A School Called Saniya

After escaping years of abuse, a young Kashmiri woman turned her home into a classroom, giving hope to children who had little of it.

- Gowher Bhat

lhe first children arrive just after dawn. They take off their shoes outside a modest single-storey house with a rusted tin roof in village Chewakalan, settle on the floor with their notebooks, and wait for the woman they call Apa.

Inside, Saniya Bashir places a kettle of tea on the stove, straightens her dupatta, and enters the room carrying a whiteboard marker.

“What is respect?” she asks the group of girls and boys, aged between seven and fourteen. Hands shoot up, and someone answers: “It’s when no one yells at you.”

Saniya nods. “Good. It's also when you don't forget your own worth.”

At 32, she speaks from experience.

Just five years ago, Saniya was invisible, a woman surviving an abusive marriage in the outskirts of Pulwama district in south Kashmir. Her days were measured in insults, her nights in silence.

The abuse — verbal, emotional, sometimes physical — began weeks after her wedding. Her husband ignored her, in-laws dismissed her, and the absence of children became another reason to ridicule her.

“I was always reminded I was nothing,” she says. “They said a woman without a child is like an empty house. They made sure I felt that emptiness every single day.”

For years, she endured it: the yelling, the isolation, and the sense of being reduced to someone's failure.

Like many women in rural Kashmir, she hoped patience would be rewarded. She cleaned, cooked, complied. She prayed harder, and blamed herself.

Saniya’s story is far from uncommon.