‘You Feel Connected in Some Deeper Way to the Country. There’s This Bond, a Kind of Patriotism, that Fills You Up’

ONE NIGHT BACK IN 1989, Sushil Kumar Kaul Arazbegi had just settled himself at his house in Srinagar, when the telephone rang. That day—October 31—had been a particularly long one. It had begun with Arazbegi walking about four kilometres with his eight-year-old son to meet an aunt he hadn’t met in years. But by afternoon, the peace in the city had melted away. Traffic had come to a halt and rumours of terrorist attacks were swirling in the air. Unable to get ahead with his car, Arazbegi had walked his way home from office through a long and deserted stretch, when the phone rang close to 9PM. His aunt had been shot dead.

Arazbegi’s brows knit themselves in anxiety as he recalls this memory today. A jovial man who had been bounding with ebullience just moments before and who is just days short of his 75th birthday, he suddenly grows silent.

That night, with Srinagar still under curfew and the streets covered in a cold darkness, Arazbegi and his wife, accompanied by two elderly relatives, had walked to his deceased aunt’s house. On their way, a group of youths taunted and showered communal slurs at them. After the cremation next morning, they were met by an even more aggressive group that pelted them with stones.

“It was one of the worst days of our lives,” he says.

He is seated today in a large colourful sofa at his house in Thane, near Mumbai; his wife Vasanta, equally quiet, on a sofa chair in the room.

But after a while, the ebullience returns. “What is it this time?” he clicks his fingers and paces the room as he works his mind. “Amrit Mahotsav. Yes Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav,” he says, referring to the government initiative to commemorate 75 years of the country’s independence.

For Arazbegi and the country share a unique bond. They are not just turning 75 years old soon, they are turning so precisely on the same date, almost even at the same time. When clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting, to borrow a phrase from Salman Rushdie’s celebrated novel Midnight’s Children about a man born at the precise moment of India’s birth, just moments after midnight (nobody in the Kaul household recorded the precise time), Arazbegi tumbled forth into the world in his house in Srinagar.

It was a tumultuous period in Kashmir’s history. Not yet formally a part of India—Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession only a couple of months later on October 26—some tribal groups, supported by Pakistan, had invaded the state. “There were groups formed in every mohalla (neighbourhood) where they would stand guard with sticks in the nights because there was a fear that there could be a raid by invaders any time,” he says.

These events had however created a sense of fear and insecurity especially in the Pandit community, and many of them began to leave the state. Arazbegi’s father Gopi Kishen Kaul, then a practicing advocate at the High Court of Jammu & Kashmir, was among them. The Arazbegi family, however, stayed back. And Arazbegi still vividly recalls how his grandfather tried to enrol him in a local school, but he refused to return after his first day. In 1951, however, four-year-old Arazbegi, along with his mother and brothers, left their ancestral home to join his father in Delhi.

The Arazbegis hail from a well-known Pandit family in the Valley. The term “Arazbegi” originally referred to the official designation of an individual in the royal court whose job was to present petitions before the king, an equivalent in modern parlance, Arazbegi says, to the post of a secretary. Arazbegi’s ancestor Pandit Ram Chand Kaul served as an arazbegi at the court of Gulabsingh Bahadur, the founder of the Dogra dynasty, and Arazbegi’s great grandfather Pandit Raja Kaul continued the tradition. Over time, this official designation morphed into the family’s last name. “You will find many Kauls from Kashmir,” Arazbegi says. “But there is only one set of Arazbegis.”

Arazbegi’s paternal grandfather Hari Chand Kaul, who worked in the state’s Revenue Department, Arazbegi reckons, was probably among the state’s earliest group of college graduates. “He studied in Srinagar’s Sri Pratap College. And in those days, he would travel in a horse carriage up to Baramulla, and then ride on horseback all the way to Lahore to sit for his final year BA exams,” Arazbegi says.

I knew I was on the hitlist of terrorists. It’s never quite easy to leave your house despite the threats, is it?

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Arazbegi grew up away from Kashmir, first in Delhi where he spent his childhood, and later in Kolkata, where he acquired a degree in chemical engineering from Jadavpur University. But by then, his family had resettled in Kashmir, and Arazbegi now had to return reluctantly, first to get married, and then to find a job. “I was a Delhi boy through and through. And I was very unhappy about the whole situation,” Arazbegi recalls. Just like his father who had relocated to Kashmir after spending many years outside, it appeared that Arazbegi, who first found a job in J&K Minerals Ltd and thereafter rapidly rose through the ranks of J&K State Industrial Development Corporation, his fate too was taking the same course, when communal tensions erupted in the Valley in late 1980s.

FOR MUCH OF HIS EARLY LIFE, THE SIGNIFICANCE of sharing his birthday with the country never dawned upon Arazbegi. As a child, the Arazbegis primarily used the Hindu calendar at home and they didn’t really celebrate birthdays. But over time, especially once he was forced out of the state, and Arazbegi began celebrating his birthdays in his new home in Mumbai, the significance of the connection has grown in him. “You feel connected in some deeper way to the country. There’s like this bond, a kind of patriotism, that fills you up,” he says. It has now come to acquire a sacredness, he says. And every birthday, he now hosts a large lunch for his closest friends.

When Arazbegi had to flee the state with his family in 1990, it had filled him with such bitterness, he says, that he decided to entirely forget about what had transpired. After working for 21 years in Kashmir, he now shifted to the private sector with the Raymond group, where he held several senior executive positions, before retiring in 2009.

It was during the initial months of the lockdown in 2020 when, as he lay down in the ground floor of his now house in Thane, the memory of his aunt’s killing came upon him unprompted. “It came out of the blue,” he says. “And I thought let me just write it down.” One memory followed another, and in the span of about three months, he found he had written a book of his experiences. Arazbegi self-published this book titled Kashmiriyat last year. “It could have been that I had buried it [the trauma] so deep that when I started looking at it, it all came flooding back,” he says.

While the Valley witnessed communal attacks in the late 1980s, Arazbegi says, there had always been a simmering tension underneath. “It [the harmony] was all very superficial,” he says. “We all lead a kind of duplicitous life.”

ARAZBEGI DID NOT LEAVE THE VALLEY immediately when trouble first broke out, and not even after his aunt was shot for no reason. He would frequently get threats from anonymous callers on the phone; sometimes stones would be flung at his home; and even his workplace had turned caustic. Once, a local newspaper brought out an article on the front page calling him communal, an article which he believes was planted by some colleagues and local entrepreneurs who disliked him. “I knew I was on the hitlist of terrorists,” he says. But Arazbegi held on. “It’s never quite easy to leave your house despite the threats, is it?” he asks.
It was on February 14, 1990, when gunshots went off in his office compound, that Arazbegi, seeking cover in the office of another Hindu colleague, decided it was time to leave the city.

The next morning, Arazbegi left the city for Jammu with his wife, son and another relative, along with a driver in his old rickety Maruti 800 with just one suitcase. He thought this would be a temporary relocation, but as it turned out, it became so for life.

His wife would later return to Srinagar briefly to collect some household items, and to take their male servant and pet dog along with her, but she would have to return on a truck meant for towing vehicles because no neighbour or taxi driver was willing to risk helping a Pandit family. Other friends also refused to help.

You have to let go of the bitterness. Otherwise, it will not allow you to go forward

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His ancestral home was looted by neighbours, and burnt partially, before a neighbouring family began occupying it. The occupants would visit Arazbegi’s father in Delhi some years later to make him officially sign away the property for a pittance.

Penniless and homeless, Arazbegi was filled with bitterness and rancour, he says. In the next few decades as he recreated his life anew in Mumbai, he kept Kashmir away from his mind.

But in 2009, nearly 20 years after his forced exodus, a sudden longing to see Kashmir returned.

Arazbegi travelled to Kashmir in a large group comprising his immediate and extended family. There were grandchildren in this group, his children and their spouses, the parents of his daughter-in-law, and even his brother and his wife.

“I wasn’t expecting anything from this trip,” Arazbegi says. But the trip turned out to be a beautiful experience. Arazbegi’s old colleagues, who had learnt of his visit, organised a get-together. He and his family were invited for meals and even a wedding. And during a dinner hosted by a former junior colleague in his house, the host presented Arazbegi’s daughter-in-law with a gold ring.

“The whole trip was such an emotional experience. And there were so many touching gestures by people I had once known,” Arazbegi says.

But there were also times when the emotions became too overbearing. At some point, his children and their spouses expressed the wish to revisit the house where the Arazbegis had once lived. Arazbegi directed the two cars in which they were travelling down old familiar roads until they reached the spot where his house stood. His eldest daughter Meenaskshi took the lead from then on. She spoke to the occupants of the house, and led the travelling group for about 15 minutes through the house that had once belonged to them.

Outside on the street, Arazbegi and his wife remained seated in one car. The two had come all the way to Kashmir, and now stood on the road on which their house stood, but the few steps that would have taken them inside were too much to bear.

Sitting on a sofa today in his house in Thane, in a room filled with artefacts from Kashmir, and just days from his 75th birthday, Arazbegi, who has seen the worst the country has to offer as well as its brighter spots—whether it was the ability to remake one’s life from scratch or the small kind gestures like the friend in Jammu who helped him with money when he fled Kashmir, or his once junior colleague who presented his daughter-in-law with a gold ring—he says that he has managed to shed all the bitterness he once felt. “You have to let go of the bitterness. Otherwise it will not allow you to go forward,” he says.

“What I have learnt in my life is that human relations go beyond everything, beyond community or religion or whatever,” he says. “You need to build human relationships with one another. That allows you to move ahead. That is what is truly important.”

About The Author

Lhendup G Bhutia

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