I am from Poonch; my family still lives there. This is what I know as of 4:00 pm on May 7.

At 7 am, I woke up to a message from my mom: "Bahut firing ho rahi hai." I slept at 10:00 pm, so I had no idea about what she was talking about. I opened Twitter and saw that people were posting about artillery shelling in Poonch city. My family lives in the city. I called my mom. She said they had taken shelter in the safest room possible.

This is the full timeline of what happened. Around 50 of my family, friends, and close relatives live in the city. Ours is a joint family, so there are four nuclear families that live in the same family house. I will try to do justice to what they've described.

May 1–5

People smell something is off. Some say that the vibe has all the signals of war. Artillery guns deployed. Bunkers cleaned. Schools closed. Government assigns schools in the city to villagers living at the border - they can use the schools for shelter if their villages get hit by shells. It also asks the hospital staff to stay ready.

People in my family start discussing what to do if an all-out war breaks. Some people in my neighborhood start hoarding groceries, cash and other essentials.

May 6

Poonch administration makes an announcement - schools will stay closed on the 7th. This is never a good sign. People get the signal. They start rushing to ATMs and grocery shops. The ATMs run out of cash. The grocery shops stay open till late night. There was nothing "mock" about this drill. By the afternoon, my family starts stocking up on groceries and filling water tanks. They cancel all plans for vacations or picnics.

My family is the last one to panic, and them doing this makes me anxious. On our family chat group, people keep sharing clips related to upcoming war and rising tensions. I refuse to believe them, asking them to calm down, telling them these tensions would soon be over.

May 7

At 12:30 am my family starts hearing the first shells. The shells drop 3-5 kilometers away from the city. A couple of my family members go to the terrace to see what is happening. One shell whizzes over their head, throwing them into a panic. The shell falls 5 kilometers away but strongly signals that the situation is going to get worse - if it can go over them, it can hit them. Everyone wakes up. People stay in their respective rooms, cautious about the situation but still not too worried as sounds come from afar.

At around 5:00 am, a shell hits our family house. It hits the water tank on the top floor, destroying the tank and the stairs to the top floor. It fills up the whole house with dust and smoke. Windows shatter. People scream and yell for help. At the time, they have no idea where the shell hit, but they know it hit the house.

The shelling intensifies, peaking at around 6:00 am. My family and neighbors shift to the safest room in the house, many sobbing, all scared. A piece of shrapnel hits the other water tank in our house, and it starts leaking. Water everywhere. Shells hit schools, colleges, bus stations, cars, houses.

At 7:00 am I receive the first message from my mother. I call her. She cracks a joke but I hear fear in her voice. She describes the scene and tells me about what had transpired. She says 30 people are dead in the city, hundreds injured, and there's panic at the hospital. I check social media. I see the level of devastation. Videos made by my friends and family flood my WhatsApp. By this time a shell has dropped in a 10-meter radius of three of our relatives' houses.

At 9:00 am, shelling starts to slow down. People start talking about leaving Poonch. Some families from our neighborhood pack their bags and leave. While leaving, they plead with our family to leave too. Buses overflow. Hundreds of the migrant workers evacuate the city on foot, hoping to catch a bus from the next city. People leave on whatever transport they can find.

By 10:00 am, more videos flood my inbox. More calls. More worried messages. First details of people who died emerge; in it, is a person we all know. The shelling dies down. People start talking rationally. Thousands more leave the city. One of the nuclear families in the family house decides to leave Poonch. The rest of them are still there. The elders in the family ask the women and children to move to a safer city. They refuse to go.

By 12:00 pm the news of the shelling makes it to national media channels. But the level of destruction is not made public. That changes in the following hours - Ten dead and forty injured, hundreds of houses damaged, vehicles hit. An old teacher of mine tells us that two students from my school are dead.

At 2:00 pm, shells hit an ambulance and a car traveling to Jammu. Everyone in the ambulance dies. A woman loses her hand, and her child dies in the car. We know this woman, she was evacuating her family to safety. People are now rethinking the move. Some still take the leap.

What now?

I am writing this at around 3 pm and hope to publish it by 4:00. At this time, people in my family just want to sleep. They have a hunch that they won't be able to sleep after 7:00 pm tonight. They have been awake for well over 24 hours and are expecting more sleepless nights.

Some of them are discussing moving to Jammu or other safer areas but they want to wait for a couple of days before they make the decision. Some of them say that they won't leave until they get a directive from the army, while others say they would leave if the situation normalizes a bit.

They have already set up the kitchen in the basement and are filling up sacks of sand to line the terrace. They are also stocking up more supplies.

I will write the next one, same time tomorrow.

Warning: Graphic Content

Destruction

This shop is 50 meters from our house.

Shelling and Migration

Look for three things in this video. One, the shelling. Two, the mass migration. Third, the beauty that no longer is.