SRINAGAR: When actress Sandeepa Dhar finally returned to her ancestral home in Kashmir, she expected to find a house weathered by decades of absence. Instead, she found pieces of a life that had remained remarkably preserved.
The Kashmir-born actor recently stepped inside the family home for the first time in years and discovered that, despite the passage of decades and the turmoil that followed the exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, much of its physical past was still there.
There was no electricity. No running water. Barely any belongings remained. But the house itself was standing, slowly weathering with time, and inside it were objects that had somehow survived the years.
In the living room, Dhar found an intricately crafted wooden cabinet that she estimated to be 80 to 90 years old. It was still standing almost perfectly intact.
“It felt like finding a little piece of our past still waiting for us,” she wrote while sharing photographs from the visit.
The discovery was not confined to large or valuable objects. Inside an old cupboard, Dhar found vintage Air India boarding passes and baggage tags, believed to be from 30 to 40 years ago.
They were ordinary pieces of paper when they were issued. Decades later, they had become fragments of family history.
“Tiny pieces of paper, completely insignificant at the time, but somehow they survived everything,” she wrote.
She also found her uncle’s suits, including some that had been tailored in the United Kingdom. The clothes, like the boarding passes, were not things one would ordinarily think of preserving as historical objects. Yet they had remained inside the house, connecting Dhar to a family life that had been interrupted decades earlier.
“There are some memories you don’t go looking for. They just wait for you,” Dhar wrote.
That sentiment perhaps best describes what she encountered. Her visit was not simply a return to a place associated with childhood and family. It was an encounter with a house that had effectively become a time capsule.
The survival of such mundane objects is particularly striking. A wooden cabinet, an airline boarding pass, a baggage tag and a suit carry little monetary significance compared with the larger history surrounding Kashmir’s Pandit exodus. Yet their survival gives that history a deeply personal dimension: they are physical traces of everyday lives that once unfolded inside the house. It also tells a larger story that despite staying unguarded it was not looted.
Dhar also revisited some of the places that continue to define her relationship with Kashmir. She shared photographs of Shalimar Bagh, flowers and marigolds, Nagin Lake and the views from Pari Mahal.
Dal Lake may be Kashmir’s most recognisable waterbody, but Dhar made clear that her attachment lies elsewhere.
“Everyone talks about Dal Lake, but Nagin Lake will always have my heart,” she wrote.
She also visited Shankaracharya Temple, describing the climb of around 250 steps and the experience of reaching the shrine overlooking Srinagar.
For Dhar, however, it was the ancestral house and what she found inside that gave the visit its most intimate meaning.
The house had no electricity or water and little of its former contents. Yet an old cabinet was still standing. Boarding passes were still tucked away. Her uncle’s suits were still there.
The people had left. The years had passed. But parts of the life once lived there had remained.
And when Dhar returned, they were waiting for her.
