In Baramulla’s Shah Mohalla, a mother’s quiet battle against hunger, loss and humiliation continues—for the sake of her children
TAQWA SHAFI
BARAMULLA, Feb 12: Shah Mohalla does not appear on most maps of Baramulla. It lies about six kilometres from the bustle of the town, down a broken road that narrows into lanes edged with open drains and mounds of unattended garbage. Children run barefoot over damp earth. Smoke rises thinly from tin chimneys. The air carries the smell of damp brick and neglect.
Sandwiched between a heap of refuse and a sluggish drain stands a modest three-room brick house. Its walls are weather-stained, its courtyard uneven. Inside lives 65-year-old Zoon, a widow who has spent the last three decades knocking on doors so her children would not sleep hungry.
Her kitchen is small and dimly lit. An electric heater hums faintly as her daughter stirs rice in a dented pot. The room is sparse—two worn-out utensils, a cracked plastic bucket, a shelf with a few steel plates stacked neatly. Zoon sits on the floor cushion, her frail hands resting in her lap. Her face, creased by time and toil, darkens when she begins to remember.
“I was 35 when my husband died,” she says quietly. “My eldest was just 12. Four children. No income. No support. I did not know how I would feed them.”
Her husband’s death was not just a personal tragedy; it was an economic collapse. With no formal education and no employable skills, Zoon was left to confront a world that offered little mercy to a young widow with four mouths to feed.
“One day my children were crying from hunger,” she recalls, her voice trembling. “They kept asking for food. I had nothing. Nothing in the house. What can a mother do when her children cry and you have nothing to give?”
That night, she says, her son uttered words that still haunt her. “He told me, ‘If we cannot eat, give us poison so we can sleep.’”
Zoon did not sleep that night. She sat awake, staring at her children’s faces in the dark. Something hardened within her. Or perhaps something softened. By dawn, she had made a decision that would define the rest of her life.
“I decided I would beg,” she says simply. “For my children, I could bear anything.”
Every morning since, for nearly 30 years, Zoon has walked from Shah Mohalla to villages and neighbourhoods across Baramulla district. Through harsh winters when snow buries rooftops. Through summer heat that cracks the earth. Through rain that soaks her pheran and stiffens her bones.
“Every day I knock on hundreds of doors,” she says. “Some people give. Some shout. Some insult. But I keep going.”
In the early days, she says, the humiliation was unbearable. “I was young. I felt ashamed. People would look at me differently. Some would speak harshly. Some would close the door in my face.”
She considered working as a domestic help. But in Shah Mohalla—home to many families who survive on alms—social stigma runs deep.
“For people from our locality, working as a maid in someone’s house is not easy,” she says. “There is little acceptance. People think differently about us.”
So she chose the streets instead.
Sometimes she begged in her own village, sometimes in the crowded markets of Baramulla town, sometimes along dark lanes where shadows stretched longer than hope. She learned which doors might open, which ones would not. She learned to swallow pride. She learned to endure.
Despite everything, Zoon insisted on sending her children to school—an ageing, crumbling building in the neighbourhood.
“I wanted them to at least learn to read and write,” she says. “Even if we were poor, they deserved that.”
Her children—Akhtar, Riyaz, Maymoona and Tabasum—were her world.
“I thought my eldest son would become my shoulder,” she says, a faint smile flickering across her face before fading. “He wanted to help me.”
But fate intervened cruelly again. Akhtar was crippled in a road accident, his dreams collapsing alongside his mother’s quiet expectations. Her second son, Riyaz, she says, struggles with mental health and drug dependency.
“After my eldest son’s accident, I lost hope,” she admits. “But I did not give up.”
Her daughter Maymoona once dreamed of becoming a teacher. Poverty cut that dream short. Today she is married, raising two children of her own. Tabasum remains at home, helping her mother manage the fragile household.
The burden, however, still rests largely on Zoon’s aging shoulders.
There have been moments of kindness. Strangers who pressed a few extra rupees into her palm. Shopkeepers who offered rice or flour. Neighbours who shared leftovers.
“There are kind people in this world,” she says. “If not for them, how would we survive?”
Yet kindness is unpredictable. It cannot be budgeted. It cannot be relied upon like a salary.
As the sun sets over Shah Mohalla, Zoon returns home, her steps slower than they were decades ago. Her knees ache. Her back bends slightly forward. But she still walks.
Inside, the electric heater glows red. The evening meal—simple rice and vegetables—simmers. Zoon watches her daughter cook and reaches out to embrace her.
“I beg out of helplessness,” she says, her voice steady despite everything. “My children deserve a better life. That is all I ever wanted.”
In a society that often reduces beggars to statistics or stereotypes, Zoon’s story resists simplification. It is not merely about poverty. It is about a mother who chose humiliation over hunger for her children. It is about resilience forged in desperation. It is about love that outlasts shame.
Three decades after that sleepless night, Zoon still knocks on doors.
Not because she lacks dignity.
But because she refuses to let hunger win.
