'Camp memories' from Jammu in the 1990s

Siddhartha Gigoo's memoir captures life in the Udhampur camp in Jammu in the 1990s and the continuing trauma of Kashmiri Pandits

- Nipa Charagi

'I care about the grammar of displacement... We are not migrants because we did not leave of our own accord...'

Siddhartha Gigoo was 15 when he left the Kashmir Valley. Despite securing admission in DAV College, Chandigarh, he chose to study much to the consternation of his mother-in "camp school" in Udhampur, Jammu.

The school tents as classrooms was set up for the children of Kashmiri Pandit families living in the "migrant camp" on Dhar Road, after fleeing the valley in the winter of 1990. There were 1,200 families, some from remote villages of Kashmir, living in 12x12ft canvas tents, sharing three toilets. In the initial few years, many died in the harsh conditions, which included heatstroke and snake bite.

"It was a conscious decision to study in camp school, and then camp college. From the conditions I saw in the camp, I knew this was not a matter of months or years, and that I should capture this - I maintained a journal," says Gigoo, 49, winner of the 2015 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Asia) for his short story The Umbrella Man.

Gigoo's memoir, A Long Season Of Ashes, to be released next week, chronicles the story of exile through his eyes - the alienation, deprivation and the loss of a sense of identity among the people living in camps in the Jammu province. People lived in tents for over a decade, and were then moved to one-room tenements (ORTS). Some of these ORT colonies still exist in Jammu. Gigoo has also authored two books of poetry, and co-edited two anthologies of stories on Kashmiri Pandits, including A Long Dream Of Home.

Gigoo's non-linear narrative is choppy, going back and forth between time and places: Srinagar of a happier times; the fear and upheaval of 1989-90; a day in June in Udhampur, when his father sat with his head immersed in a bucket of cold water unable to bear the heat; in Delhi of 2012, his grandmother saying, "Wumber ha gayam zaeth (My life has become long)".