I was born in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Its tranquil beauty,
which seems to reflect the permanence of all the greatness of life on earth,
belies the state of conflict that surrounded my childhood there. For Kashmir
had been invaded by Pakistan
immediately after India and Pakistan became
two independent countries in 1947. My father, Jatender Zutshi, narrowly escaped
the terrorist’s attack in part because of the loyalty of the hundreds of Muslim
peasants who worked on his estate.
My father was born to an affluent landlord family and
managed one of his own family estates in a town called Sopore (which is about
thirty miles north of Srinagar, the capital of Jammu And Kashmir State), where
he owned a great deal of farming land. The Muslims who worked for him respected
him, not only because he was the landlord’s son, but also because he was
secular, a reformist, and had a charismatic, generous nature. The invaders
showed up without much warning from across the borders, and by the time my
father knew it, they were only twenty miles away from Sopore. It did not give
him time to escape.
Fortunately, the invaders through the town without stopping
at my father’s estate because they were not aware that a Hindu landlord resided
there. However, he did not have much time to relax before it was reported to
him that the invaders had made a U-turn and were coming back to attack him. A
member of the fundamentalist Muslim clergy made it a point to inform them about
my father and that they had missed a great opportunity to loot this young,
recently married Hindu who had plenty of jewelry, gold, carpets, and money. Our
land ended at the river and we could see all traffic coming and going on the
road on the other side of it.
While some of my father’s loyal Muslim servants kept watch,
others took him to a residence in the neighborhood where he hid on the third
floor under the grass that made up the roof. My father stayed there for a
couple of days. While he was hiding, the invaders searched for him and interrogated
and almost killed his loyal servant. The servant was firm in telling them, “The
landlord is gone.
He fled.†They cut him with a khanjar, a dagger, to force
him to tell, but he wouldn’t divulge my father’s hiding place. The Pakistani
invaders looted his estate, taking all his valuables, but finally gave up the
search for him and moved forward towards Srinagar.
They never made it to Srinagar, however, because
the Indian army entered Kashmir and fought
them off. At that time, Sopore’s population was thirty thousand, ninety four
percent of whom were Muslim.
Our ancestral home remained in the capital city of The Last Smile 18 Chapter
Two - Beautiful Blossoming 19 Srinagar, where the rest of the family lived.
Both Sopore and Srinagar are situated in the Kashmir valley on the banks of river Jehlum. India’s independence from England in 1947 initiated a series of events in
the region that would drastically change the Kashmir
my family had known for so many years. The newly formed Constituent Assembly sought
to distribute land to what was known at the time as the peasantry in the “Land
to the Tiller†reform policy. The policy was the result of a political movement
that had been initiated in 1931.
It gave over a million acres to seven hundred thousand peasants,
who were comprised of mostly Muslims in the Kashmir valley and included
lower-caste Hindus in the Jammu
region. Many more acres were distributed to government run collective farms.
However great this reform policy was, it came at a high cost for some. As
Sheikh Mohammad Abdullah, the then leader of Kashmir, said in the Constituent
Assembly in 1951, the reform policy “brought light into the dark homes of the
peasantry, but it has given rise to the problem of the landowners’ demand for
compensation.†The final decision of that 1951 assembly was to not compensate
the landowners for their land. With that decision, life for our family changed.
Although my father was able to retain a twenty acre farm,
lack of compensation for the land that was lost would have far reaching
effects. My grandfather, like so many other Hindu landlords, lost his property.
In spite of their new situation, my parents elected to stay in Sopore and start
a family with prayers, hope, and hard work. I was the first-born. My parents
ultimately had four children, born in the space of six years. All of us,
myself, my two younger sisters, Girja and Vijay, and my younger brother,
Surender, continue to be very close to one another to this day.
Our mother, Lalita, was merely18-years old when I was born
and like an older sister. Early marriage was not uncommon, and women married
and had children in the early teenage years. The lives of the children were
relatively sheltered from the larger changes that were taking place in Kashmir during the 50s. England’s flag no longer flew on
the flagpole and shifts were taking place under the surface of our lives in
ways we could not fathom. Tensions between India
and Pakistan over the Kashmir region began to take root in the beautiful hills,
lakes, and mountains that lie between the two countries. Although Kashmir was known as a place of religious tolerance,
there were undercurrents in Sopore that were a foreboding of the strife that
would later manifest in the region. On the surface, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs,
Buddhists, and people of other faiths lived in complete harmony.
Yet, silent discrimination was being perpetrated by the
local government officials against the lower-economic strata Hindus, Sikhs,
Buddhists, and Muslims. As a young boy, I was oblivious to these larger
realities. Playing with my siblings and a few very good friends, mainly in our
own estate, was all that mattered to me. And life, indeed, was simple and
beautiful for us children.
On weekends, we would travel the thirty miles from Sopore to
Srinagar, the
state’s summer capital, visiting my mother’s parents more often than other
relatives. Relatives also visited us. My father’s youngest brother, Shamboo
Nath, who stayed a few of years with us, my mother’s youngest sister, Raj
Pyari, and my cousin’s sister, Mohini, filled our childhood with excitement,
love, and affection. My uncle had finished graduate school from Agricultural University,
which was located in Agra, India. He was a great comedian and
singer. I’ll never forget how his humorous stories and songs kept us
entertained. Raj and Mohini were not much older than myself, and they were
always very protective of me.
Mohini’s older sister, Sham Pyari, would also visit once in
a while. Mohini’s mother, Kamla Zutshi, regularly stayed with us. We called her
Behanjee and she was like our second mom. She had become a widow at 28, as my
father lost his immediate elder brother, Som Nath, all too soon, when at age
30, he died of cirrhosis of the liver. In those days there was nothing that could
be done to treat it. Som was thought to be the best that our family had
produced at that time.
He had not only been a handsome, brilliant, lawyer, but he
had been generous and extremely compassionate. Both Mohini and her mother are
in the United States
now. Mohini was the first in our family to leave India
to join her husband, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland,
in 1966. Sham Pyari and her husband, both scientists, have been living in Michigan since 1970.
When no one was around, the four of us would be playing, quarreling, plucking
fruit from our garden, jumping on heaps of harvested crop, playing with our
cows, or looking after our poultry farm.
We had apple, cherry, and walnut trees. The almond trees
were huge, as well as the walnut trees. Those were trees that had been around
for awhile, while many others were fruit trees my father had planted himself in
the orchard. I remember the three pomegranate trees that faced the entrance to
our farm. Everything felt so real and permanent, as though we would be that
young always, forever basking in the sense of security and love that surrounded
us on that beautiful farmland, on the river banks of Jehlum. I remember
spending some of my playtime creating better pathways running from the front of
the house to the edge of our land.
The paths in those days were patterned after the British
style of laying bricks on angles one right after the other to delineate the
path, which in every other respect was nothing more than dirt. Perhaps the
civil engineer, as my father desired me to be when I grew up, was already
budding in me as I was The Last Smile 20 looking for alternative routes out of
our land. Or perhaps this early activity presaged the task I gave myself in
later years, seeking a “better way†for our family, a way to peace and
prosperity that would eventually lead us out of our homeland.
As I grew into my teenage years, more and more of my time
was spent focused on studying. I matriculated from Sopore
High School and spent two years in Sopore College,
ready to secure a seat in a good professional college. In spite of my
harmonious surroundings I felt premonitions of religious rifts. Although it was
difficult to put your finger on it, there were some very silent non-verbal
undercurrents between Muslims and other faiths.
Occasionally these tensions would erupt between Hindus and
Muslims during cricket matches. If Pakistan lost a match, some Muslims
felt insulted and would resort to violence. This violence grew more intense as
years passed.
I wonder at times whether this brewing violence played a
subconscious role in my family’s drive for its own independence. To this day I
am not sure I can give an adequate answer to that question. I only know that it
clearly taught me the importance of seeking peace and harmony, a value that
predominates in my life today. At that time, these sorts of questions remained
unasked, for it was time to move forward: a professional college awaited me.
