To Start With...

 I am working in Kashmir with an NGO named ‘Shehjaar Help Foundation’ as an intern this summer. Although work in Kashmir is not that regular but still I do get the opportunity to work twice or something in a week. Yeah, it may sound weird but that is how people in Kashmir work and how work goes about. I have been meeting women of the families that have been affected by violence and terrorism going on in Kashmir. It is sad to hear such stories but what we forget to corroborate with the fact is that it is heartbreaking, traumatic and technically impossible for the families to survive after the loss they suffer. The families not only undergo a mental breakdown but also in many cases, an economic crunch.

The trauma to the family is not mostly caused by the loss of the person but by the conditions and particulars associated with the loss. Many families have no clue how their son or husband died, or who killed them, or why they were killed. And those who disappeared have a blearier idea of how, what, when , where, why. Women often start and end their stories by a sentence which often sums up all they know or are aware about. The stories go like, ‘some men came and took him away in a vehicle and we haven’t heard about him from anyone since.’

Now a long story of someone’s loss is sad to hear and hard to bear. But sadder than that I assume is that one short sentence that defines the loss, the grief, and all the events that happened along. That one sentence leaves a question lingering about in your minds and hearts of what followed. People go missing without a trace; men are shot dead by unknown gunmen; some people walk into a house kill a person or the family and move out; no one gets to know who the killer was, no one gets to know where the missing people have been taken, are they alive or dead, will they ever come back, no one has any idea. They live their life with their hearts burdened with questions they seek answers of, questions that no one claims to know answers of.

While listening to these women I often wondered what is more painful, seeing someone being killed an undeserved death in front of your eyes or someone gone missing without a trace and no idea whether the person is alive or dead. When a kin dies in front of you, with it dies the possibility of him coming back into the lives of his family but when someone goes missing, even years after the incident, the family always has that ray of hope that may be someday he may come back, may rejoin them in their joys and sorrows. But at the same time, there remains an ambiguity to his status, to his existence. Is the ambiguity of existence more painful than the certainty of death or is it the other way round.