Will there be a CST in Kashmir where people run not for life but for bread?

It was like taking the known battles in mountains of Kargil and the forgotten war in the streets of Kashmir to Mumbai. Talking about deat...

It was like taking the known battles in mountains of Kargil and the forgotten war in the streets of Kashmir to Mumbai. Talking about death and destruction at a place where guns don’t boom so frequently. Where people have not heard much about grenade blasts or curfews, it was an altogether different experience. As my colleague, Gaurav, took groups of highly inquisitive people around explaining every picture, I was engrossed in the hustle and bustle around me. I recalled my first visit to Delhi after the emergence of militancy in the Valley. It was in 1994. That evening, I could not walk in the well-lit street of Delhi, as back home, people of my generation had no streetlights.

In Kargil, the day would end at 7 am for us, and the booming guns and bomb blasts all around had erased even the memories of night life. The evenings are still silent, nights dark and violence still rules the roost but now I feel comfortable with all of it, perhaps I have turned immune. But sitting on platform no. 1 at the CST Station,with an exhibition of photographs of Kargil, I was all the time thinking about the unending dance of death. I looked at the sea of people, running after fast moving trains, that seemed never to end and recalled the huge crowds in Lal Chowk of Srinagar who are also always in a rush. But there was a difference. Mumbai has peace and this crowd is out to earn its daily bread while those in Kashmir live under the threat of being caught in the crossfire between the militants and security forces. Though my eyes were slowly getting used to the street lights on Mumbai roads and also inside the CST Station, the happenings in the exhibition were again and again taking me back to Kashmir, reminding me of the death and bloodshed. I felt more pain than while actually being in the theatre of war.

During the inauguration of the exhibition, a young man was staring at me. He asked me where I was from. When I said Kashmir, he wanted to know exactly where. I too felt something different in him. Extra warmth. Finally, he burstout in Kashmiri introducing himself as Ashok Pandit. He would have been my neighbour, I thought, if this mad dance of death and destruction had not forced the Pandits out of their ancestral homes and hearths. He had a home that was just a ten-minute walk from mine. Now he is living thousands of kilometres away but his heart is still in the Valley. He called it “call of the roots” when somebody inquired why he was so eager to speak to me. Though this was our first meeting, I felt like I had known him for decades. “What is this bond?” I wondered and, being a Kashmiri Muslim, asked myself how things had gone so terribly wrong that there is this deep wedge between the two communities. The most exciting time I had during my visit to Mumbai was those few moments spent with Pandit. Perhaps this is the real tragedy of Kashmir.

The Kargil war also exposed many realities of Kashmir to Mumbai. There were many who asked me if this ten-week long `controled’ war in the hills of Kargil was so tragic what aboutKashmir, where bloodshed has been the order of the day for the past ten years. Sitting, waiting for another person to come with a query regarding the exhibition, I was asking myself as to why it needs a Kargil to happen to attract everybody’s attention to Kashmir. Can there ever be peace in this one-time paradise: a CST station with a train and people running not for life but for bread and butter? Who knows…