VIJAY RAINA, 55
Now living in Delhi; original resident of Habba Kadal, Srinagar Fled the Valley on March 8, 1990
You don’t forget the events that force you to run away from your own home, no matter how much time passes,” says Vijay Raina, sitting in his apartment in Delhi’s Mayur Vihar area where he lives with his wife and two sons. Now employed with a private firm, Raina says he has never gone back since he and his parents fled the Valley 32 years ago. “The mere thought of returning fills me with fear. What would I return to, anyway? I left nothing back there,” he says. Delhi, on the other hand, has given him safety, stability and is what he considers home today.
Raina’s father had been in Doordarshan and the family lived in Habba Kadal in Srinagar. A night after his father’s colleague was gunned down on March 7, 1990, people came to their home asking for his father. “I pretended he was in Jammu,” Raina recounts. “They were not strangers or Afghans. They were our neighbours— people we grew up with, played cricket with, went to school with.”
It was at this point the family decided to leave. Raina was 24 at the time. They made their way to the refugee camp near Geeta Bhawan in Jammu, where they stayed for nearly a month. In Delhi, Raina’s father rejoined Doordarshan. The hardest part for Raina was dealing with the mental and emotional scars.
Even today, gaanth gobhi, a turnip-like vegetable Kashmiri Pandits are particularly fond of, reminds Raina of blood and death. He had been at the local grocer’s to buy a kilo of the same when a blast ripped through the area. It was the 42nd year of India’s Independence and Raina remembers first going mad with fear and then fainting. “There was darkness and blood. When I looked down at my own leg, I saw a cylinder lodged in it,” he says. He then takes out a faded clipping of an Urdu newspaper that has his photograph printed in it. “I was hospitalised,” he recalls. The physical trauma has eased since, but the emotional scars seem permanent. “Being a victim, a refugee, becomes a part of who you are. You cannot ever fully dissociate from it.”
EVEN TODAY, GAANTH GOBHI, A VEGETABLE KASHMIRI PANDITS ARE PARTICULARLY FOND OF, REMINDS RAINA OF BLOOD AND DEATH