JALOZAI CAMP: Bahadar Singh was hardly 17 or maybe 18 years of age — his forehead wrinkles in the effort of recollection — when he converted to Islam after a local Muslim in the Mehraban Kalay area of the Tirah valley promised him his young daughter’s hand in marriage. He is now in his early 60s and resides in a tent at the Jalozai camp, along with some 200 families displaced from Khyber Agency.

But in the years since he converted, Sheikh Bahadar, as he has since been known, has lost everything — including his entire family.

Wearing dark glasses as he has contracted an eye disease due to the unhygienic conditions in the camp, Bahadar narrated his saga to this writer at a chance meeting during a recent visit to the Jalozai camp.

“We were a family of about 20 people and were quite content with our lives in Tirah,” the bearded man tells me. “Then one day, a local resident from the majority Muslim community lured me to embrace Islam with the promise of giving his daughter in marriage to me and a piece of land for cultivation.”

I sort of grilled him for a while to divulge the name of the Kukikhel tribesman who proceeded to deprive him of all his belongings while keeping him waiting for years to marry his daughter. But he stood firm, maybe for fear of still being counted as a minority community member. He was denied registration at the Jalozai camp for having no family.

“That greedy man continued to rob me of my hard-earned income from my timber business for years,” he continues. “In the process, my family also deserted me and I lived alone in the hope of my promised marriage to the Kukikhel girl. That never materialised.”

Bahadar fled Mehraban Kalay after it was overrun by militants back in 2011 along with other parts of the picturesque valley, while some members of his Sikh family shifted to Afghanistan and others migrated to India. “I had lost all relations with my family and was thus left with no other choice but to take refuge in the Jalozai camp along with other displaced families,” he says.

For quite some time, the camp authorities, as per the rules, refused to register him as a “legitimate temporarily displaced person” (TDP) as the poor man had no family. He was thus compelled to live in community centres, mosques and schools, all of them established in tents. It was only after persistent pleading for over a year that he was provided a small tent in which he lived an isolated life for almost four years.

“Nobody is kind to me,” he says as he ponders the meaning of his life. “Everyone tried to rob me of the little money I had left from the timber business. But even then I have no regrets for changing my religion and losing my family. It was written in my fate.”

But he is uncertain about his future plans as the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa disaster management authority has recently announced the impending closure of the Jalozai camp. “Maybe I will go to Bara and restart my timber business,” he muses. “But I am not sure, as business activities have yet to restart in the Bara market. Also, I have no interest left in life anymore.”

Back in Tirah, very few Sikh families have gone back since the return of displaced families started in mid-2014. Hatam Singh, a general store owner at the Lar Bagh Markaz (market) in Tirah Malakdin Khel, told me that almost all the Sikh families’ houses have been destroyed and their belongings taken away by militants. The Sikh community, Hatam Singh said, has no place of worship in the entire Tirah valley; they worship inside their houses, in their shops and at times on the banks of a natural spring running behind the Lar Bagh Markaz.

Before the occupation of Tirah valley by the Taliban, he explained, most Sikhs here were either tenants with local landlords or were drug mules for drug markets in Bara as well as those across the border in Afghanistan. With life not yet fully restored in the militancy-ravaged Tirah valley, chances for the revival of older professions for the local Sikh community also look dim.

The Sikh community had a tough time in Bara when the area was under the control of the proscribed Lashkar-i-Islam (LI) for nearly half a decade (2004 to 2009). The LI chief, Mangal Bagh, variously reported as having been killed in a drone strike earlier this year or in hiding in Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, had imposed the Jizya tax on all non-Muslims, mostly Sikhs living in Bara, in return for ‘security’.

This forced a large number of Sikh families to leave Bara and move to either Peshawar or Punjab, especially Hasan Abdal.

Published in Dawn, October 28th, 2016