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5th October: A Day That Took Away Two Pillars of Kashmiri Culture

  • RK News By RK News
  • Comments 0
  • 05 Oct 2025

      BASHIR AARIF   Every year, the 5th of October returns like an old wound that refuses to heal. It carries not one, but two sorrows, both etched onto my life at the same hour, in the same hospital, twenty-six years apart.   In 1982, at 6:45 pm, in the surgical ward of AIIMS Delhi, I lost my mentor, Somnath Sadhu, a name that may not ring familiar across India today, but to Kashmiris of my generation he was nothing short of a cultural revolution. A playwright, actor, director, and radio legend, his voice had entered homes before television had. His radio plays in Kashmiri were not mere entertainment; they were the living memory of a people. He portrayed our humour without cruelty, our pain without melodrama.   Exactly twenty-six years later, in 2008, at the very same hour in the very same institute, Pushkar Bhan, another father figure to me, breathed his last. If Sadhu Sahib was the architect, Bhan Sahib was the foundation of Kashmiri theatre and radio storytelling. His long-running radio serial Zoon Dab was to Kashmir what Malgudi Days was to the rest of India except it ran for 19 years. When he entered a room, conversation turned into performance and laughter became language.   How does one process such symmetry of loss? How can coincidence be so cruel?   In August 1982, both Sadhu Sahib and Bhan Sahib had come to Kashmir. I had begged Sadhu Sahib to stay back for my wedding on August 18. His official commitments in Delhi would not allow it.   So I requested, “At least stay till the 12th.” He agreed. Both came. They ate dinner with affection only elders are capable of silence in between laughter, concern hidden beneath jokes. After dinner, Sadhu Sahib stood up, smiled, and said he would catch an early morning flight. That flight took him to Delhi and the next one brought him back to Kashmir, lifeless, on 6th October 1982.   Even today, when I see the old photograph of him and his wife, tears come uninvited. Age has taught me to speak less but loss has taught me that memory doesn’t age.   On my wedding day, it was Pushkar Bhan who stood beside me like a guardian. He had only recently returned from surgery in Delhi after a road accident. Yet he insisted on accompanying me.   There is a picture from that day, me in the centre, nervous, overwhelmed; and Bhan Sahib beside me, smiling not like a celebrity, but like a father hiding his fatigue so that his child may feel strong.   That smile accompanies me even today.   India remembers its icons through awards and archives. Kashmir remembers through storytelling. But what happens when storytellers fall silent?   Somnath Sadhu and Pushkar Bhan were not just artists. They were Kashmir’s living memory, its laughter, its dignity, its pauses. I do not write this for tribute. I write this as testimony. Because grief may be personal, but legacy must be public.   5th October is not a date on my calendar. It is the hour when two lights went out and yet, continue to guide.

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