Paradise lost again

Kashmir, often romanticised as heaven on Earth, today is a paradise surrounded by barbed wire. Political chaos, economic shutdowns, and the suffocating weight of uncertainty inflict new scars upon the valley. But the pain has taken on a new shape after the recent incident in Pahalgam. Now, the wound is deeper and refuses to heal.

Now in complete disarray lies the tourism sector of what was Kashmir’s economy’s beating heart. In the once busy streets, silence does echo, Dal Lake shikaras do lie still, and the hotels are now locked. Livelihoods, along with lives, were claimed during the Pahalgam incident. Thousands of Kashmiris depended upon tourism for their livelihoods. They became unemployed suddenly. Nobody has been spared from the ripple effect.

Children who did once dream of much brighter futures now sit helplessly at home as they watch their parents battle to provide even just a single meal. I have met men now lining up for charity food packets who once proudly led treks in the Himalayas. Women sold all of their jewellery just to buy books for all of their children. And what about those people who dared to build small businesses by taking loans from the banks? Debt overwhelms them, also dust is all that remains of their dreams.

This represents a humanitarian crisis not only an economic one. The crisis is about what dignity is?

What was the ordinary Kashmiri’s fault? Why does a political issue occur each time? The average person cannot possibly control the matter. It is the Kashmiri people who are made to pay the price? Why do innocent families have to suffer for the failures and ambitions of those in power?

There is a cruel irony in calling Kashmir a “paradise.” Beauty, hope, with peace, should be a paradise’s place. For us, paradise has become a prison, though. The birds are not going to be allowed to sing in a cage. That is a cage that nevertheless is beautiful. Hope is a luxury fading where life is lived in fear. If this is what they call paradise, I would never wish it upon anyone.

The world is watching Kashmir in a silent way. Headlines do flash in all of the media for just a day or two. Leaders express their concerns. Then they move on. We still remain here in the fallout. We must gather pieces of lives we did not break.

We are still expected to have to smile then. The warmth now welcomes all of the tourists. We feign that everything is okay now. But inside when we are bleeding, how can we? The raw painful truth about what it means to live in Kashmir today is what the world should hear instead of the political version or packaged tourist fantasy. People can be seen as more than only statistics. Headlines are not all that we truly are. We are human beings. Silence exists beyond our deserts. Hearing we deserve.

Let this article be as not another forgotten page. A story about loss, resilience, and humanity gasping for air should remind us that behind every closed shop, empty houseboat, and tear streaked face, there is a story in a paradise that’s slowly suffocating.

We don’t want sympathy. We want justice. We want peace. We want a life for which we do not need to explain all of our pain.