So how would it be if i tell you tomorrow morning you wont be able to see your loved one. You just dont have any idea where has he gone. Is he dead or he is just missing. Has he been killed or where he is you dont know. Your brain tells you that it has been a decade since you lost him he is probably dead but your eyes haven't seen his corpse and your heart pounds and tells you he is still alive. You cannot mourn even for his loss.
Here is the saga of iron lady of kashmir.
Parveena recalls that the audience at the seminar - 'Kashmiris: Contested Present, Possible Futures' - was "teary-eyed" when she told them that nothing but death could stop her in the endeavour to find her son.
Parveena, who is the chairperson of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP) in Kashmir, has been fighting this arduous battle for the last 24 years, like so many others in the state whose relatives have reportedly gone missing since the security agencies swooped down on them as a counter-measure to tackle militancy.
Talking about her son Javed Ahmad, who was 17 years old at the time of his arrest on August 18, 1990 during a raid in Batmaloo area of uptown Srinagar, Parveena says it seemed no one knew what happened to him.
And no one knows even today, despite the illiterate Kashmiri mother's efforts to trace him in the prisons across Rajasthan and Kashmir.
"He was nowhere," she says.
Parveena later approached the court of law, and a trial in the case has been running for all these years, as she waits to know whether her son is dead or alive.
"During one of the hearings, an Army officer asked me how much money I wanted to close the case. I told him I didn't want money but my son," Parveena says.
Javed remains one among the thousands in Kashmir who reportedly disappeared in the backdrop of militancy and massive security operations.
After Parveena moved the court in the early 1990s, several people whose relatives have disappeared in custody also approached the courts and later formed the APDP.
Members of the Association meet every month at Lal Chowk in Srinagar, and demand information on the whereabouts of disappeared persons.
"Government should tell us whether they are alive or dead. Yes, thousands have been killed since 1989 in Kashmir. They have been buried. Their relatives have their graves, at least. But we don't know what has happened to ours," Parveena says.
While successive state governments acknowledged disappearances in the state, they keep the count quite low.
Former minister of state for home Abdul Rehman Veeri in 2003 had said some of the disappeared did cross over to Pakistan.
Later, on March 25, 2003 former law minister Muzaffar Hussain Baig informed the state Assembly that since December 1992, about 3,744 persons were reported missing.
Parveena, however, puts the number at anything between 8,000 to 10,000 persons. And she hopes to attract international attention on the issue.
While in the UK, she also met British parliamentarians. She requested them to help in tracing these disappeared persons and also urge the Indian government to allow APDP to construct a memorial in Srinagar.
Parveena, who represents APDP in the Philippines-based Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances, has also been demanding an independent commission to probe the disappearances in the Valley.
So far, only Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah repeatedly called for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the lines of a similar agency in South Africa to probe all the alleged human rights violations in the state.
Even though officials claim that disappearances don't take place now, Parveena alleges Special Operations Group of Jammu and Kashmir arrested Mushtaq Ahmad Changa, a civilian, in Sopore area of north Kashmir early this year and since then nothing has been heard about him.
"They tell his wife that he was taken by unknown gunmen, but Changa's whole family knows he was taken by the police," Parveena alleges.
"I am not scared of saying this. They cannot stop us from telling the truth," she says.
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