Intezar: The Silent Heartbeats of Kashmir’s Half Widows

Intezar: The Silent Heartbeats of Kashmir’s Half Widows


Half widows are not statistics; they are living testimonies of injustice whose suffering remains invisible but whose pain is permanent


How does a woman feel her heartbeat when someone extinguishes the light of her home? She is left alone with her children, buried in the dust of inequality. All she does is intezar an Urdu word that means to wait. To wait with the fragile hope that one day her heart will start beating again, that her house will break free from the chains of silence. In Kashmir, a land trapped in legal limbo, countless hearts cry silently. Tears of blood fall when a woman is left alone, clinging to the hope that her husband might return. These women are known as half widows neither married nor widowed, suspended between life and loss. If we were to step inside their minds we would find a dark room surrounded by fire with no visible door, no escape.


On January 20, 2000, the heart and mind of a Kashmiri woman stopped working when her husband, Abdul Hamid Badhiyari, became a victim of enforced disappearance. Since then, his wife Shakeela and their children, Adil and Sana, have been waiting for him. Earlier, on March 20, 1992, Zoona Begum forgot the meaning of life when her husband Dar, a farmer, was picked up by the Indian Army. Zoona and her three sons Sajad, Naushed, and Yusuf are still waiting for his return.Similarly, in April 1990, Rafiqa Begum lost all the colors of her life and became metaphorically color-blind when her husband Shah, also a farmer, was taken away. Rafiqa Begum and her son Nisar Ahmed continue to wait, holding onto fading hope.


There are dozens indeed thousands of such half widows in Kashmir. They walk like living dead, forced to survive for the sake of their children, sustained only by false hope. Standing at the door, sitting on rooftops, resting on worn couches or lying on green grass, their thoughts remain the same: one day, the light of our house will return. One day, the walls of their silent homes will crack open with screams of happiness. Yet their suffering is brushed under the carpet. Between the night of August 17 and the early morning of August 18, 1990, Parveena Ahangar’s son, Javaid Ahmed Ahangar, was forcibly disappeared.


This catastrophic event transformed her grief into resistance. Her search for her son led to the formation of the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP), turning personal pain into a collective movement against enforced disappearances in Kashmir. There are reportedly thousands of cases of enforced disappearances in Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir. Since the revocation of Article 370 in August 2019, APDP has been unable to hold its regular monthly protests and has largely fallen silent due to fear of retaliation and arrests. In October 2020, the APDP office and Parveena Ahangar’s home were raided by India’s National Investigation Agency (NIA).


Documents were seized, and the raids were widely condemned as attempts to intimidate and silence human rights activism. Many of these half widows may have thought of standing at the edge of a cliff and ending their lives. But they chose to live for their children, and for hope. They chose intezar. Waiting, endlessly for their husbands to come back and for the House of Silence to finally breathe again.

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