CHAHAL, Uri (Greater Kashmir.com), April 4, 2008:
ATA MUHAMMED KHAN: 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.
‘I Treat All Of Them Like My Children’
“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.
Read on
By Zubair Ahmad
Copyright 1998-2008 GreaterKashmir
