Blog | We Have Not Lost Ourselves - Notes From A Kashmiri Pandit

I was seventeen the night I left Kashmir. It was January 19, 1990. My father woke me at three in the morning. I can still feel that hand on my shoulder in the cold.

Jun 23, 2026 20:22 pm IST Published On Jun 23, 2026 20:18 pm IST Last Updated On Jun 23, 2026 20:22 pm IST

Published On Jun 23, 2026 20:18 pm IST

Last Updated On Jun 23, 2026 20:22 pm IST

I was seventeen the night I left Kashmir. It was January 19, 1990.

That night everything changed for us.

The loudspeakers began blaring slogans against Kashmiri Pandits. Overnight, the place we had always called home no longer felt like home. Families who had lived in the Valley for generations suddenly found themselves confronting questions they had never imagined they would have to ask.

Could we stay? Were we safe? What came next?

In the days that followed, people began leaving quietly. Neighbours disappeared. Relatives left. One family would go, then another. Soon it was our turn.

There was no time to grieve the house, or the streets, or the only life I had ever known. There was only the decision that Pandit family after Pandit family was making in those days: leave now, while you still can.

My father woke me at three in the morning. I can still feel that hand on my shoulder in the cold. He did not explain much. There was nothing to explain that we both did not already know. He put me on his scooter and drove me out through the empty, curfewed streets. No sound but the engine and our own breathing. His government curfew pass was the only reason we could move at all. I held on to him in the dark, and somewhere on that ride I understood, without either of us saying it, that I did not know when I would see him again.He took me to the bus stand at Lal Chowk. Two buses were leaving Kashmir that morning, and an entire community was trying to fold its whole life onto them. The only one I could take was a KMD bus, already packed. There was no seat for me anywhere inside. So I climbed up and sat on the bonnet at the front, the metal cover over the engine.

It was the dead of a Kashmiri winter and my face was numb with cold. But the bonnet was hot. The engine ran beneath it the whole way down, and the heat came up through the........

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