Found while my father was doing his post-retirement file purge – the ritual in which retiree gets rid of all the useless papers accumulated over years of work, bits that at one time must have held some meaning. Among the papers, I found this old pocket phonebook from year 1990. He was going to throw this away. It’s the diary in which he maintained the expenses of moving out of Kashmir.
Truck: 800, the truck in which material possession of three families were hurriedly loaded.
Auto (Driver: 20), for the morning drive from house to the bus stand.
Lunch: 50, had at the bus’s stopover after crossing Kashmir.
Mother: 100, left with his mother who was going to stay in Kashmir.
Satish: 100, for uncle who years later died in an road accident while making his ‘back to Kashmir’ trip.
Muni: 500, for my mother. Father was going to go back for his parents.
In total, the expense was just a little over a month’s salary of my father. And his bank balance stood just has about four times of that.
On the next page is the birth dates of me and my sister.
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My heart ached reading this. The cost of leaving your homeland.