Shamim Meraj
Shamim Meraj

Shamim Meraj

It was with nervous steps that I walked out of the British Airways flight on to the tarmac of the Heathrow Airport in London. I had just been admitted to a Masters Degree course in University of Wales. The dream of a phoren education was about to become a reality.

The eight hour flight from New Delhi had been a tale in itself. Since it was my first overseas flight ever, I had my fancies on how the world would look from plane at night. I was disappointed at first as I thought I would see the stars at a much closer distance. Nothing of the sort happened, but it was more than made up when I saw Europe through my plane window, played out through a stream of unending lights, the GPS on the monitor guided me through Tehran, Prague and many other fabled cities, even though virtually and thousands of feet above.

In my one year stay I did not come across many Kashmiris. But those whom I met left memories with me. The first was as in a cinema hall, where Shahrukh Khan’s Devdas had just been released. To my right was an English couple, perhaps they had heard so much about Shahrukh Khan, that they eventually risked to watch his film. Before half time, the girl was weeping and the boy was snoring. Amidst the snores and sobs and onscreen songs, I thought I had hallucinated. I was actually hearing voices in my native language as if someone was arguing about the film. I tried to listen more intently and after sometime I was assured of meeting a fellow Kashmiri. At interval I figured them out, an aging couple from Kashmir. I greeted them and introduced myself, immediately the lady hugged me and the gentleman shook my hand with a quip. ”This Devdas is crap, Shahrukh should never have even tried it,” he said.

His wife agreed. Both had picked up a bit of Cockney during their stay in UK. After the film we met for a coffee. It turned out that both of them were doctors who had immigrated in 70s, had three children, two married to Britons, nine grandchildren and all of them in different continents. They hadn’t been to Kashmir for a decade now but were planning to (as was the case throughout last ten years).The couple were very frank about the fact that their roots in Kashmir had long been uprooted, and the final link would be snapped with their deaths. Naively I asked them, did they ever miss Kashmir and pat came the reply, “Never it’s a hell on earth”. Coffee finished, they dropped me home. We never met again.

Brits have an innate talent for murdering names, so John Terry becomes JT, David Beckham is ‘Becks, and Bashir Bhat from Sopore became Bash. I met Bash at one of the cricket games. Bash was sporting a goatee, and with his fair complexion gelled completely with ‘them’. After the pleasantries and the game, Bash took me home for a delicious yakhni and batta. By this time I had become sick of donor kebabs and was tired of my experiments with white meat. Before we had food, Bash had quickly washed, done a wudhu. He told me he prayed five times a day without fail. Even while he worked at Hilton as a manager, he would take out time to pray. None seemed to object. How seriously Bash took his religion was reaffirmed during the month of Ramdhan when Bash would lead the prayers and even contribute heavily to the kitchen that the local mosque put for that one month. Bash told me that his father was one of the leading fruit merchants of Sopore and though initially he did think of going back to his dad’s business, but he found Sopore too small for his head which was now full of chapters across Europe. So, after much drama at home and an intervention by elder brother, Bash was allowed to leave. His family still sent him the money of his share allowing Bash to live well. Every year Bash would be in Kashmir, searching for new bats and avoiding matrimony. In his three years in Cardiff, almost all of Bash’s family has visited UK. His uncle from Sopore even after returning had not been able to figure out how the bus service managed to run on time to the last second and how could pigeons in England not be scared of humans or even worse, how could his own nephew (Bash) pay all his bills on time. When I left Cardiff, it was Bash who dropped me at the airport, with an advice to let him know if anyone from motherland would be in the vicinity, they should meet him.

Tailpiece: There is always a sense of pride when one meets a fellow Kashmiri especially in a foreign country, it doesn’t matter even if he is selling cheap shawls in Edinburgh. There is a sense of pride that a fellow native made it till here from boondocks, a small street or even a mansion. Yes, the sadness at the state of our state was there throughout, but there was also a promise somewhere within, a promise to return, return to a better Kashmir.

(The writer is the Srinagar bureau chief of News X. He studied journalism in UK)

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