Under the Same Roof
Two teenage girls both lost fathers to the conflict in Kashmir - one killed by the Indian Army, the other by militants. Now they’re at the same shelter trying to rebuild their lives.
By Kevin Sites, Thu Jun 1, 9:06 PM ET
SRINAGAR, India-controlled Kashmir — She was only 10 at the time. Now she is 16, but Safina Begum will never forget the day the Indian Army came to her home in Kashmir looking for militants.
"They searched the house," she says, "then took father into one room and forced us into another room. We could hear his screams as they beat him the whole night."
She says that sometimes it became too much and she and the other children would push past the guard at the door to glimpse what was happening in the other room.
"Father was on his back," says Safina, "with a soldier holding down each leg and each arm while another beat him. 'Let him go, please,' we screamed, but they just hit us and pushed us back behind the door again."
Living in a house of refuge » View
"My husband wasn't a militant," says Shah Begum, Safina's mother. "But our neighbor was, and the army wanted information."
The army took her husband to their base and finally released him three days later, but at that point, she says, he was a broken man. He died a year later from blood clots, she says, that were a result of the severe beatings that damaged his blood vessels.
With no way to support themselves, Shah and her six children moved into Rahat Ghar, a Kashmir shelter for widows and orphans funded by an Indian humanitarian organization called Guild of Service.
Even though she says it's good that the family could stay together, Safina, the most outspoken member, is still angry.
"Life is nothing without father," she says.
For two different sisters also living at the shelter, Nighat, 19, and Ulfat, 12, the scenario is similar. Only the roles are changed. Nighat says her father was a retired soldier when Muslim militants issued a death threat against him.
"He was walking into town," she says, "when we heard the gunshots. My mother, my uncle and I all went running toward the sound. When we got there we found my father lying on the ground and smoking a cigarette, bleeding from where he was shot in the stomach."
The militants warned anyone else of helping him, Nighat says, so the three of them had to hire a cab to take him to the hospital where he died 90 minutes later.
"The militants also banned anyone from coming to his funeral the next day," says Nighat. "But my uncle came anyway. [Militants] shot and killed him later that day."
Nighat says over time, the militants killed three of her father's other brothers as well.
Now she and her little sister Ulfat live at the shelter, while their mother and another brother still live at home. This is the only way, she says, the two of them can survive and get an education. She, like Safina, was only 10 when her father was killed, and she, also like Safina, nurses a simmering anger about the killing that happened so many years ago.
Shelter from the fight» View
"I always thought I would join the security forces," says Nighat, "and kill those people that killed my father. I still feel that way, but I'm also afraid to join."
Conversely, Shah says she was afraid that Safina and her other children might begin to sympathize with the militants and possibly join them after the death of her husband at the hands of the Indian Army.
"I think being here in this place has helped to prevent that," she says.
That, according to Zamrooda Najar, who operates Rahat Ghar with her sister, is the whole idea of the shelter.
"We want to rehabilitate the widows and orphans," she says, "make them independent so they can be the architects of their own destiny."
And, she hopes, to get them out of the perpetual cycle of conflict in Kashmir that has engulfed tens of thousands of people since it began 16 years ago.
It's a bold mission for a place that scrapes by on the kindness of donors — about $1,200 U.S. per month.
Currently 70 women and children live in the four-story shelter, sleeping eight to 10 in a room. It is run much like a home, albeit a very large one, with the goal of keeping families together while providing for their basic needs of food, shelter and education.
While the women and children who live here have been victimized by the Kashmir conflict, they don't, at least on the surface, appear to have an overwhelming sense of tragedy about them, perhaps because of the focus on helping them rebuild their lives.
While children attend outside schools, the widows and the older girls also get vocational training on site as seamstresses in a room filled with hand-cranked sewing machines. And though they don't have an Internet connection, there are two computers to give them at least some limited exposure to high technology.
There is no school on this day, so the children read and study in the carpeted but spartan rooms of the house, where bedrolls are piled to the side. Younger girls make paper cutouts while secondary level students do their algebra homework.
When lunch is called, it's a simple affair — rice and broth with some small pieces of chicken and vegetables. The widows and older girls serve the younger ones, who all pack into one room, shoulder to shoulder, eating off steel trays with their fingers.
Safina walks around the children, ladling out more broth onto their rice. As they finish, the children wash their own trays at an outside spigot and go back to studying. The older children then have a few moments to sit and eat. It is an efficient and impressive choreography to feed 70 people in a sitting that takes no more than half an hour.
Eating lunch during a study break
When lunch is complete, some of the girls who are part of the music group gather in one of the upstairs rooms and begin singing traditional songs. Ulfat, Nighat's sister, is one of two girls chosen as a dancer.
While they're performing, the tragic experiences of their pasts, at least for the younger girls, seem to wash further downstream in their memories.
"Music, the singing and dancing, seems to be one of the best ways to help them heal," says Zamrooda Najar,
Both Nighat and Safina clap their hands and sing the songs as loud as the others, but they are girls on the threshold of womanhood and the unsettling transitions that brings. It is, they seem to know, a tricky time for them under this common roof, choosing a new future while trying to keep in check the consuming anger of the past.
To learn more or to help the Rahat Ghar shelter, visit the Guild of Service web site.
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