Thread by @MonaADhar

#thekashmirfiles - Life in Jammu in 90s part 1
In march It had been a couple of days since I saw TKF, I was feeling anxious and barely slept a few nights. One night I woke up at 3am, vomited out our Jammu ordeal on paper and that felt like catharsis.
So here goes my story.

-> One random day in march \ April in 90\91, dates are blurry - but what I remember was mom waking and dressing us up at midnight, and while we were still sleepy and it was pitch dark outside our taxi starting from Anantnag

-> I, my younger brother, Mom Dad, and 2 cousins (~ 15 & 17), we all in a small 4 seater trying to adjust, carrying 1 small VIP attache few documents in it, 2-3 small bags & some of mom's gold jewellery.

-> Surprisingly I was super excited for my first long drive. How naive of me, I remember enjoying rajma chawal on the way, but slowly when the terrain & climate started to change - I started feeling uneasy & restless.

-> Every hour I would nag my dad "Kar vatav" (when will we reach). He would reply back saying "Bas veet" (soon), and I would show my displeasure and say " Toh vanvu bas 1 gante lagge" (you said we will take only 1 more hour).

-> I vividly remember entering Jammu, the ugly-looking red-maroon-yellow wildflowers welcoming us on the way. I could smell them from a distance & feel nauseated. We got rid of our sweaters and the sun was yet to set when we reached Jammu.

->Finally taxi dropped us near an under-construction shop in Janipur (a small town in Jammu), my Mama Ji's family had left a week before us and had rented 2 small rooms there.

->We had dinner & since there was no place to sleep, All the men and kids slept on one side of the road on charpais. I don't remember sleeping much that night, thanks to the heat & hundreds of mosquitos sucking my blood. 😡

-> I felt betrayed, angry & irritated, my last couple of months in Kashmir were heavenly. Few months back we had shifted from our Srinagar home which was next to a mosque to our Masi's 3-storied mansion in Anantnag for safer refuge.

->I didn't understand the situation outside, we kids were having a good time. No school, unlimited playtime, and getting pampered by our older cousins. Masi had a huge house with so many rooms - Big garden with so many flowers, we never felt we were under lockdown.

-> The only irritating factor was electricity cuts on Sat & Sunday nights when we were looking forward to our weekly movie on DD. They did it on purpose, as soon as the movie will start electricity will go away.

-> When we reached Jammu, I didn't realise what we had left behind & what we as a family were getting into. But I was excited to meet my same-age cousins in Janipur.

->My dad decided not to risk his life and report to his job in Srinagar and started looking for the cheapest of rooms, and we finally shifted to one in a very dingy locality.

->That room was totally opposite to what we had been living in Kashmir. It had no window, door opening into big aangan. It was a cowshed which the landlord had painted in hurry to get some tenants. The route to the room was downhill and bit slippery.

-> Since there was no kitchen, mom cleaned a corner of the room and made a makeshift kitchen, dad bought some utensils, a single bed, a table fan, 1-2 small trunks and 2 mega-size buckets - blue & green. This is how we started our early days in Jammu.

-> The house owners lived next to our room, the family was nice but culturally very different from us. Their kids were a couple of years older than us, and they would physically bully us - which we would hide from our mother.

->They were not into studies & would use bad language with us all the time, my brother picked up all the bad words in no time. Comparatively, we were shy, into books, scared & always warned by mom not to get into any trouble with them.

-> Jammu wasn't ready for such a mass migration, Almost 3-5 lakh people landed in Jammu in a span of 2-3 weeks. There weren't enough schools , water , electricity , clean accommodation available for such a huge inflow of Pandit population.

-> There were so many Dogras families who went to any length to help pandits, every day 100s trucks filled with pandits stuffed like animals will land on the borders of Jammu.

-> And Jammu (blessed by Maa Vaishnavi) absorbed us all in her आंचल like a mother, so many came to our help, helped us re-settle.
Something I will be grateful to Dogri brethren till my last breath.

->There were many people in Jammu who didn't understand our situation, they saw us a weak community who left their motherland without any fight,

->One day on the way to school - 3 teenage boys grabbed my 5-6-year-old brother by his p***s and started saying "yeh hai kashmiri lola (dick) - haath main kangdi - muh main chole - aaye dekho yeh kashmiri lole".

->I don't know from where I got the courage, I scratched one of them with my nails - grabbed my brother's arm and ran from that place. We avoided that route for so many days - but promised each other not to share it with my mom as we didn't want to add to her problems.

-> Some people in Jammu saw us as an opportunity to earn some quick money, so they started making basic rooms that looked nothing more than a cowshed

->But Kashmiris were desperate, they needed a roof on their head and a room to ensure their women could sleep with some modesty. All my relatives lived in very dingy places during those initial years.

And it has been 8 months since then, and I didn't have the emotional will revist it to document it in a blog. Finally, I decided to go through all 20 pages and share my ordeal with you all