Kashmir: Book 3 of The Partition Trilogy by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

Author:Manreet Sodhi Someshwar [Someshwar, Manreet Sodhi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9789356995406
Amazon: B0CNBGWP5P
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Published: 2022-09-24T18:30:00+00:00

In the two months since she had lost her husband, Durga Mehra had managed to travel from Muzaffarabad to Mirpur via Rawalpindi, keeping her four children, two young boys and two teenaged girls, safe and her honour intact. It was no small deal. The kabailis had shot Mr Mehra, set their house on fire, and forced them to flee barefoot with just a bedsheet and a guptee, the walking stick concealing a sword within. The tribesmen were abducting women, forcing them to convert, taking some as ‘wives’. Many a lustful eye had roamed over her, many Pathans had tried to separate her children from her, but Durga Mehra had conducted herself as the widow of a senior officer would and demanded the dignity that was her due, sword-stick in hand. Reminding every upstart Pathan who waylaid her that she was the wife of a man they had shamelessly killed, she wore the mantle of a martyr’s widow with pride, and consoled herself with prayers from her beloved Gita. Counting on the kindness of strangers, drawing out the humanity of a Pathan chieftain, throwing her weight around when needed, she was painstakingly making her way to India. She slept fitfully, but kept her nightmares to herself: the snakes in her garden the morning of the raid; her husband’s receding back as he strode off to answer a summon for help; her son questioning why she wasn’t flinging herself off the Domel bridge to save her honour like other women … Resolve was Durga’s close companion. If there was danger of molestation, she would use the guptee to reunite the family in heaven, for where else could patriot and martyr Gyan Chand Mehra be?

After a talk with the camp commander, Durga took charge of helping the camp women. Fluent in several languages, she switched from Dogri to Panjabi to Urdu to Kashmiri as she coaxed the women to assemble, and suggested a prayer meeting every morning and evening. Some nodded. A few protested. ‘We are not Hindus any more!’

‘That’s fine. Singing hymns will not make you Hindu again. If you don’t want to sing, that’s also okay. Tell a story. The children need distraction, too.’

Durga squatted on the cleaned living room floor, layered with fresh hay. She invited the women to sit in a circle around her. When she sang, ably assisted by her children, some women began to repeat her hymns with leaden voices. By the end, a few faces had relaxed a little, the children had gone off to sleep in their mothers’ laps, someone had hesitatingly shared a story. When they fled Mirpur, her father got separated from them while her mother, two younger brothers and she were seized by the raiders and taken to Alibeg Camp. There, one of her younger brothers was trampled by a camel and he died in agony. Kusum’s bony chest heaved as she sobbed relentlessly. Over the days, the trickle of women in the evenings changed to a gush as more women spoke, their grief was un-bottled, and they wept in one another’s arms.

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