Just ten minutes after I, along with five members of my family, escaped through the narrow lane of our locality, an artillery shell landed with full force on the same path. Zain and Zoya (nickname of Urwa), the 12-year-old twins you may have heard of by now, were the first to be martyred. Three others were injured—one of them was a friend whom I had greeted at his doorstep as we fled, urging him to do the same.
It was the 6th of May, and the Poonch market buzzed with urgency. People hurried through the streets, desperately stocking up on essentials, fearing something major was looming. That evening, during a conversation with another friend of mine, Wajid, about the possibility of conflict, we concluded that the likelihood of skirmishes along the Line of Control—the de facto border between two nuclear-armed South Asian nations—was now greater than tossing a coin. We parted ways for home, and on my way, I picked up my share of essentials from a local shop: a gas cylinder, a few bags of flour, a can of mustard oil, and other items my mother thought were a must-have.
There was an eerie silence in the air, with our people being so naive that they took the publicly announced mock drill scheduled for the 7th as a declaration of war. Our people were right, though. We ate and went to sleep after having offered Isha prayers as usual. At 2:27 AM, I received a call from my uncle—the same uncle whose house we were heading to in the morning before Zain and Zoya were killed. He told me to get to the ground floor and stay indoors. Before I could ask him why, an artillery shell struck nearby. The ground trembled, and window panes rattled from the shockwaves. I sprang from sleep, invoked God’s name, and rushed downstairs to see what the hell had broken out. “It was no less than a war”, I said confidently—far bigger in scale than what Wajid and I had concluded just hours earlier.
This was an utterly alien experience—not just for my generation, but for that of our parents as well. Different even from what had happened in 1947, ’65, or ’71. After capturing dozens of videos showing shells landing in and around our locality—or mohalla, as we call it—I asked myself what I should do. We came to the ground floor, not that the top third floor was more likely to get hit, but I was convinced that the house would collapse on its own due to massive tremors and shockwaves caused when the shell landed.
The night passed. Soon, the voice of the Fajr Azaan echoed from the mosques, marking the break of the dawn. It was hard to tell which was louder—the call to prayer or the chaos outside. Not in spirit, of course. Half an hour later, people began gathering at the mosque. One neighbour, noticing the unusual turnout at the masjid, remarked, “Wao! Looks like the bombs either woke everyone early or didn’t let them sleep at all.” People offered their prayers and shared stories of the shelling, which had continued into the early morning. The shelling paused briefly—just enough for prayers. I uttered in my mind that our neighbours were kind enough to stop bombing during prayer times. I didn’t know then that they would resume after prayers and both sides would come up this time with heavier shells.
The shelling resumed! And this time, unlike the night before, people were out on the streets, scrambling to leave the city. This was when most of the casualties occurred. Yes, they didn’t know what to do during a bombardment. Of course, the mock drill was scheduled for the 7th, but the assault began a night earlier—were we misled? The shelling grew fiercer with no signs of stopping, and Zuhr was still hours away at 1 PM.
God was merciful to us that day—we managed to escape in the early hours of the 7th. But Zain and Zoya, among many others, could not. The death toll kept rising by the hour. The town, once thought safe, was no longer so. “We must leave for the villages as soon as possible,” everyone said in a rush. Ah, the villages—serene, sublime, with lush green valleys, towering mountains, and majestic trees under which rivers flow. Exactly, heaven on Earth. Villages had tough terrain, sparse populations, and were less likely to hit—at least, that’s what a colleague from mainland India said after I shared with him a video of my village, assuming both sides respected basic wartime ethics.
We reached our village, as others reached theirs. But to our shock, the villages too were not spared. Large shells continued to rain down even in remote areas, and we kept on watching helplessly. Yes, we’ve heard of the S-400 and other air defence systems, but we haven’t seen them in action—not even now. Perhaps our lives aren’t worth a few hundred dollars. Shelling from both sides finally halted in the afternoon—but only after more than fifty innocent civilians were killed and over twenty times that number injured along both sides of the Line of Control.
The next day, people returned to the town—not to resume life, but to retrieve the supplies they had hurriedly gathered on the 6th. I was no exception. Our neighbours had bombarded our locality indiscriminately, as if enemy camps were hidden there. After the ceasefire, I began enquiring about the number of shells that had landed in each area, only to see whose locality had suffered most. It is 19 and counting for me in a less than 200m radius.
War is not a movie theatre. It should not be a fantasy either, though it has become one for many ultranationalists sitting in cosy rooms in capital cities and urban centres. War is a brutal reality—it destroys lives, dreams, and entire communities. It is the local population along these colonial-era lines on a map that bears the horrors. It is we who have their hearts in their mouths whenever a shell lands nearby, or missiles cross overhead, or jets hover high up in the sky.
After this latest episode, we—the younger generation who have seen one relentless crisis after another—deserve a future of peace. One as calm and tranquil as our villages. This town of Poonch was settled by people who migrated from villages in the 1990s, seeking safety and better lives. Now, we are witnessing a reverse migration back to those same villages that might turn hostile too in the next series of events that might inevitably unfold as we, the naive people, are expecting. Amidst all this, the people along the Line of Control deserve dignity, stability, and above all, peace.
Muhammad Kazafi is a resident along the LoC.
, the 12-year-old twins you may have heard of by now, were the first to be martyred. Three others were injured—one of them was a friend whom I had greeted at his doorstep as we fled, urging him to do the same.){kind=link}