Habba Kadal, And Everything After

A daughter traces her mother’s quiet courage from a Habba Kadal window through every crossing that followed.

Habba Kadal was my first cinema hall, its window my balcony seat and my mother the only audience that mattered. Legs stuck straight out from the wooden ledge, I would lean into her shoulder and watch the world assemble itself below. Shutters rose with a metal sigh, a broom scraped the stone awake, and behind it all the Vitasta (Jhelum) kept moving steadily, as it had for centuries, unbothered. My childhood, perhaps, has always been woven around Habba Kadal.

And then, as if on cue, they would appear, the office-going didis and aunties. They moved with a purpose that rearranged even the dust in their path. Dupattas neatly wrapped under their Noori Pherans (if you know, you know), handbags swinging with the assurance of women who had already cooked, cleaned, soothed small tempers and packed tiffins, and were now stepping out to run another universe altogether. The school children with tin tiffins were obviously my tribe, but not yet my story. The didis and aunties were what my dreams were all about at that age.

“Will you also go to work like them?” I would ask my mother, again and again, pointing with the subtlety of a small child who thinks no one notices. Sometimes she laughed. Sometimes she said, “We will see.” Sometimes she said nothing at all. I did not have the vocabulary then, but I recognise it now, that quiet audit where you measure your own life against the ones walking past your window. Habba Kadal was a bridge twice over, wood over water, yes, but also home to office, childhood to whatever lay on the far bank of growing up.

Long before I claimed that window, she had already crossed another kind of bridge. She became a mother on a Republic Day morning in Baramulla, in one of the crowded wards at St Joseph’s Hospital, while snow fell outside in impatient, determined sheets. I like to imagine her there, nurses moving in purposeful rhythms, women in labour breathing through their private storms, the town outside muffled as if someone had tucked a safed laef over Varmul. I arrived into a world that looked freshly laundered: streets softened, roofs blurred, everything wrapped.

By the time I could hang my elbows on that sill, my mother had already lived several lives in the span of one, first as a daughter who lost her father young, then as a wife, a mother, and then a mother again. Only after my sister and I had arrived did she step out as a working woman, quietly setting a new routine around two small children.

From Habba Kadal we moved to Kanipora, adjusting to a different street, a different set of neighbours, a different way of being at home. Just as that rhythm of daily life seemed to settle into its own quiet beat, the exodus threw everything off tempo. Habba Kadal, Kanipora, Karan Nagar, much like so many other parts of Kashmir that were once brimming with Kashmiri Pandits, emptied almost overnight as families left homes they had occupied for generations. Home shifted from a place you inhabited to something you remembered. And when she might have thought she was finally finding her footing again, her mother went too. In her case, loss did not just arrive, it kept rearranging the seasons.

What she did with all of this did not look heroic. She just kept going. New town, she learnt its bus routes, its water timings, its temper. New role, she simply got on with it, embracing it as she always had. By the time we were born, she had steadily practised the art of enduring and adjusting; something the family would one day name as strength and lean on in times of need and otherwise.

People know her by many names. At home, she is just Mummy, the axis around which our illnesses, report cards, sulks and small triumphs revolved. To her siblings, she is Tathi, the one they turned to for decisions, emotional support, recipes and the occasional attempt at spiritual guidance. Others call her Picha; to her grandchildren she is Nani and beyond the soft borders of family she is simply Sarla, typed on forms that could never hold even a fraction of her. “Tathi aasi patta” (Tathi will know) is less a phrase and more a family policy. None of us ever asked who she turned to when she did not.

Of all the things that define her, one stands out like a carefully underlined line in an old notebook: her belief in education. It is her single non-negotiable. When we were fleeing, the first things she packed were our school bags, heavy with books that suddenly mattered more than almost everything we were leaving behind. In four decades and more of my life, she has raised her hand at me exactly once, not for stealing, lying or setting anything on fire. My crime was far more serious: I said I wanted to miss school.

We were in New Plot, Jammu that year, during the Darbar move, basking in the winter sun. I must have been three or four. An older cousin was visiting for her winter break, and I decided that school could wait but cousin time clearly could not. I declared I was not going. My mother, who had already fought a quiet war over my schooling, the right school, the right class, some continuity through every move, said no. I insisted. She said no again. At some precise point that no one quite remembers, something snapped. Her hand rose, landed sharply and the argument was over. I went to school.

The lesson settled somewhere deep. You could say it aligned all my chakras for life. For the rest of my years, I never quite found the courage to bunk, school or college. When a mass bunk was planned at university with all the drama of a minor revolution, I could not bring myself to leave the premises. While others marched out, I sat on the steps, consoling myself that technically, I had honoured an old pact. One well-timed slap proved more effective than any attendance policy. Did she enjoy that moment? Not for a second. She turned up at the school gate much earlier than usual, holding a treat and an apology carried mostly in her eyes. She still winces when I mention it. For her, it is perhaps a regret. For me, it is proof of how fiercely she guarded the one thing she believed no one could take away from us.

If I was a difficult child, it was not in the “teachers calling home” sense. I was the other kind of problem, perpetually ill, a small saboteur of timetables and plans. Schedules bent around fevers, tests and hospital visits. And there she was, in the middle of it all, ushering me from one appointment to another, clutching folders of reports, still smiling through her tiredness.

My sister, on the other hand, floated through childhood on an entirely different current, except, perhaps, for dentist visits, bowls of ice cream and a series of head injuries that deserve a piece of their own. Every story needs its comic relief. She is ours.

Food, for my mother, has always been more negotiation than pleasure. She watched her own mother battle metabolic disorders from a young age, an illness that eventually shortened a life that should have had far more years. She therefore treats food with a cautious eye. And yet she is human, gloriously so. A slice from Valerie Patisserie, a few soaked doon goze and like any self-respecting Sumbly, sochal wangun and Roth khand can still cut through her discipline.

She is a wonderful mother. But I suspect she is an even better grandmother. My child gets the benefit of her experience: patience refined, temper sanded down by time, love grown even larger. The rules around education, of course, remain carved in stone. Some doctrines are intergenerational.

We did not grow up sprinkling “I love you” into conversation. Affection arrived as extra helpings, scoldings about jackets, phone calls that somehow matched your commute home. Writing this is my attempt to translate that language back to her, in a script she might finally recognise and, perhaps just once, allow herself to believe.

And if you also come from a family that taught care instead of confessions, maybe this can serve as a gentle permission slip. We do not need perfect sentences or grand gestures. We can begin where our mothers did, with small, ordinary acts that dare to say what we have been feeling all along.

Happy Mother’s Day.