#201 …when you don’t leave behind your motherland for a safer future.

It was an illuminating session with them opening their heart out so easily on an issue so sensitive to the nation. I had hardly known them for more than 2 hours, since we together boarded the bus that was supposed to take us to Victoria Memorial. I had been asked by Seagull, the group which had invited those kashmiri kids to the city as an attempt at peaceworks, to take them around. They didn’t mind sharing tits and bits of their life’s story with me. Born and brought up in Kashmir, they had to face all that a native of that place has to suffer. The kids complained about having no cinema halls, the teens about having to be back at home by 8pm, the adolescents about not having a definite career and the elders about losing their families all too soon. One of them warned me not to wear the attire, the one I was wearing then, in their city. I looked at myself – a casual tee and a denim. What’s wrong in it? I wondered. “Acid will be thrown on you.” This did scare me a bit. “Girls are supposed to be fully covered including their head.”

“Why don’t you people shift to other cities when there are so many problems in there?” I asked with vehemence that their statements had build in me.

“Will you stop loving your mother if she becomes incapable of caring for you?” one of them asked.

I got my answer. For the next half an hour we exchanged ideas, thoughts and cultures. I was delighted to find they had more in store for me then I had for them.