Ashiq Hussain
SRINAGAR: “Kansar ha gachi (You’ll be afflicted by Cancer),” she shouted, and unnerved the policeman. He did not dare to pull the trigger now.
The teenage girl’s cry, from the balcony of her house in downtown Kashmir capital Srinagar, pierced the cop’s courage to shoot at a young man infront of him.
The policeman was holding an AK-47 and his target was a young lad on a white scooty.
The boy had only got caught at a wrong place by a few policemen chasing a group of stone throwing youth, protesting ‘sacrilege’ of holy Quran hundreds of Kilometres away by BSF men.
The cops were tricked by the young boys into a cortex of lanes and by-lanes of old city where they were bamboozled by the raining stones from every direction.
Seething with anger, the scooty-riding boy would have been the policemen’s ‘easy target’. To vent out their frustration.
But then the girl, who was watching it all, roared like a lioness, warning the ‘enemy’ not to hurt her family. “Hata yiman naren ha gachi Kansarr agar myanes bayes Goul lageavith” (Cancer will eat up your arms if you kill my brother), she said, her words only growing louder and louder.
The cop knew that the girl, who called the boy her brother, was actually nobody to him, no sister, not relative. But he knew for sure the bond that has tied everyone in this strife-torn valley – pain of losing a near one, that has left no family untouched.
So he stepped back, for his safety, perhaps.
That evening the brave girl’s mother locked the main entrance of their house from outside to stop charging policemen, should there be an overnight raid of ‘revenge’.
The schoolgirl was persuaded by her concerned parents as to how a girl should not mess with policemen over issues of Azadi in Kashmir.
“We are worried,” her mother told FreePress, saying she feared her daughter could get into trouble.
“Had she been a boy, I am sure she would have been a wanted stone-pelter,” she says.
But the young girl hardly cares. At least that day she considered it “duty done”.
(The incident happened last month when protests erupted in the valley as news of the sacrilege of Quran and killing of protestors in Ramban spread.)
