Rahul Pandita's Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir
Rahul Pandita's Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir A revolution was surging across Eastern Europe; and a bloodied frenzy was about to be unleashed against the Armenian Christian community in Azerbaijan. In the midst of this chaos, my eldest uncle came from my father’s village to visit us. ‘The water in the spring at the goddess’s sanctum has turned black,’ he whispered. This was considered to be ominous. Legend had it that whenever any catastrophe befell our community, the spring waters turned black. That it was indeed a catastrophe became clear on the night of January 19, 1990 […] they had found an old man is discovered dead in his ripped tent with a pack of chilled milk pressing against his right cheek somewhere in Jammu, writes Rahul Pandita, a Kashmiri Pandit (a Hindu) in his memoir. It was Rahul's first June in forced exile from his ancestral home in Kashmir, and he was sitting bearing the knockout heat for the first time, with the dead man’s Stewart Warner radio on, playing an old Indian classic:
Aadmi musafir hai [Man is a traveller]
Aata hai, jaata hai [He comes, he goes]