Rifat Mohidin
SRINAGAR, May 25: In a decrepit two storeyed house in the congested Maisuma locality of Srinagar Yawar Ibrahim Bhat has been lying on his bed, paralysed, for three years now.
He struggles to speak and only gestures to every visitor to his home.
“Kale” (head), he mumbles repeatedly in desperation, which only his mother, Gulshan, understands.
“He wants to say that please cure my head,” she says as she starts crying.
“He was a smart boy. He was not like this always.”
Yawar, 17, was hit in the head by a tear gas shell fired by police during a protest demonstration in 2009. The valley was simmering with protests against rape and murder of two women in Shopian district of South Kashmir, and thousands of youth engaged police and paramilitaries with brick-battles. Many died and hundreds of youth were wounded.
“But my son had only gone to get butter from outside. Then he did not come back home. He had been taken to the hospital by some good people,” Gulshan says.
“After some days the doctors told us that his chances of being alright were very bleak. They said he will be disabled almost permanently.”
Since then, everything that the family had was spent on his treatment, says his father, Mohammed Ibrahim who worked as a mechanic before his son was paralysed.
“Everyone was happy. I owned a mechanic shop which was the source of income for my family. But then after he was injured I sold it with all the tools for his treatment,” Ibrahim says. He now sells petty goods on a pavement in the neighbourhood.
“I sold off everything which was worth selling, even the jewellery which I had collected for the marriage of my two daughters.” But that wasn’t enough, he says. “We have sold even the utensils that we had in our kitchen,” he says as he hangs his head in despair.
To help in her own way, Yawar’s sister, Sehar ul nisa decided to quit her school thinking that would save her father the school fees.
“I stopped going to school because I thought we could use the fees for Yawar’s treatment. It’s enough if only he becomes alright again,” Nisa says.
But now even her younger sister, Khushboo, is forced to leave her studies.
“We didn’t want to stop her studies, so we let her go to school. We told them (school administration) that we will pay her fees when we have the money,” Nisa says.
“But now the credit has reached 16000 rupees. The school authorities say they won’t allow her to continue her studies without paying the fees.”
Struggling to come to terms with the condition of his family, Mohammed Ibrahim says, “Though I don’t need someone to tell me how much my son means to me, but I wish that he were dead that day itself.”
But in his gestures, Gulshan, his mother still finds hope that he will be normal again.
“Doctors have told me that if we took him to Delhi for treatment, things will be better there. We don’t have the money but I have decided to now sell the house,” she says.
“I want him to live, for me, for his sisters,” she says as she burst into tears.
