Suddenly, it is a full-fledged religious procession – but it still remains confined to the lanes and bylanes, so the army continues to observe.
Gradually, the group finds its way to the army pickets at the place where the lane joins the main road. A solitary soldier steps up to the barbed wire, asks them to stop, and to return to their homes. Curfew is on, he reminds them.
The crowd taunts him. The volume of the chanting gradually picks up. An effigy materialises out of nowhere -- Mehbooba Mufti, president of the People's Democratic Party, appears to be the favourite muse of effigy makers.
The crowd garlands it with torn slippers, and sets it on fire. The lone soldier now gets backup in the form of four or five more colleagues, who roll up in an army van. And just when you would assume that a flashpoint has been reached, and a violent confrontation is a heartbeat away, the crowd melts away, its job for the day done.
The next day, the dangerous game of chicken, played out between restive crowds and tentative army personnel, begins afresh.
Seventy-year-old Santosh Aroura is soaked in sweat as she returns home after the daily game. She is ill; it is difficult to walk back down the lane to her home. So why take the trouble, why subject the body to a strain it is clearly incapable of taking?
"We have spent enough years thinking why to get out," she says, as she clambers painfully into the car of a friend. "And we have been paying the price for it for 60 years. This time things have gone too far, and there is no point sitting at home and lamenting our fate. If we don’t come out, how will the youngsters come out?"
"We will show the Mehbooba Muftis of the world and the Kashmir Valley what Jammu is made of," says another elderly lady with a toddler on her hip and no name she wants to share with the world. "All these years, the people of the Valley have gotten away with a lot of things. This time they have stooped so low as to make an issue of a piece of land that was going to be used for a pilgrimage for just two months? How can they twist it into such a big issue? This time we will not back off till the government withdraws its order."
This is the woman who made the Mufti effigy. "At my age, I sat for two hours and made it. But I don't mind as long as we get something out of it."
Image: Women mourn after JKLF chairman Yasin Malik is shifted to a hospital in Srinagar. Malik was on a 'fast onto death' to protest reported attacks on Muslims in Jammu and imposition of an economic blockade on Kashmir.
Also read: Jammu is not for burning
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