Srinagar, 1989. A boy of twelve stands in a lane, hears a slogan, and does not open his mouth. This is what he wants to say now, thirty-seven Raksha Bandhans late.
I Ahmed Wani:
The thread is tied today. In houses across this country a sister will take her brother’s wrist, wind a coloured string around it, and bind him to a promise older than any of us: that he will stand between her and harm. Note the order of it, because the order is the whole meaning. She chooses. She ties. He is the one who receives the thread and carries the debt. His part is not generosity. His part is to be worth choosing.
I want to speak today to the people this Valley did not protect.
I was twelve in the early months of 1989. I remember that winter the way you remember a fever: in fragments, out of order, with the temperature of it still in the skin. Something had entered the air of Srinagar that was not weather. The lanes filled with a noise none of us had heard before, and boys my age ran towards it the way boys run towards any loud thing, without asking what it is made of.
One slogan from those months has never left me. *Kashmir banega Pakistan, battu rusti, batnaw saan.* Kashmir will become Pakistan, without the Pandit men, but with their women.
I want that line set down in full, because the second half is usually dropped when it is repeated, and the second half is the whole horror of it. It was not merely an eviction notice. It announced, in a rhyme, in the open street, what would be done to the women left behind once the men were gone. It told the Pandits of this Valley that their men were surplus and their women were spoils.
At twelve I did not understand it. I understood that it had a beat you could walk to, that older boys were shouting it, that the sound of many voices doing one thing is the most seductive sound there is to a boy of that age. I have spent the years since understanding it. There is no version of that sentence a grown man can hear and remain standing in the crowd.
I do not know whether my own voice was in that chorus. Memory at twelve is a poor witness; it keeps the shape of a thing and loses the detail. But I know where I was standing. I was among the boys who watched, who listened, who breathed it in and did not know they were being changed by it. Perhaps I shouted. Perhaps I only stood there while others did.
I have stopped taking comfort from the difference. Silence inside a crowd is not neutrality. It is the floor the crowd stands on.
That is the confession I bring to this festival, and I bring it without dressing it up. Our public speech about 1990 has become so smooth, so padded with soft nouns, that the thing itself has almost vanished inside them. Migration. Displacement. The events of that period. Say it plainly instead. Men were shot in their homes and outside their shops. Names were read out on lists. Notices went up on doors. Families packed what would fit into a single trip and drove out through the Banihal in the dark, and most of them never came back. A community that had lived here for three thousand years was emptied out of the Valley in a matter of weeks.
And we, the ones who stayed, learned to live in the space they left as though the space had always been there.
It was not always there. Anyone honest about this land knows what was taken out of it. The Pandits were not a minority who happened to live in Kashmir. They were the Valley’s first literate memory: the Sanskrit that once ran through these mountains like water, the shrines at Hari Parbat and Tulmul, the scholarship, the record-keeping, the particular Kashmiri that only they now speak with the old accent, kept in exile like a seed kept dry. Every time we praise our *Kashmiriyat*, our composite culture, we are praising a weave from which one of the two main threads has been pulled out. What is left is not a fabric. It is a fraying.
I am a father now. The boy who stood in that lane is a man with children who ask questions at the dinner table, and I have chosen to tell them the whole story rather than the pretty half of it. I have told them about the old neighbours and the shared festivals, yes, but also about the slogans, the lists, the doors. I have told them that a mob is never an alibi. That being young is not an alibi. That the fear of standing alone in a crowd is the most ordinary fear there is, and that it has served as the excuse for nearly every atrocity in human history.
They listen. Sometimes they ask me things I cannot answer, and I have decided that is as it should be. The next generation is not obliged to inherit our comfort. It is obliged to be better than we were.
Let me say why this particular festival, and not some other day.
I have a sister who is not my sister by blood. Santosh Pandita. I say *my sister* and I mean it in the full sense, the sense that carries no asterisk: the same protectiveness, the same ease, the same claim on my time and my trouble that my own sisters have. When she is in the room I am not practising brotherhood across a boundary. I am simply at home.
Now set this festival against that slogan and see what today actually is. The slogan took a woman’s consent out of her hands and disposed of her. The rakhi puts everything back in her hands. She decides whom to bind. The man does not confer protection like a favour from above; he stands there and offers his wrist and waits to see whether she considers him fit to be trusted with it. One sentence in 1989 made Pandit women into property. This thread makes the woman the one who chooses, and makes the man the one on trial.
That is the position I want to be in today. I am not offering to tie anything on anyone. I have no right to. I am holding out my wrist to the sisters of a community my own society drove out, knowing perfectly well that they are within their rights to look at it and walk past. If a Pandit sister does tie that thread on me, I will not treat it as absolution. I will treat it as an examination I have not yet passed.
Because if Santosh is my sister, then the wrist I hold out is not held out to her alone. It is held out to every family that left. To the camps in Jammu where children grew up hearing about chinars they had never stood under. To the flats in Delhi and Pune and Faridabad where old men died with the keys to houses in Habba Kadal still lying in a drawer. Raksha Bandhan is not a family occasion. It is a public vow that we happen to perform inside families. And the vow was broken here long before any rakhi was tied in 1990.
So today I extend my wrist so you, my sisters, can tie the sacred thread again.
And come back. Not as guests. Not as a photograph for a minister’s press release, not as a colony behind a wall with a sentry at the gate, not as a temporary arrangement that lasts until the next bad summer. Come back as the people whose land this was first, with the right to walk in Srinagar and Anantnag and Baramulla without measuring the street before you enter it, the right to light a lamp in your grandfather’s temple, the right to be ordinary and unremarkable neighbours again.
I know what I am asking. I know the mistrust is not a mood anyone can be argued out of. It was earned, in the worst possible way, by people who looked like me and spoke my language. I know many of you built whole lives elsewhere out of nothing, and that returning means gambling a second time with everything you rebuilt. I have no guarantee to offer. A man who was silent once has no standing to issue guarantees. He has only the standing to present himself and be judged.
What I can offer is the truth, said out loud, on the record, on a day about protection. We failed you. Not history, not circumstance, not some faceless force. We. And the Valley has not been well since. A place that expels one of its founding communities does not simply carry on smaller. It carries a fracture down its middle, and every festival held here since has had a hollow at its centre where you should have been.
The land has kept better faith than its people did. The rivers still run past your empty ghats. The chinars in the courtyards you left are older now, and larger, and nobody has told them anything.
My wrist is out. The choosing is yours, as it always should have been. Tie the thread, and then hold me to every word of what it means. Come home.
