“Even when Burhan grew older he insisted that I feed him with my own hands. Every time he visited us I fed him with my own hands,” said Maimoona as tears well up her eyes.
Srinagar: It has been two years since her son, the Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani achieved what he had set out to achieve: “martyrdom.” But for Maimoona, the mother of Burhan, it feels like yesterday when her son left home to join guerrillas in order to fight the government forces.
His father once told him ‘I think you are done with this (militancy),” Maimoona recalls. But the son retorted back: ‘I now realise that I have wasted 15 years of life. The real journey for me starts now,’” she recalls her son telling his father. Burhan had been preparing for his class 10 examinations when he left home.
“Even when Burhan grew older he insisted that I feed him with my own hands. Every time he visited us I fed him with my own hands,” said Maimoona as tears well up her eyes.
She feels indebted to all women who provided shelter to her son for six long years and also served him meals. “They all are his mothers too and it was because of their prayers that my son remained safe for such a long time and then achieved what he aspired to achieve, which was martyrdom,” said Maimoona.
Those who had sheltered him felt reverence for the young commander so much so that they requested the family to let them have his school bag, stationery, clothes and other such items.
“How could we deny them? They had every right to his belongings because of the love they gave to my son,” Maimoona said.
During a few meetings with Burhan, Maimoona, 44, a graduate and daughter of a retired school headmaster, would tell her son not to harm anyone.
“He would say, my mother, your son will never do anything that would make you feel ashamed. Be assured of that. I even plead with our enemies working for the (Indian) agencies to shun this practice and support our cause and I have been successful to a great extent,’” Maimoona said.
Nothing irritated Burhan as the family’s prayers for his safety, she said.
“He always said pray to God that he should be the last martyr of Kashmir and soon after his martyrdom Kashmir should get freedom,” she said.
The mother remembers commander Burhan, whose killing two years ago triggered a large uprising spanning over several months, as a bright student “but not a bookworm”.
“He topped 8th standard board examination in the zone and we expected him to do equally good in 10th standard,” she said.
Burhan, she recalled, was quite close to his elder brother Khalid Muzaffar, a post graduate in economics who was killed by the army in April 2015.
“Burhan aspired martyrdom but it was Khalid who achieved it well before him. It is God’s will and we as humans can do nothing but to accept it,” said Burhan’s father Muzaffar Ahmad Wani, 55, a principal of a higher secondary school.
Burhan, his parents said, was a darling of his relatives and his grandparents were particularly fond of him. “It is a tragedy that I lived to see both my grandchildren martyred,” said Burhan’s paternal grandfather Ghulam Ahmad Wani, 75, a retired assistant director in the department of planning.
Burhan has two siblings: his younger brother Naveed and sister, Iram Jan, both of whom are pursuing graduation. (Courtesy Greater Kashmir)