Ghar
This for my Nani, Mumma & Masi
They came one night and said, “Leave now,”
the snow had covered every lane;
doors were locked as if for a while,
but some keys never turned again.
They folded lifetimes into bags,
they kissed the threshold, cold and bare;
as the chinar leaves fell one by one
through Srinagar’s deserted air.
But Nani stood beside the door,
one hand pressed to the wall;
she said, “This house is ours before
it ever was fear’s at all.”
She was not brave because she knew
the night would pass, or clear;
she stayed because the fear was true,
and yet she stayed, despite that fear.
A Razdan woman, small and still,
with determination on her face;
she did not shout, she did not kill,
but simply kept her place.
And Mumma saw. My Masi too.
They saw her keep her ground;
they saw her stand against the wrong,
they saw her never back down.
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They saw her keep the house alive
when streets had turned unknown;
and in that stubborn will to survive,
their own strong spines were grown.
So when I see them standing tall,
I know from where it came;
not from some school lesson that taught it all,
but from the nameplate that still bears our name.
At home they speak fondly of Srinagar in snow,
of the Jhelum moving wide;
of the shikaras in Dal drifting soft and slow,
with childhood still inside.
And you call it paradise,
a dream that tourists knew;
but I have heard & felt the other side,
so I don’t see like you.
Kashmir is not a place I tour,
it is not a borrow for a frame;
it is where my family’s laughter lives
beside what loss became.
It is where I try to touch
what they still call their own;
the home, the garden, childhood days,
the roots that they had sown.
Not only what they had to leave,
not only what was lost;
but all the love that stayed behind,
and what that leaving cost.
And if I become half as brave,
as the women I come from;
I will know what parts of me they gave,
I will know what I am made of.
For if they ask me to erase
the parts I call my own,
I hope I hold, despite the fear,
like Nani held our home.
~ Aditi Razdan Khanna
