A divided village

Enayat had driven us in his taxi from Kargil to a point above the Shingo river where we could see both parts of the Hunderman village. Everything here has multiple names and multiple identities. Even the Shingo river is sometimes called Drass, sometimes, confusingly, Indus. The sun was low over the western ridge. He pointed out a cluster of houses by the river, “Hunderman mal,” he said, “In Pakistan.” It was already in shadow. Then he pointed up slope to a cluster of houses still lit up by the sun. “Hunderman broq, in India” he named it.

Mal and broq, probably the Balti words for lower and upper. If it wasn’t for the border between them, I would have thought it was a typical mountain village. Each family farmed and kept livestock. The farms would be by the river, the summer pastures up the slope. Under different circumstances I would have had to ask many questions, teasing the circumstances of their life out of conversations with strangers. Now it was not possible. The story of how their lifestyle came to be is eclipsed by the story of two countries divided in the Balkanization which Western Europe used as a political tool since the late 19th century and could not discard even though it had created two world wars. There is an attempt here to recover a peoples’ story. We had come to see the Museum of Memories, but it was too late in the day, and we were leaving the next morning. Perhaps I will come along the Srinagar-Leh highway again, and give myself enough time to see it.

But Enayat and others talked only of wars. Why not? On two sides of the valley, at roughly equal heights overlooking Hunderman mal, stand bunkers of the Indian and Pakistani armies (the Indian on the left in the photo above, the Pakistani on the right). Someone has built a tea-stall and set up a pair of good binoculars outside. We paid for some tea and a view through the binoculars. Enayat was less than ten years old during the Kargil war of 1999, when this part of the border remained unchanged. He told us about his memories of the shelling of Kargil. Listening to him I thought of my memories of the India-China war of 1962; all I remember are sirens and black-out curtains.

Later, a resident of Hunderman told us what he remembered of the stories told by his grandfather. He said that the divided village carried on its living between the bunkers of the two nations. This would have been the time after the undeclared war of 1948 by Pakistan, impatient to claim Kashmir before the legal process mandated by the British Empire could be completed. Then in the 1971 war of the liberation of Bangladesh, the Line of Control advanced a few hundred meters, and divided the divided village between two countries. That’s how the situation has remained in the lifetime of the 216 (more or less) people living here today.

But then history is not the same as living. The Indian village of Hunderman has moved a hundred meters or so uphill, to sit on a concreted road. We drove up it. In a schoolyard a few boys were playing volleyball. Other children played in open spaces next to the road. Someone hit a cricket ball down-slope and his friends complained loudly until he dropped his bat and began to climb down. On the other side of the road, behind a jutting rock, there was a badminton game in progress. Children waved at us. Someone was tethering a last goat to a post for the night and looked up as our car passed; another herded a few donkeys off the road. I saw big plastic drums of water stored between houses, and spotted a store stocked with the usual bright packaged food-like-substances that we see in cities. Several motorbikes and a couple of cars were parked near the concrete houses on the roads.

I stopped to take photos of the abandoned Hunderman broq. Rooms and houses stuck close together, ladders to move between levels, ashes from hearths. This was a village whose families seemed very closely connected, separated mainly by who ate in which kitchen. The walls were largely made of unfired clay bricks, and some stone. Branches of a supple wood were woven together in some places to make fences and corrals. Ladders, doors, and windows seemed to have good wood worked and fitted well. The village was no different from a score of others dotted across this part of the Himalayas. I’m sure those others feel some kinship for the people from here, but are happy not to be part of this history.