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| Cashmere Pheran returns to Valley after 35 years as | | M’bad lawyer digs deep into family’s pre-1990 bondage | |
AHMED ALI FAYYAZ
SRINAGAR, Oct 16: Until last fortnight, Muzaffarbad-based lawyer, Farrukh Intisar (34), had no imagination of her grandfather’s death wish getting fulfilled 23 years after his death in Pakistan. Once a freedom fighter and anti-Sheikh Abdullah Muslim League (ML) activist, Mir Mohammad Nazir of Talab Khatikaan, Jammu---who later joined government service as a diploma engineer (Overseer) in Jammu & Kashmir and finally migrated to Pakistan---had carefully preserved a Kashmiri Pheran for 12 years and desired at his death bed in 1986 that it be returned to his affectionate friend, Mohammad Rajab of Balgarden (Srinagar), whenever possible.
Around the wedding of Farrukh’s parents---Mir Abdul Rehman and Nasreen Akhtar---Mohammad Rajab had sent the elegantly embroidered blue-colour cashmere Pheran to Mohammad Nazir as a gift for the bride in 1974. It was never used as Mir Nazir suspected it to be from Mrs Rajab’s dowry package. With Nazir’s oral and written will, it remained in its original packing for the next 35 years. Mr and Mrs Rehman did never touch it even when they became the parents of their first and the last child in 1975.
Abdul Rehman returned to the Valley on a Pakistani passport in early 1980s and kept shuttling between his two houses---one at Talab Khatikaan (Jammu) and another at Shaheed Gunj in Srinagar. Her declined to go back and overstayed in J&K until he was arrested in 1987 and remained in jail for about two years. Wife, Nasreen, visited Srinagar alongwith 9-year-old Farrukh, in 1984, stayed at the old family friend Rajab’s house but failed to take her husband back. Her miseries unfolded in quick succession as, in a couple of years of her returning to Mirpur, her elderly father-in-law died and she was left to fend for herself.
Back in J&K, Police arrested Sikh militant, Muthbean Singh, whose father---a former Congress leader and Member of Legislative Council, Preduman Singh---once happened to figure among then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s J&K confidantes. Muthbean’s revelations in custody led to the arrest of Muslim separatists like Mehmood Ahmed Sagar of Srinagar and Mohammad Sharief Sartaj of Jammu.
Having unsuccessfully contested 1987 Assembly elections as a candidate of Muslim United Front (MUF) ---mother of today’s Hurriyat Conference---in Habbakadal, Sagar later migrated to Muzaffarabad in 1990. He has been operating as a Hurriyat leader in Pakistan and PoK since 1993. Sartaj happens to be a cousin to the prominent Congress leader and former Chief Minister of J&K, Ghulam Nabi Azad.
Being in association with both Sagar and Sartaj, Mir Abdul Rehman was also arrested and interrogated for Muthbean’s alleged involvement with some terrorist incidents in Punjab. Then J&K High Court judge, Moti Lal Bhat, ordered Rehman’s return to Pakistan which was affected in 1989. Back in Mirpur, Rehman and his family lived with the trauma that they had not fulfilled Mir Nazir’s keenly recorded will of returning the Cashmere Pheran to Mohammad Rajab. Thereafter, for nearly two decades, return of the Pheran to its owner in Srinagar remained a wild dream as an undeclared war broke out in the form of armed insurgency in Jammu & Kashmir and lasted ferociously for over a decade.
When Srinagar-Muzaffarabad Road opened for restricted cross-LoC traffic after over five decades on April 7th in 2005, Abdul Rehman was among the first who applied for travel documents as he wanted to return the Pheran to Mohammad Rajab. He never got the permit. Luck, finally, descended on the family last fortnight when Farrukh, now 34-year-old, figured among dozen-odd Pakistani participants of an India-Pakistan conference in Srinagar. Pakistan’s former Foreign Secretary, Dr Humayun Khan and former High Commissioner to India Aziz Ahmed Khan, attended the conference alongwith PoK’s sitting Minister of Finance, Choudhary Lateef Akbar, and a group of traders and mediapersons.
On the margins of her conference, Farrukh barged into Mohammad Rajab’s house late in the night on Thursday. None in the family recognized the stranger who had stayed at the same house with her mother in 1984. Perplexed and dumbfounded, Mr and Mrs Rajab did not take a second to break the mystery as Farrukh got the Pheran out of its original packing and laid it in the lap of her host. Now an octogenarian, Mohammad Rajab had his eyes but no words to ask what made her get it back after 35 years.
Farrukh could manage her emotions till she read out her grandfather’s will. She broke down and tears came gushing out of her eyes as she began reading out her father’s letter to Rajab that mentioned how almost all he knew in the family had expired and he had settled in Sialkote after closing down once a flourishing business in Mirpur. As always happens, flood of tears on all faces made the reunion memorable. No communication had been between the two families since 1985.
Recalled Mohammad Rajab: “In fact, this Pheran was not from the dowry of my wife. I had got it made in 1960 and preserved it as a gift for a friend. Carefully and clandestinely, I had sent it alongwith six meticulously embroidered Pashmina shawls to my friend Abdul Rehman through a person who later turned out to be a crook and double-cross (working for the Pakistani as well as the Indian agencies). He sold off all the six shawls in Murrie and delivered just the Pheran on the address in Mirpur”.
Mohammad Rajab, who retired as Head Clerk in Kashmir Irrigation Department in mid-1980s, revealed to Farrukh and this correspondent that Mir Mohammad Nazir had been shuttling between Srinagar, Jammu, Sialkote, Lahore and Rawalpindi on his bicycle for years in 1940s and 1950s. He got never arrested. But, after Sheikh Abdullah was dismissed as J&K Prime Minister and arrested in 1953, Nazir, though his political rival, was detained and framed in Kashmir Conspiracy Case. He remained posted in Irrigation Department in Jammu as well in Kashmir. “We used to mark his attendance even when he happened to carry out his activities in Pakistan”, he said but recalled painfully how Ghulam Qadir Ganderbali, then SSP Srinagar, had unleashed a veritable hell on Mir and all of his friends, associates and neighbours.
All praise for Justice M L Bhat and then Chief Minister, Dr Farooq Abdullah, who facilitated Abdul Rehman’s return to Pakistan in 1989, Mohammad Rajab and his equally aged brother recalled that JKLF commander Yasin Malik made his first firing attack on Police or CRPF near Bohrikadal Chowk in Srinagar downtown when they were just returning to home after sending off Abdul Rehman to Lahore via Jammu and Amritsar this season 20 years ago.
Mohammad Rajab and his family, now spread over three generations, accepted the Pheran back but gifted it afresh to Farrukh. They did not relent until she received it back and wore it on for the night. With a heavy heart, Mohammad Rajab and all in his family saw her off late in the night, never knowing whether they could see her ever again. She kept her schedule of flying to Jammu on Friday where she is staying for a night, before leaving for Wagah, to take a look of his father’s house at Talab Khatikaan. Abdul Rehman had sold off both of his houses in the state before returning to settle permanently in Pakistan.
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