Rohan Dua,TNN | Oct 11, 2014, 06.15 AM IST
ARNIA/PARGWAL (Jammu): With overpowering pain in her right arm, 41-year-old Neha Devi looked agitated while Kiran Bala (36) sobbed. The two from Arnia sub sector were wounded in cross-border shelling from Pakistan on Thursday. They are among thousands of civilians, who are too frightened to return to their homes even as nine days of firing and mortar shelling from across the border has de-escalated.
"Why should we return? Why does not the government provide us permanent homes if such border tension continues? It is not our problem if we have our land that earns us meager income," Bala said.
Most of these civilians grow rice or work as daily wage labourers. Many of them earn their livelihood by selling milk.
In Pargwal, 75-year-old Ram Lal and his son, Vijay Kumar, who lost their cow and calf, are now jobless.
"Our daily earning depended upon the milk our cattle produced. Even my third cow is now badly bruised. She can die anytime," Lal said, as he wept inconsolably.
In Akhnoor's Molu village, 78-year-old Chaggar Singh, who had lost his son Naresh Singh in a militant attack in 2003, has for years been receiving stray shells at his home.
This time, when the shell broke even the glass fixed outside the statue of his slain son, he too decided to quit the village. "I thought I could carry his bravery here but now time's up," he said.