Laying them to rest

‘I Treat All Of Them Like My Children’

Zubair A Dar

Chahal (Uri), Apr 2: His is a name that few heard for 67 years of his life. Not many remember it now as well. In his chest, however, lie buried stories of the last rites of hundreds of men, none of whom knew him either.

Ata Muhammad Khan remembers each detail about their burial – faces, injuries, graves and exhumations. The unlettered villager from this hillside hamlet on the right bank of Jhelum even remembers each paper he marked with his thumb before police handed over the bodies to him. All these years, his only companion in pain has been his village graveyard, some 15 kilometers from Varmul on Srinagar-Muzaffarabad Road.

Like the graveyard, Khan too has never complained though the pot of patience is about to overflow. But for the search of a loved one, Khan might have given up the job years back.
“Faces I buried here can never fade from my memory,” says Khan, who took it unto himself to lay the ‘unidentified militants and foreign terrorists,’ as officially labeled, to rest. Away from media glare, when dozens of bodies were transported by troops to his village from across Kashmir - early morning or late night - Khan dug graves, locals joined in for funeral prayers, and the family shared the emotional trauma.

Many rights groups have urged Amnesty International and other bodies to help identify human remains in nearly a thousand unmarked graves discovered by a local human rights group over the past year. The graves were found in 18 villages of north Kashmir.

“Initially, when I accompanied my father to the graveyard and helped him in burying the martyrs, the figures would haunt me in bed,” says his son, Manzoor. “But the most painful part is retrieving the bodies when parents come to know and arrive with orders. Some stories are so painful that we fear recalling them,” adds the senior Khan.

Khan clearly remembers the first time he buried a body. He was busy in his fields that a police man from the village in civvies approached him. “There is a body of a Muslim youth that needs to be buried,” Khan recalls the police constable telling him. By then the Martyrs’ graveyard in nearby Kichama village had been filled with bodies leaving no space for any further burials.

“When I asked why he (Constable) had approached me, he said that no one else in the village had agreed. That was the first time and the succession has not ended till date.”

Since then, Khan says that he buried 235 bodies and exhumed seven of them when parents came back with orders from the district magistrate. Pain of witnessing the mutilations and marks of torture on the bodies has turned him frail. “My eyesight has faded. I have not slept for years. I have grown hard at hearing as well,” says the skeletal villager whose grey hair and wrinkled face tells the story of anguish he has gone through. But he remembers the face of the first body. And all the bodies that arrived successively – some times in numbers as high as nine.

“He was young. A bullet had hit on the right side of his back and then opened its way through the chest,” Khan recalls. “There were marks all over the body. Probably, it had been thrown down some slope to avoid the grind of carrying it on back,” he adds. While Khan has dug hundreds of graves, he calls some of the burials unforgettable. “How can I forget the two bodies that arrived at 11 pm. No one except a neighbour came for my help. He held a gas in hand till I dug two graves. A dozen policemen were watching us,” Khan recalls, leaning forward. “There was no one to offer funeral prayers. So the two were buried without any prayers,” he continues, masking his face by his hands. “One was an aged man who I was told had fought forces for long. Other was a 20 year old. Tears rolled down my eyes when I put his body in the grave. I had cleaned their faces. It appeared as if they were alive, smiling.”

Khan might have given up the volunteering soon afterwards. Several times he fought with police and army over the ill treatment given to the bodies. “I would ask them why they brought bodies in sacks. Why they pushed them down the slopes,” Khan fumes. But for a personal quest.

Khan’s sister had died leaving behind a one and a half year old nephew. “I brought him up till 16. Then his father took him back to his house,” says Khan. “Then one day he came to my house. That was the last time I saw him. Those days many youth would go for arms training. He promised me he would be back by the evening but he never came back since,” Khan reveals. “Even today, I search for him in the bodies that arrive for burial. One day I missed the burial of eight bodies. Then someone told me that my nephew was among them.”

“Allah knows what the truth is. I treat all of them like my children.”

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