Before The Phones Came Back To Life, Kashmiri Families Could Not Even Mourn Their Dead scroll.in

The news came from strangers. Hafizullah Reshi, who had gone to Ladakh on business, got a call around 8.30 is on August 31, telling him his father, Ghulam Nabi Reshi, had died an hour ago. The call was made from a police station in Srinagar.

His wife, food writer Marryam Reshi, who was in Delhi, got a call from another police station in Srinagar later that morning. She was prepared for the news. She had just been on the phone with her husband, who had called her up crying.

“Mujeeb hund bud bubbe chu gozrayamat” – Mujeeb’s grandfather has passed away, said the voice at the other end of the line. Mujeeb was her nephew.

Two days later, after Marryam Reshi posted the news on social media, another nephew, Aamir Ismail Najar, who works in Gurgaon, found out his grandfather had died. “He called a friend in Srinagar whose landline was working and asked him to pay a visit to our home and check if the news of his grandfather’s death was true,” said his elder brother, Umar Ismail Najar, who was in the house next door to Ghulam Reshi when tragedy struck.