IT’S a bright sunny day in the picturesque village of Chakothi, hardly three kilometres from the Line of Control (LoC). At the fag end of September that heralds the advent of winter in high-altitude areas, such days perk up people. However, the mood in the cross-LoC Trade and Travel Terminal, some 800 metres ahead of Chakothi bazaar, is sombre.

The terminal is the last spot where relatives of passengers travelling between divided Kashmir through the Muzaffarabad-Srinagar bus service are allowed to receive or see them off.

Know more: Held Kashmir: submerged and suppressed

The prefabricated structure, with the roof painted green and the walls pink, sits on the edge of a sloped mountain that goes hundreds of feet down to the Jhelum River, coming from Srinagar where it has lately wreaked havoc that words fail to describe. Dreadfully swollen until recently, the river is comparatively calm now.

Given the cumbersome and time-consuming process, travellers are naturally happy when they are granted travel permits. However, as more than 150 passengers who travelled to Srinagar on or before Sept 1 on a four-week (extendable) permit were stuck there, after the deluge suspended trans-LoC travel from the Chakothi-Uri crossing point, the atmosphere at the terminal is somewhat serious as I reach there last Friday.

Normally, the crossing takes place on Mondays. But after a meeting between the authorities from both sides on Sept 24, a special bus was run on Friday to bring back 57 of the stranded passengers in the first phase.

As the two buses stop at the terminal premises and passengers start alighting, their body language expresses the pain and fatigue they have experienced since Sept 7, when the ‘Paradise on Earth’ was swallowed by floodwaters.

The joy of returning alive, however, is also noticeable, as many of them had a close shave. “We have been blessed with new lives,” Saqib Butt, a banker from Muzaffarabad, tells me. The 57-year-old travelled across on Aug 18 along with his spouse and a teenage son. They were staying at the Karan Nagar residence of his in-laws and had plans to return on Sept 8. Amid the manual scanning of luggage, he recalls the “harrowing experience”.

“When it started raining on Sept 6, none of us had the slightest idea that the downpour will usher in devastating flash floods,” he muses. “At about 9pm, we heard announcements from the mosques that the Jhelum has breached the embankment and that people should move upstairs. But we took the warnings lightly. When we got up at 4am for Fajr prayers, there was commotion across the neighbourhood as the water level had grown to four feet. By 1pm, it was 18 feet, submerging the ground floor.”

Along with 12 members of the host family, the trapped guests spent the next three sleepless nights on the second floor, rationing out the available food and water. “Since many houses in our immediate neighbourhood crumbled before my eyes, and ours was a 60-year-old house, I had lost all hopes of survival,” he says.

During those days, trapped residents waved red flags at army helicopters, but to no avail. The choppers were only airlifting government and military officials from the nearby civil secretariat, he claims, showing me pictures in his mobile phone of choppers hovering over the civil secretariat.

Eventually, they were rescued by local Kashmiri youth in a canoe on the fifth day. The rescuers took them to a hotel where they stayed for three nights and then they moved to their ancestral Pattan village. Their luggage was retrieved on Sept 26, two days before their departure.

Prof Amjad Hussain, an academic from Muzaffarabad, has an even scarier story to tell. Also trapped in an inundated house in Karan Nagar for three nights, when they were finally rescued by the local Kashmiri youth, their small craft lost balance, plunging his wife and one of their two children in the water. “Thankfully, the rescuers were able to immediately rescue them,” he says.

Saqib Butt was on his second trip to India-held Kashmir but there were some who had gone across the divide on a maiden tour. Among them were Khawaja Mushtaq Ahmed and his family, including his spouse and university-going daughter.

In his mid-50s, Ahmed runs a garment shop at Quetta’s Jinnah Road. His parents migrated to Pakistan after Partition, and he had gone to the Valley to meet his relatives only a week before the floods.

The house where they were staying in the Jawahar Nagar area was inundated on the night of Sept 6, and later partially collapsed. The family, however, had fortunately moved to another relative’s house earlier that very afternoon. “All of our belongings were swept away, including our documents,” says Ahmed. “But Rajbagh police station officials issued us duplicate papers, enabling our return.”

Ahmed had planned to buy gifts for his friends in Quetta, but returned with just the clothes on his back. Their luggage was almost insignificant. “This is the same shalwar qameez I put on for the dinner on that critical night,” he tells me, pointing to his wrinkled clothes.

Back in Muzaffarabad, the returnees are being visited by family members and friends. “You can hardly imagine how concerned we were about their safety, particularly after we lost contact with him,” says Khawaja Ayaz Qadir, a friend of Saqib Butt’s.

The travellers say they did not see any tangible help from the Indian army and that the trapped people were mostly rescued by local Kashmiris. For years, Kashmiris have been facing brute force and discrimination. Now, they are fighting calamity together.

Published in Dawn, October 6th, 2014