Thread by @OfPandits

Exile and Dignity by @primosome

1) We lived in the refugee camp for Kashmiri Pandits at Muthi for almost fourteen years. I’ve documented the entire period of life in camps in my short memoir ‘Summers of Exile.’ One of the instances that drew my attention again to those..

2) days was my sister Vaishali Dhar’s account that was shared recently on this page. She describes a day when the camp was hit by incessant rains and the rain water breached the drains alongside the camp and flooded the quarters of the entire camp. This happened several times..

3) all through the years when we lived in the camp at Muthi. She was 10 when she went through this horrible experience. What unfolded overnight was destruction. Filthy water from the overflowing drains entered their quarters at night. Half of the quarters was under...

4) water. They moved to my grandmother’s quarters nearby in the other block where water level wasn’t too high. The next morning, all of us saw our household things floating in filthy water. My father ran a shop and all the things kept in the shop were ruined...

5) Some of the neighbours were cried inconsolably. Vaishali describes, “Our bedding, utensils and clothes were floating in dirty water. My school books were damaged. I started crying. My parents comforted me. When it stopped raining, it took my parents a week to remove the water,

6) dry our clothes and bedding, and set things up again in our room. The stench from the drains remained for a month. It was tough living in a single room."

This particular instance and the entire struggle of the community to survive and live a dignified life finds reflection..

7) in the autobiography of Nikos Kazantzakis in which he describes a day in the month of August when the entire year’s supply of raisins laid in the vineyards of farmers perished in rainwater. The drain ditches overflowed, roads began to run like rivers. Mournful voices

8) Mournful voices rose from every vineyard. The lamentations grew louder. The author, a child then, ran back to the house, anxious to see how his father reacted. Would he be weeping? Would he be cursing or crying out? What he saw was his father standing motionless on the

9) threshold biting his moustache and his mother standing behind him, weeping. “Father,” I cried, “our grapes are gone!”
“We are not gone”, he answered. “Shut up!”
The author never forgot that moment. He always remembered his father standing calmly, motionlessly on the threshold

10) neither cursing, entreating, nor weeping. Motionless, he stood watching the disaster and–alone among the neighbors- preserved his human dignity.

We, the children of exile and the entire Kashmiri Pandit community, too saved our human dignity by battling extreme deprivation

11) in exile. We turned our pain and hardships into strength and moved forward, without our homes and our possessions with us, creating hope and opportunities for the journey onward.

#ChildrenOfExile #KashmiriPandits

A memory by short story writer @primosome

*were crying