I am no stranger to killing and chaos in my surroundings, for I have lived most of my life witnessing, dodging and reporting such events. As a journalist in Kashmir, I have filled columns of newspapers counting the dead in dozens, collecting the pain and suffering in lifeless words, and watching, the ’paradise on earth’ - that old designation of Kashmir - burned to a wasteland of sadness by the violence kindled by Indian rule.

As a poet, I tried to sing the pain of my countrymen and women, the wails of mothers whose children were snatched from their beds, the government employees kidnapped by militants for being ’informers’ - a phenomenon common now in Iraq.

I stopped writing poems, since these seemed to me an inadequate response; the words had become strange to the ears of the people. I had become irrelevant.

A few years ago, I came to London to study. Being here made me sad. My time here was shadowed by a strong sense of guilt that I am free while my people remained captive. They cannot move an inch without permission of the army man standing over their home. Even marriage-parties, which were traditionally conducted by night are now held in the daylight, for no one can move at night without being shot at.

If I had brought my unhappiness to London, this is scarcely surprising: my life had been punctuated by bomb blasts, cries of loss by mothers who had lost their sons, of children whose father had been tortured to death. Everything was unpredictable and unstable; how could I be expected to attain stability? By the time I went to college in Kashmir, everyone was talking about holding a gun to fight for freedom. In no time, I saw friends, teachers, neighbours, relatives exalting freedom and the gun. The first blast I witnessed occurred in 1998, and I was standing just yards away from where an old man died.

After six months in London, I returned to Kashmir. I felt I had been thrown out of life. I felt like an evictee form my own country. I came back to London and settled here. But all the time I was hiding from myself. I could no longer write. For a time, I even stopped reading about Kashmir and its killing fields. I denied everything that had formed me - my life, my background, my feelings, even my friends. For a long time, my family thought I had gone missing. My mother had become resigned to the possibility that I had been just one more name added to the thousands missing in Kashmir.

As the time passed, I started believing that I was renegotiating life on ’normal’ terms, doing a job, going about life - I came to feel safe. However, I could not resume writing anyway - my thoughts eluded me in the blood-clotted lanes of memory.

Everybody in Kashmir knew I was not as ’comfortable’ as I would have been in my own culture, but everyone including my parents acknowledged that I was at least secure, however painful the separation. It is my usual practice to call my home and friends in Kashmir after every ’encounter’ or bomb blast that kills people. Just four weeks ago, there was a blast a few minutes’ walk from my family home, which wiped out six members of the same family.

On 7/7, the world turned upside down again. My brother tried desperately to contact me as news of the blast poured in. My sister tried everything to get in touch. Scores of friends from Kashmir left messages or sent texts, and my old Kashmir days came back to haunt me, as I realized I am in the firing line once more. Fate has created another war zone similar to that I was desperately trying to flee. As the first news came through, I was in Holland Park tube station. When people started to evacuate the station, confused and bewildered, I was back in the Kashmir of my yesterday…The running footsteps, the closed shops, the deserted bus stands. I called my wife and tried to contact my father who is with me at the moment, and was even then on the underground traveling to Central London - the ’theatre of action’ for the day.

Despite my familiarity with bombs, the events in London shocked me, as they have every Londoner, not because they exhibit the endless capacity of human beings to turn to savagery, but because the bubble of security I had created around me living thousands of miles from Kashmir had burst. I realized I was once again vulnerable and uncertain; and being in London Underground tube only makes the vulnerability and uncertainty more certain.

As the dead were ’identified’, I had the same old feeling of helplessness and a return of the constant grieving mode in which I had lived in Kashmir. Now that I am a Kashmiri Londoner, the grief is doubled. My soul feels suffocated in the dingy tunnels of the Underground where blood is spilt of both oppressor and the oppressed. It is scarcely new to me. I have seen hundreds of deaths. I have participated in scores of funerals, of friends, teachers, relatives, strangers. In my own hometown I witnessed more than 40 deaths in one day. As we marched peacefully, we were showered with Indian army bullets from every direction.

The London outrage sparked a particular memory - 22nd October 1993, the day 43 civilians were mowed down in my town. I turn on TV, read newspapers, and everywhere victims stare at me. We don’t call them victims in Kashmir, we call them shaheed or martyrs; wailing women sing to them and shower candies and flower petals and rose water. We bury them in their own clothes, whether torn by bullets or shrapnel. We erect tombstones carved with Urdu verses

Aa yay thaey hum misle bulbul sair-e-gulshan kur cha lay
Lay low mali bagh apna hum tove apnay ghar cha lay

(I came like a bird, but abandoned your garden
O gardener, take your garden, I have left for home)

As we bury our dead, we turn victims into martyrs, since the pain is lessened and a certain calm descends.

As I looked at the names of victims, a name leaped out. John Tulloch, a professor, is one of the injured whose bandaged face was all over the papers. He was my teacher during my journalism course at the University of Westminster when I first came to London.

My father, a retired professor, has been staying with us for a few months. He visited King’s Cross every day to visit the British Library, where he found many books and manuscripts which are clearly not available in Kashmir. When he came, he was surprised by the relaxed life of London compared to Kashmir, where he had lived surrounded by strife and destruction. His visits to the library have stopped. Kashmir is suddenly my closest neighbour in London.