Normally, Mir says, he wouldn’t let his family know about these everyday hiccups. “But after Lone’s killing, my mother is adamant. She is insisting that I return as soon as possible...I have put in my papers with a heavy heart. I don’t know what I will do in Kashmir. I feel I have wasted my seven years,” says Mir.

He adds that harassment is not new. “It happens with everyone of us. I had to hide that I am a Kashmiri and a Muslim from my landlord in Karnal. Otherwise they would have never rented me a room,’’ he says. However, he doesn’t blame the landlord. “They too are scared of police harassment.”

Mir claims to have faced similar harassment while studying at the Institute of Public Health and Hygiene in Delhi. “Once there was a fight between junior students and the college administration and three of us (Kashmiris) were among those who tried to intervene. Soon the police came looking for three Kashmiri ‘terrorists’. We were arrested and kept in lock-up for an entire day. We were lucky that the college administration came to our rescue. There is still an FIR lying against us in that police station,’’ Mir recollects.

It is not just place to stay that is difficult to find, he adds. They are unable to even make friends. “The moment people around us get to know we are Kashmiris, they avoid us. They do it to keep away from trouble,” he believes.

Mir says his friend Mohammad Abbas, who works as an opthalmologic technician in Delhi, too is planning to leave his job and return home, while acquaintance Inayat, who works in Delhi for a Kashmir-based handicrafts company, is packing his bags.

... contd.