Where is the Habbakadal for Kashmiri Pandits to go back to?

My ancestral paternal house was on the banks of Jhelum - a huge complex of four houses with a common courtyard binding them. I remember, with baby eyes, the evenings spent, sitting on the high windows opening to the Jhelum, watching the world pass by on the Habbakadal bridge. Till date, I cherish the squeals of delight on occasionally catching a flower-laden shikara afloat just below my window.

Later I was told, on one occasion, when the Jhelum waters had risen substantially, the same windows were used by the family living out of a houseboat below to enter the house when it was deserted, post militancy. The family sent a not-so-subtle missive to my uncle in Jammu informing him that the house was anyway occupied, so we may as well accept the price they were ready to pay. That is where the links broke with Habbakadal, and a bit of trust too.

But the optimist in me didn't give up easily and, in 2004, when I visited Kashmir after a lag of over two decades, I decided to revisit the childhood lanes. But my driver advised against it. So he arrived at a middle path of taking us to the bridge instead - there we sat in the car with my mother weeping bitterly, looking at the house from a distance. She had come to the house as a bride in her teens so her memories brought a greater onslaught than I could possibly imagine. My dad looked at it with a strange, distant but dead look, the memory of which scares me till date.

I have never seen hope so dead.

The house had changed, the wooden panes of the windows opening to the Jhelum had given way to glass windows in aluminium frames and were shut tight as if to keep the present out. The lanes were deserted and there were no familiar faces to be seen. The generation had changed and even if my parents walked the lanes, they would be strangers amongst a much younger neighbourhood of shops and owners and I would anyway be a non-entity.

I wonder what they can go back to today, if they were to...

It is true for all Kashmiri Pandits who left the valley in the '80s. About 25 years later, it is difficult for them to visualise themselves in the same surroundings as they grew up in. They would go back to a generation that has no clue on who a Kashmir Pandit is or why a Pandit girl who did not have a brother was escorted to her new home, post marriage, by a Muslim brother from the neighbourhood. Or for that matter, why Muslim families would look forward to Shivratri to binge upon a much-awaited feast. Neither would the Pandit youngsters know why both Muslims and Hindus swore by places like Reshi Peer, Makdoom Sahib and Dasgir Sahib.

With due apologies, the cultural fabric stands broken and the likes of Yasin Malik cannot mend it even with their nerve endings.

Last year, I attended a Muslim wedding of a very dear friend's family. Needless to say, I was the only Pandit in a guest-list of a thousand and incidentally also the only woman without a hijaab. I felt an emotional tremor that night – both as a Kashmiri Pandit and as a woman.

We can lament history but there may be no essence in trying to negate the changes that it brings in the wake of its creation.

The only way is to start afresh to build a cultural composite and a new future. Scratching history to find fossils of the time that was, is a futile exercise. We will have to start a new chapter.