Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven

The brunt of the military escalation between India and Pakistan was felt by people in the Valley, especially near its fraught borders, far away from the studios that amped up the war talk

- Ishfaq Naseem

BLOOD drips from Nargis Begum’s face as her daughter, Sanam Bashir, 21, holds the 45-year-old Kashmiri woman in her arms. Sanam feels for her pulse and is relieved, but not for long. Nargis succumbs soon after to the injuries caused by shrapnel from a Pakistani mortar shell that exploded near them just as the family stepped out of their Rajarwani home in Jammu & Kashmir’s Uri tehsil on the night of May 8, crushing their hopes of making it safely together to the district town of Baramulla. As artillery fire from across the Line of Control (LoC) pounded the verdant landscape, targeting the homes of villagers, this family lost a mother who had lived in poverty all her life.

Two days later, on the evening of May 10, foreign secretary Vikram Misri said India has agreed to a ceasefire after Pakistan’s “reach out”. US President Donald Trump claimed New Delhi and Islamabad agreed to a “full and immediate” ceasefire. The announcement has come as a sigh of relief for people like Sanam’s family who live near the LoC or the international border. “Our area saw the worst in terms of property damage and the loss of lives due to heavy mortar shelling. The shelling stopped earlier in the morning, but we feared this would resume in the evening. The ceasefire is a relief,” says Habibullah Khan of Mendhar town in Poonch, who hopes it would translate into a more durable and lasting peace.