Residents of Tangdhar can see the devastated homes of their relatives living across the Line of Control but can do little, struggling as they are to rebuild their own lives.
NAHILA TARIQ last saw her father, Tariq Husain Mir, standing on the far bank of the Neelam r6iver, which marks the Line of Control (LoC), in January 2004. An Indian spy, Mir was arrested in Muzaffarabad in 1994 and had subsequently made his home there. He had waved out to his daughter he had not laid eyes on in 11 years and shouted out: "I will soon come home. Somehow I will soon come home."
After the devastating Saturday, when homes on both sides of the LoC were reduced to rubble of stone and wood, Nahila asked her relatives in the Kashmir Valley to call her father's Muzaffarabad home. They did, more than a dozen times since that day. The phone rings, but there is no answer. Power supply to Tangdhar resumed four days after the earthquake and since then Nahila has been glued to the television set, hoping to catch a glimpse of the father who promised to return.
While the Tariq family's story is exceptional in its emotional intensity, it is shared by hundreds of earthquake-hit families in the Tangdhar mountains. Almost every family in the Neelam River Valley, the point up to which Indian troops pushed back Pakistani forces during the war of 1947, has relatives on the other side of the LoC. Until the next India-Pakistan war, in 1965, crossing the border was a relatively easy, if illegal, business. Most families succeeded in maintaining some sort of contact. After the 1971 war, though, even such contact came to a halt. A generation grew up with little sense of the bonds that go beyond the borders.
As the India-Pakistan detente process gathered momentum last year and restrictions on travel across the LoC eased, it appeared that it might be possible to reverse history. Now, many in Tangdhar are wondering if there is anyone for them to reach out to.
Nahila, now 19, still remembers the brush of her father's hand across her cheek the night he left home. Mir, who was recruited by Indian Military Intelligence as an operative, was despatched across the LoC in April 1994. He was arrested the same month, just days after his mission to infiltrate terror training camps in Pakistan was initiated. For the next several months, the family lobbied local politicians and military officials to secure his release but to no avail. In time, the Military Intelligence officials who handled Mir were transferred out of the Tangdhar area, and politicians grew tired of listening to the family's entreaties.
Mir spent three years in a Muzaffarabad prison along with a fellow agent from Tangdhar, Ghulam Yahya. Late in 1997, Pakistani intelligence officials approached him with a deal. They promised to release him if he `turned', that is, switched sides. Mir apparently agreed and joined the Tehreek-i-Jihad, a major terrorist group, and began instructing recruits on where and how to cross the LoC. By the accounts of his family, both Mir and Yahya made several attempts to return home after their release. Yahya eventually succeeded, and now runs a small store up the road from the Mir residence in Tangdhar. Mir himself, however, was not so lucky and ultimately he gave up the struggle, married again, and did his best to forget his old family.
THE earthquake buried Hafiz Ahmad Manhas under several feet of debris while he was foraging for firewood on a mountain above Teetwal. When Indian troops found him the next morning, he was still alive and they ferried him on a stretcher to the nearest medical post, at Chittarkot, a two-hour walk. All the way it seemed that Hafiz, the first literate member of a peasant family, would survive. He complained that he was cold, but seemed to be in no great pain. He was dead before doctors could begin work on his crushed organs.
Even as Mohammad Shafi Manhas, a labourer in Teetwal, mourned his son, he noticed that across the Neelam, only the white roof of his brother Nayamatullah Manhas' house remained. Beneath it there was just rubble. His memories went back to that special day last year, which people in Tangdhar call the mela, January 26, Republic Day. A ceasefire had taken effect a few weeks earlier, and on that day hundreds of villagers from the Tangdhar mountains gathered on the banks of the river hoping to see relatives on the other side they had not seen for five decades. People came from as far away as Muzaffarabad, and as the crowds grew, some people slung ropes across the river, allowing families to exchange gifts and letters.
Mohammad Shafi Manhas was there to see his brother, Nayamatullah Manhas, who had crossed the Neelam in 1947, to tend to the family land on the other side. Desperately poor, Mohammad Shafi Manhas had focussed his energies and his earnings on Hafiz, his only son. At the mela, the families exchanged news: that Hafiz was about to complete his twelfth grade at school and that Nayamatullah was ailing, but that his three sons had grown up and were ready to care for the family land. The families exchanged gifts - a packet of dried copra from the Indian side and oranges from the other side.
Now only memories remain. It may be weeks before Mohammad Shafi Manhas knows whether he still has a brother and nephews with whom he can share his grief.
ON the morning of the earthquake, a bulldozer had arrived to flatten the ground next to Teetwal's Primary Health Centre. It was to house a large hall where, politicians in New Delhi and Islamabad had decided, divided families on both sides of the Neelam Valley would be allowed to meet without visas or passports.
More likely than not, Habibullah Mughal would have found work at the meeting point. Unlike most of his low-paid dead-end construction jobs, this one might have held a special meaning for him. In 1962, his brother, Abdul Rehman Mughal, had finished a college degree. The opportunities in Teetwal were limited. A local legislator offered to get him a job as a schoolteacher; another family contact thought he could arrange an opportunity to work as a government clerk. Ideologically committed to Jammu and Kashmir's accession to Pakistan, Abdul Rehman Mughal had larger dreams. Without telling his family, he packed his bags and crossed the Neelam one night - and thus began a journey that would propel him to power as one of the senior-most bureaucrats in Pakistan-Occupied Kashmir.
Abdul Rehman Mughal was at the mela, standing silently to one side. The two brothers exchanged a wave, but if the bureaucrat spoke any words, they were lost in the tumult. "It was wrong of him to go like that," says Habibullah Mughal, slowly, "for the family had invested everything in his education and so he should have stayed on to help us." If there is any pride at his brothers' success, it is invisible: "No one cares for a poor man," Mughal says, "not even his brothers."
Bent over with age, Mughal is now camped out next to the mosque in Teetwal, and spends much of his time gathering firewood for the makeshift shelter he shares with several other labourers from the hamlet. "I would have liked to have met him again before I die, though", says Mughal. "I thought perhaps he would come to the meeting point when it was built."
Abdur-Rahman Kanth had the same hope for his brother Abdul Qadoos Kanth. In 1955, Abdul Qadoos Kanth was sent to close a family business transaction in Srinagar. He ended up losing all his money to a conman. Unable to bear the humiliation, the Class X student of the Teetwal High School never returned home. Along with two friends, he crossed what is now the LoC and began a new life in Muzaffarabad. The brothers had no contact, bar the odd letter, for decades. Then, after the Muzaffarabad-Srinagar bus service commenced, Abdur-Rahman Kanth despatched his son Tabish Kanth to make the journey his uncle had made decades ago. Tabish learned to love the cousins - three boys and four girls - he had known only as names; they had promised to make a return visit.
Camped out in the biting cold of Teetwal, along with her two infants, Nishada Aziz had planned to make the same journey soon. Her long-separated aunt, Hakima Begum, had visited the Aziz home four weeks ago, and returned to Muzaffarabad just days before the earthquake. She had invited Aziz to meet cousins she had never known, and to spend time with their children. There is no working phone in Teetwal now, but if there had been Nishada Aziz may well not have used it. "I must care for my children now," she says without the sentimentality of many older villagers, "and our relatives must care for theirs."
If Tariq Mir is still alive, he has no such choice: his families live on either side of the LoC. "He will come home," says Nahila. "I know he will come home." Her hope is well founded. Soon after the January 2004 meeting, Mir made an abortive attempt to cross the LoC, pretending to lead an infiltrating group of terrorists into Kashmir. Mir had sent word to his family in Tangdhar that he would use the opportunity to escape from Muzaffarabad once and for all. The group strayed into a minefield, though, and one of Mir's legs was blown off. He was found by a Pakistan Army patrol and taken to hospital in Rawalpindi. Tariq's brother Abdul Wahid Tariq obtained a visa to visit him and helped nurse him to health. Just three days before the earthquake, Abdul Wahid Tariq returned to Tangdhar, travelling through the Wagah border in Punjab. Mir, for his part, left for his Muzaffarabad home.
When the cracks that cut through her family home in Tangdhar have been repaired, and she can get a break from her studies in Srinagar, Nahila plans to make the journey to Muzaffarabad. "I know I may never see my father again," she says, "but I would like to meet his family there, to see my cousins and look into the life he made in Muzaffarabad. I would like them to meet the daughter for whom their father was willing to risk his life."
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