Arfeen Angel:
There is a moment from Tulmulla this Jyeshtha Ashtami that will stay with anyone who witnessed it long after the festival lamps have been extinguished.
Two sisters stood at the sacred spring of Mata Kheer Bhawani and simply could not speak. One had flown in from the United States. The other from Mumbai. Sixteen years had passed since either of them had breathed this air or seen this water catch the summer light. Their mother had kept this place alive for them through stories told at bedtime, at dinner, on ordinary evenings far from the Valley. Now the mother was gone, but her stories had walked her daughters back here. And beside these two weeping women stood their children, born in cities that had never heard of Tulmulla, watching their mothers fall apart at a shrine they were only just meeting for the first time.
No government arranged that. No political party claimed credit for it. It simply happened, the way the most important things always do, quietly, between people, without a microphone anywhere near it.
The ones who stay and the ones who return
Leaders did come to Tulmulla this year. Governors, former chief ministers, party presidents. They offered prayers, said the right things, and left. And that is fine. That is what leaders do.
But the moment that will actually be remembered from this mela was not any speech. It was a local Muslim resident setting up a small stall offering puja items to Pandit pilgrims he had never met. It was a young volunteer steadying an elderly woman on a path she had not walked in twenty years. It was two old neighbours, one Pandit one Muslim, finding each other in a crowd after years apart and not knowing whether to laugh or cry, so doing both at once.
These are the connections that do not appear in any official record. Nobody photographs them for a press release. But they are the ones that a child watches and carries inside themselves for the rest of their life. They become the story that gets told. They become the memory that shapes how someone sees the world thirty years from now.
A leader’s tenure ends. A policy gets replaced. But the Muslim family in Tulmulla who opened their home to a returning Pandit pilgrim, that family now lives in that pilgrim’s story forever. Their children are now part of each other’s histories. That is not politics. That is something much older and much stronger.
What we allowed to happen to ourselves
Kashmir did not arrive at its decades of pain by accident. Division was useful to certain people at certain times. A Valley where Pandit and Muslim and Sikh neighbours trusted one another completely was inconvenient for those who needed fear to hold power. So fear was manufactured. Suspicion was seeded carefully, watered patiently, harvested repeatedly.
And ordinary people paid. The Pandit family that packed whatever they could carry and left in the night. The Muslim neighbour who stood at the door of an empty house the next morning and did not fully understand what had just happened to the life he had known. The friendships that had no chance to say goodbye. The children on both sides who grew up inheriting a wound they had not personally received, and were never quite sure what to do with it.
1947 broke something across this subcontinent that Kashmir felt in its bones. 1987 and the years that followed broke something else, closer, more intimate, inside the Valley’s own heart. These are not small things to move past. Anyone who says otherwise has not sat with the weight of them honestly.
But here is what Tulmulla showed this summer. When ordinary people are simply left alone to be human with one another, when nobody is stoking anything or needing anything from the exchange, they reach for warmth. Every single time. The hand extended across a stall of puja flowers was not a political gesture. It was just a person being decent to another person. And that, it turns out, is enough to begin rebuilding a world.
The children who will write the next chapter
The two sisters at the sacred spring were not the only ones changed by that morning. Their children were changed too, perhaps more permanently, because they are young enough that this will become part of how they understand themselves.
A child who grows up with Kashmir only as a story lives at a distance from part of who they are. But a child who stands under a Chinar tree at Kheer Bhawani and watches their mother weep with recognition, that child now knows something in their body that no story could have given them. They know what it feels like when a place claims you. They know what home means when it has been away for a long time.
These children will grow up. They will talk to other young Kashmiris, Pandit and Muslim and everyone else, who are also carrying pieces of a divided history and quietly tired of it. They will not need to be told to let go of hatred they never personally chose. They will simply find each other, the way young people do, and build something together that their grandparents’ generation was not allowed to build.
That is the new wave. It is not loud. It does not hold press conferences. But it is already here, already moving, and it is far more powerful than any political programme because it does not need anyone’s permission to continue.
Taking politics out of how we see each other
There is a habit that has settled over Kashmir like a kind of exhaustion, the habit of reading every human gesture through a political lens. Every act of warmth gets tested for motive. Every festival gets assigned a narrative. Every moment of genuine connection gets filtered through the question of who benefits.
It is time to simply put that habit down.
Not because politics does not matter. It does. But politics is for governance. It is not meant to be the air that people breathe inside their friendships, their festivals, their grief, their homecomings. When politics enters all of that, it poisons all of that. And Kashmir has drunk enough of that particular poison.
The sacred spring at Tulmulla is said to change colour with the Goddess’s mood. Perhaps what it reflected back this year was the mood of a Valley that is genuinely tired of being a battleground and genuinely ready to be a home again. For everyone who belongs to it.
We will emerge
The hatred that came with 1947 was the hatred of a continent being torn apart by forces far larger than any of its ordinary people. The darkness that descended after 1987 was the hatred of manipulation and desperation and broken trust, visited upon people who deserved none of it. Both were real. Both cost lives and childhoods and relationships and years that cannot be returned.
But neither was the final sentence in Kashmir’s story.
The final sentence is still being written, at a sacred spring where two sisters wept and their children watched and understood something new about who they are. It is being written at a stall where a man offered flowers to a stranger returning to her own land. It is being written in every quiet reunion, every shared meal, every moment where someone chose to see the person in front of them rather than the history behind them.
Kashmir’s people, all of them, have survived things that would have hollowed out lesser places. They have not been hollowed out. The Valley still blooms every summer. The Chinars still stand. The spring still shimmers. And the people still reach for each other when they are finally free to do so.
Let the politicians come and go as they always have. The real work, the work that lasts, is being done by a volunteer helping an old woman find her footing, by a neighbour who kept a friendship alive in his heart for twenty years waiting for the chance to show it, by two sisters who brought their children all the way back to a spring so that home would never again be only a story.
That is Kashmiriyat. Not a slogan on a banner. A woman weeping at her mother’s favourite shrine. A child seeing it and understanding.
We, the Kashmiris, will emerge. We always have. And this time, perhaps, we will emerge together.
