[DAWN] Fifteen years later, Shah is a driver at the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority, surviving on a meagre salary and a Rs5,000 pension. He blames Nawaz Sharif... served two non-consecutive terms as prime minister, heads the Pakistain Moslem League (Nawaz). Noted for his spectacular corruption, the 1998 Pak nuclear test, border war with India, and for being tossed by General Musharraf...
. "Kashmire was in our hands," he told me at his house, sitting in a blue plastic chair under harsh fluorescent lights and a clock that read 6:54, no longer keeping time.
"But then Sharif went to the United States and we had to give Kargil
... three months of unprovoked Pak aggression, over 4000 dead Paks, another victory for India ...
back." For Shah, and his neighbours, many of them ex-army men, Sharif's greatest betrayal was calling the Kargil fighters mujahideen. "Kashmiri mujahideen?" he scoffed. "He said we were mujahideen! I'm retired from the army. He disowned his own army." While Shah has never been compensated for what he left behind, and several trips to the GHQ have borne nothing, Sharif will travel to India next week to make gains for the future.
A neighbour's son Ali Raza, now 20, also remembers shells: exploding Indian shells dripping like rain every day on his way to school. A shell fell near his school bus once, so close it rocked the bus from the side to side. He tells me about the 12-year-old girl whose nose was sliced off by shrapnel. He also tells me about how the war changed children's lives -- and their toys too.
"They [army] would give us one gola (grenade) each and send us to throw them on the Indians," Ali, a cook at Nadra, said. "The children were small and were hard to detect at night. And plus we knew all the inside routes that even the adults didn't. So they gave us a gola each and off we went, running up the hills."
As Ali tells me about the unusual toys and the invented games, his infant daughter plays with a rattle by his feet. She chuckles. At least for her, one can pray, the war is over.