And It Didn’t Let Me Sleep..
Part II: Not Again
I. Ahmed Wani
The screen went black after that final scene in Baramulla, but the words still hung in the darkness of my room like smoke that refuses to leave the lungs:
“Not again.”
Two words.
Just two.
And yet they tore something open inside me that had been stitched shut with thirty-five years of excuses.
In the film, the terrorists kick down the door of the old haveli—the same haveli that once belonged to the Sapru family of Baramulla, dragged out one January night in 1990 and shot against their own courtyard wall because the youngest son had refused to chant “Naara-e-Takbeer.” Their blood had frozen into the snow before morning. Everyone in the mohalla knew. No one spoke.
Now, thirty-five years later, the same courtyard. The same wooden pillars blackened by the same kind of hatred wearing a different mask. Only this time the family cowering inside is a Muslim policeman’s family children clutching their mother’s dupatta, the youngest one still holding the remote of a broken toy car. The terrorists raise their guns. And then he appears.
Not a ghost with bleeding eyes.
Not a vengeful spirit dripping snow and rage.
Just an old man in a faded pheran, the kind Pandit elders used to wear, with a quiet light around him like moon on Dal in winter. He steps between the muzzles and the children and says it, calm as dawn azan:
“Not again.”
The guns freeze.
The children breathe.
The circle breaks.
I sat on my bed long after the credits rolled, tears rolling down without permission. Because I understood, finally understood, that the Pandits we failed to protect did not all die that winter. Some of them lived on inside us. Inside our guilt. Inside the way we hurry past abandoned houses. Inside the way we still lower our voices when we say “Pandit mohalla.” They became the unquiet part of our soul that wakes us at 3 a.m. asking the question we never dared answer:
What kind of people were we?
Let me confess now, without the comfortable veil of “context” or “complexity” that we Kashmiris wrap ourselves in like pherans in December.
Yes, Gujarat happened. Yes, Delhi 1984 happened. Yes, Nellie, yes Bhagalpur, yes every stain on every community’s kurta. But nowhere else in this bleeding country did an entire majority community my -community- pick up guns against its own minority in the name of an “azadi” that was sold to us as justice. Nowhere else did boys from ordinary homes cross the LoC singing naats of freedom, only to come back and kill the Vice-Chancellor who taught them, the judge who protected them, the factory manager who gave their brothers jobs, the teacher who made them human, the woman who wore a bindi, the man who said “Hum Indian hain.”
Nowhere else.
I was almost one of them.
1992. I had just passed matric. The village was electric with the new fashion Kalashnikovs and beards. One evening two boys from the neighbouring lane came to our house. They spoke softly to my father the way polite murderers do. “Your son is bright. Send him across. Ten days training. He will come back a lion.”
My father, the same man who called azan and read Rumi and Mehjoor under apple trees, went pale. He could not say no – not openly. To refuse was to be marked. That night he pressed two thousand rupees into my hand, kissed my forehead, and put me alone on the last bus to Jammu. “Go to Pt. Rahda Krishan Bhat,” he whispered. “He will hide you.”
I lived with a Kashmiri Pandit family in Jammu for eight months. Eight months eating the same rogan josh I had eaten in my mother’s kitchen, only now cooked by a woman whose own house in Achabal had been burnt because her husband taught Ghalib to Muslim children. Eight months sleeping under a photograph of Shiva while the radio spoke of fresh killings back home. Eight months learning what shame tastes like when it is served by people you helped make homeless.
Many boys my age had no father with two thousand rupees and a Pandit friend in Jammu. They went across the mountains. They came back different. And the Valley bled.
We blame Pakistan and Pakistan did train, arm, fund, push. But let us stop lying to our children. The first bullet was not fired from Muzaffarabad. The first loudspeaker did not broadcast “Ralive, Galive ya Chalive” from Rawalpindi. It came from our own mosques, our own mohallas, our own boys drunk on half-truths served by molvis and leaders who spoke of 1987 but never of humanity.
The rigging was real. The anger was real.
But the monster we invited in the name of anger did not stop at Jagmohan or Delhi. It turned on us too. It killed more Kashmiri Muslims than Pandits in the end- moderates, nationalists, leftists, anyone who refused the beard or the burqa or the “tax.” And still we looked away, because admitting the truth would mean admitting we had opened the door and rolled out the red carpet for the killers.
That is the sentence we never say out loud.
In Baramulla, when the Pandit atman shouts “Not again,” he is not just saving one Muslim family. He is saving us from becoming what we once were. He is doing what my father’s generation could not—standing up, speaking, protecting the “other” when it was dangerous, when it was unpopular, when it could cost everything.
And today, thirty-five years later, the sons of that silent generation are finally screaming it not with words, but with their blood.
NOT AGAIN.
It is written now in the martyrdom of our own boys in olive green.
Altaf Ahmad everyone called him Altaf Laptop because he always carried a laptop along with his rifle. In Bandipora he got hot intel on three foreign terrorists. He could have waited for the Army. He could have stayed back. Instead he walked in front, smiling the way only Kashmiri boys smile when they know it’s the last time, and dropped two before the third shot him in the back. He died with the same smile because he knew the message was delivered: no more little girls will miss school, no more tourists will bleed on our mountains, no more Pandits will pack one suitcase in the night.
Humayun Bhat, DSP, Kokernag. He always led from the front always the front because someone had to show the new recruits that courage still grows in Kashmiri soil. A Pakistani sniper was waiting in the pines. The bullet found him. But not before his boys finished the job. Another Muslim name added to the long list of those who paid so the Valley could breathe.
When the Pahalgam massacre happened, thousands of Kashmiri Muslims poured into the streets not with stones this time, but with tears. Not shouting azadi, but cursing the killers and their handlers in Islamabad. We finally understood: we were never soldiers in their war. We were only the firewood.
Someone across the border is still waiting to exploit our pain again. But we Kashmiri Muslims are standing now at every naka, every orchard, every school gate, and saying with one throat:
NOT AGAIN.
Just days ago, when a terror module in white coats tried to spread death across India, it was the Jammu & Kashmir Police almost entirely Muslim boys from our villages who hunted them down across states before they could strike. When the Delhi blast happened and the mastermind blew himself up, within hours J&K Police reached his village in Pulwama and razed his house to the ground.
Not one neighbour came out to protest.
That silence you hear now is different.
It is not the old silence of cowardice.
It is the new silence of shame turned into steel.
I wish someone had shouted “Not again” the night the Rainas’ house burned in Anantnag.
I wish someone had shouted “Not again” when loudspeakers gave Pandits three choices.
I wish someone had shouted “Not again” when my own uncle whispered, “It’s sad, but let them go for some time. Things will settle.”
Things never settled. They only rotted.
Today when I see sny young Kashmiri on social media romanticising “resistance” with the same fire their fathers had in 1989, I want to take him to the graves of Altaf and Humayun and hundreds more. I want to take him to the Muthi camp in Jammu where an old Pandit woman still sets two extra plates at dinner because habit dies last. I want to make him eat the fruit from trees planted by people we made homeless.
That is what your resistance cost.
The Pandits must come back. Not as “rehabilitation colony” refugees guarded by CRPF. But the way they left—walking through their own gates, turning their own keys, smelling their own orchards that still remember their names.
And when the first Pandit family returns to Baramulla, to Anantnag, to Shopian, I want the entire mohalla to come out—not with cameras or politicians, but with tears. With wazwaan cooked the way their mothers taught ours. With kahwa sweetened with the exact amount of cardamom they liked. With the words we have choked on for thirty-five years:
“We were wrong.
Maafi.
Ghar aao.”
No “but.”
No “1987.”
No “Jagmohan.”
Just that.
Because only when we say it clean will the ghosts stop walking our lanes at night. Only then will the empty temples stop echoing with questions. Only then will old books left on verandas stop gathering dust that tastes like guilt.
Yaad rakho.
Maafi maango.
Ghar bulao.
That is the only azadi left worth fighting for now.
The one that begins inside the chest.
The one that says, finally, without fear and without excuse:
Come home, brother.
The orchard is still yours.
The shame is ours.
And this time we will stand in front
not silent,
not looking away,
but shouting with every breath left in us:
NOT AGAIN.
Never again.
