Neena Gopal: The widows of Gardoo

They don't wear widows' weeds here. With their dangling ear-rings and colourful beads, there is little to set the widows of Gardoo apart from the other women in the village.

Unless you look at the care-worn face of 60-year-old Ayesha, her daughter Mumtaz and the 14 other women of Gardoo, who have paid a huge price for their lack of enthusiasm for azadi (freedom) every male member of their family is dead.

Their male children, lined up and shot by militants who accused them of being collaborators, of being hand-in-glove with the Indian government, of being against freedom.

Gardoo, in Ganderbal, the district that was once fiercely loyal to the former chief minister Farooq Abdullah and yet rejected his son Omar in landmark state assembly elections two years ago, supported the militant upsurge against Indian rule. But not whole-heartedly.

Says Gul Mohammad Shaikh who guides you over the barely-there rickety wooden bridge that spans the swirling stream, to Ayesha's home: "they steal our young away like chickens, even the parents don't know they're gone, then they come back and claim a right to everything. You can't call that support."

But he waits until we are across the bridge, out of earshot of the others before he speaks; his voice is almost inaudible, his anger is not.

Sentiments against militancy run high in this farming community as does a palpable fear of retribution. Paddy fields ringed by bare poplars on both sides of the river stretch into the adjoining villages of Sheikhpora and Sheikhmahalla.

Here too, there was no protection from the militants who came not once but thrice to drive home their brutal message.

Ayesha lost her brother, her son-in-law and her husband during each of those murderous visits.

Both her brother and son-in-law were militants who had surrendered to the Indian army. And it is this that angered the militants says Gul. "They saw it as a betrayal."

The most notorious of the surrendered militants was Yusuf Gardoo. He was related in some way or the other to the rest of the villagers where inter-marriage is common as it is in most rural communities. After a number of failed attempts and retribution killings of those close to Yusuf, the militants finally killed him as well as his 14-year-old son.

But before that they came for Ayesha's family. Her son-in-law Abdul Wajid Shaikh had surrendered along with Yusuf. She says he was a fierce but embittered man who kept indoors and did not collaborate as Yusuf did.

When they came for him nine years ago, they rounded up 16 other men in the village. Abdul Wajid was in the outhouse washing up before going to bed. The militants shot him dead there and then marched the others from the village to the fields for the execution.

Today Abdul Wajid's son Riyaz has left school, unable to afford the fees or the price of the books. He has become a labourer in the fields at the age of 14.

Like Gul, who chose his moment to tell us the real story, this family soaking in the winter sunshine with Ayesha grinding red Kashmiri chillies to a paste and Mumtaz clearing the yard of the fallen leaves took its time before opening up

To start with they said they didn't know who was behind the killings, that the men were masked and that they came on a moonless night. Until Ayesha, tears in her eyes said "they even took my 70-year-old husband, what had he done… ?".

And the dam broke. One of the daughters ran in and brought a picture of her father Ghulam Mohammad Shaikh, shot seven years ago as he was coming back from the fields at sundown.

Fading family picture

Mahmuda smoothed a crumpled, fading family picture of her uncle slain six years ago. The militants came to the house and took Ayesha's brother and two others, Mushtaq and Manzoor Ahmed, who would later marry the old woman's daughters. Mushtaq and Manzoor managed somehow to give the militants the slip.

"I ran from them and they kept shooting at me, the bullets missed but only Allah knows how I escaped that night. I now sleep in that room upstairs, if you can call it sleep, the slightest sound, a dog's whimper and my heart is beating, I immediately start to plan my escape, even the blasted dogs are no protection, and we do not keep guns, we hate them, they bring only grief," says Mushtaq who is now the sole male in the household and has taken over the farming.

Manzoor, who crawled out through the back door when the militants were distracted, said militancy was finally over, that he had not seen them around for months.

Promised jobs, they have not seen the politicians who trooped into their home when the third massacre took place.

Outside this village, there is little sympathy for their plight.

Bashir, our driver, based in the capital Srinagar, refused to take us to Gardoo on Friday saying it was too far when it was only a few kilometres away from where we were.

On Saturday, despite precise directions, he feigned ignorance over the exact location of the village. He unwittingly gave the game away when he said the killings were by a surrendered militant Yusuf Gardoo and not by militants as we had been told.

When Ayesha told her tale, he quickly changed his story. Yusuf Gardoo was a zalim (tyrant) he said and had brought it on the village because he had led the Indian army to the home of many militants' families. "He deserved to die."

As we head out, we run into Yusuf Gardoo's widow Moglee, carrying a huge basket of radishes that she had got in return for working the fields. Her phiran the outer garment that Kashmiri women wear is torn, and she tells you that she is Yusuf's first wife.

Barely 30 but looking at least 10 years older she says her widow's pension of rupees 200 (Dhs16.50) has stopped and she has to work in the fields to feed herself, her mother-in-law who has lost her mind after Yusuf's death and her six-year-old son.

It is Bashir who pulls out rupees 500 [Dh41] and hands it to her, while giving her the completely false promise that this time she would get Srinagar's attention, that she is after all the wife of a martyr!