no one around was of our faith.

There was neither municipal water nor any civic facility available.

The water was to be sourced from a small river called Doodh Ganga till we sank a well in the compound.

Living there was tough. But by every passing day, all of us got used to the area and developed affinity.

Summers were playful. The open spaces around, a few acres of land full of flowers and fruits belonging to one Colonel Kaul, took us closer to nature.

The winters were very harsh. The open surroundings and the blizzards would leave a chill in the spine.

But then the house was now our home.

As years passed, our relatives started frequenting our place. Some of them even took a liking to the area and showed interest in building their houses there.

Soon a colony — it was named Doodh Ganga Colony — came up on Colonel Kaul’s land, comprising most of our relatives and three Muslim households, totalling 24 houses. The year was 1969. Our house was numbered 20.

The main lane of the colony was behind our house and the house just opposite ours belonged to one Aslam Bucha, principal of a college.

During the construction of his house, he utilised our house for everything from storing materials to staying overnight. Our house slowly became a community centre of sorts where all the colony members would meet to seek solutions to their respective problems.

With the passage of time our family expanded; my nephews and nieces were born, Rattan, my elder brother, got married here.

Seventies proved to be a boon for Chanapora as the area developed into many enclaves where hundreds of houses were constructed by Hindus. It spread up to a few kilometres up-stream of Doodh Ganga.

Local Muslims gelled well with the new inhabitants, and there was a general atmosphere of happiness and assuredness in each other’s company and in their respective homes.

The decade also saw our sister, Sarla, getting married and me leaving Kashmir in a quest of better future.

Every year, I would visit home either on Herath or in summers to enjoy the warmth of home. The rigours of life, first in hot Delhi and then in humid Bombay, would make me crave for the easy going, comfortable and lovely life of home.

The eighties saw me married and Mikhil, my son, was born in the same home. Family life added more significance to my existence and attachment to my home.

My move to Bombay did not yield desired results, and even though I had to keep changing addresses, I never really harboured any regrets of not owning a place in Bombay. I had a place I could call home back in Kashmir.

Not for long.

Late eighties brought turmoil in the lives of our community. We lost homes, our brothers and sisters, blood.

Many moved to torrid conditions of camps in Jammu and other parts of the country, but my parents refused to leave early on.

That changed a few months later. A young boy, who had come to attend the last rites of his grandfather, who too had refused to leave their home, was fired upon in his house the evening of the cremation. As if the death of grandfather had not done enough damage to the household the Nature pounced savagely on the family.

The boy tried his best to escape the militants and jumped out of the window that opened into our compound. To his misfortune, there were two more militants waiting, who pumped eight bullets in him.

The commotion alerted my parents. They saw the boy lying in a pool of blood and the militants escaping in the dark. My mother, a fearless woman, ran towards the principal’s gate to seek his help and wanted him to call the police. But to her surprise, all the banging on his door and calling him out, her pleas fell on deaf ears. Sometime later the boy was taken away by the BSF soldiers, who arrived after hearing firing.

That evening changed everything. The next morning my parents and my brother left their home for never to return. For me, I lost that one place that gave me strength, comfort and solace in my worst time.

The move from home was not particularly easy for my father, who tried his best to survive in Jammu, Delhi and Mumbai but ultimately breathed his last in 1996. The one vital link that we all had to our House Number 20 in Doodh Ganga Colony had been severed.

Meanwhile, a new breed of land sharks, which started looking for owners of abandoned houses, emerged. One such broker, who was well-known to us, approached us. He used to take tuitions from me in the sixties. He convinced us, especially my mother, to sell our house to him for his sister.

All of us, seeing no immediate hope of return with the situation in the valley worsening, unanimously decided to sell.

He paid a token amount and promised to pay the whole amount after two weeks. He knew that our house was insured. A few days later, we were informed by him that our house was burnt by some miscreants. The deal got stuck due to this.

A few weeks later, he came to renegotiate the deal. He wanted us to adjust the insurance amount which we were supposed to get, as the value of the house had gone down.

It took a couple of years for us to settle with the insurance company.

By this time, my mother too had passed away.

He didn’t even pay the balance amount in full but took our brother’s signature on the sale papers fraudulently and never returned with the promised money.

Now when I look back, it was never about the money. Our home was priceless for us. It was the deceit that left us hurt. It always rankled in me. A few years later, I made him pay for his folly with interest but that’s another story.

Jawahar constructed a house in Jammu, and Rattan purchased an apartment in Delhi. I kept changing my addresses in what was now Mumbai.

But none of us could call these our homes.

There was something about that creaking timber; there was something about having fresh vegetables from that small farm. There was something homely about that spine-chilling winter. There was something- the essence of all religions-the spirit of fellow feelings of pre-militancy times, something special and joyous about that attic where my son would hide from his cousins while they played. There was something warm about watching television together. There was something comforting about getting scolded by my mother for walking into that one kitchen for meals without having washed my soiled feet.

Reforms introduced by a socialist government made us landless in the sixties, and then the insurgents abetted by a mute spectator of a fundamentalist government made us homeless three decades later.

And it rankles.