Handwara Tragedy: The Tulips Gone Too Soon!

Khursheed Ahmad Shah

The Road Never Promised Flowers
They left with songs on their lips and tulips in their thoughts.
They returned in ambulances.

It began like something soft a Saturday wrapped in excitement, students gathered in the early morning cold, cheeks pink from the chill and from joy. Government Degree College Sogam had organized a trip to Srinagar’s Tulip Garden, and for once, life felt generous.

Humaira Tabasum, a final-year student, woke up before dawn. She packed a small steel lunchbox with fruit chat — carefully chopped, sweetened, meant to be shared with friends on the grass beneath blooming flowers.

She never got to open it.

“It was all laughter on the bus,” she said, lying on a hospital bed days later. Her head was bandaged, her hands trembling. “We were singing, talking about what the tulips might look like. My friend beside me was showing me old photos. Then… suddenly…”

She paused, eyes wet.

“I don’t know how to describe it. The road just gave way.”

At around 8:00 a.m., near Vodhpora, Handwara, the bus lost control. It overturned, shattering metal, glass, and joy all at once. Some students were thrown against the windows. Others were pinned beneath seats. A few never opened their eyes again.

“There was blood. There was screaming,” Humaira said. “One girl beside me was still. Another kept asking for her friend, again and again. But her friend was gone.”

Among those injured was Tahira Begum, 27, not a student but someone who had asked to join for once, just to see something beautiful.

“I’ve never been on a picnic,” she said softly. “Life never allowed it. That morning, I got ready like a child. I sat near the front. When the crash happened, I remember my head hitting the side. After that… it’s a blank.”

Tahira will recover. But she, like the others, will carry what she saw and what she heard far longer than her bandages will last.

News of the accident spread fast. By noon, the college had shut down. In Sogam, teachers sat motionless in staffrooms. In Handwara, the mood was shattered. In Baramulla Boys College students stood in silence.
Two young lives had been lost. More than twenty others were wounded.

And at the crash site, the road held pieces of their morning: Torn seats . A broken slipper. A lunchbox flung open, its contents scattered in the dirt. Apples, bananas, pomegranate seeds untouched, never eaten.

That fruit chat was Humaira’s. She had packed it with care, dreaming of sharing it beneath a sky full of color. But the garden remained far away. And the students never made it.

That same afternoon, the Tulip Garden opened like it always does in spring. Tourists wandered among neat rows of color. Children posed for photos. But somewhere between Sogam and Srinagar, a different kind of spring had ended before it began.

“We just wanted a memory,” Humaira said. “Instead, we got silence, screams, blood.”

Two families now wait to bury the daughters they had waved goodbye to that morning. The rest are waiting in hospital corridors, counting wounds, fearing complications, saying little.

And the survivors the ones who came back broken but breathing will carry with them a scar that the season can’t soften.

The investigation is ongoing. The reasons may eventually be known. But reasons won’t heal what’s already gone.

Because on that road, something more than a vehicle overturned.
It was a bus full of stories.
Of futures.
Of girls who had just begun to dream.
The road cold, unfeeling offered them nothing but pain.

The author is a freelance journalist from Kashmir who have contributed to different national and local media organizations including 101 Reporters, News Click, Good Food Movement, Kashmir Life, and Kashmir Times. He can reached at shahkhursheed918@gmail.com (The feature image to the article has been rendered by Kaiser Ahmad)