1. MISRI NIVAS

 

1.     MISRI NIVAS

A House of Memory, Learning, and Wonder

At the edge of a quiet garden, beside the flowing river Vitasta, and under the watchful gaze of the Ganesha Temple, just across stood Misri Nivas — a home unlike any other.

Within its walls lived Janki, an elderly teacher of rare wisdom, gentle humour, and boundless imagination. To the children who gathered around him, he was more than a grandfatherly figure. He was a storyteller, a guide, and a keeper of hidden doors. Through his strange questions, unforgettable lessons, and magical tales, he opened young minds to science, courage, history, and the deeper mysteries of life.

But Misri Nivas was not only a house. It was a world.

A place where ordinary afternoons could turn into journeys beyond imagination. A place where gardens whispered secrets, books became gateways, and children discovered that knowledge was not something to be memorised, but something to be lived.

Blending family memory, Kashmiri heritage, childhood adventure, and timeless wisdom, this book is a tribute to a man, a home, and a vanished world that still breathes through story.

For every child who has ever wondered what lies beyond the garden gate — and for every adult who still remembers.

Now, sitting in New Malden, London, Sham Misri writes with a heavy heart. He reaches back across oceans and decades to the days when the air was filled with the scent of woodsmoke from the Dhan, when the Thas Bur gates stood silent, and the house was alive with students, laughter, his father’s quiet authority, and his mother’s steady kindness. He tries to set down his memories as a tribute to the quiet strength of a family that bent before storms but did not break.

His father, Janki Nath Misri, became a teacher whose influence stretched far beyond the walls of the school. Thousands of young minds and countless children received their private coaching through him, especially during the long winter months when the snow locked the valley in cold. Hundreds came to him for guidance, and many more were formed in the quiet fireside rooms where lessons turned into confidence, and discipline into hope.

The Misri House is still there. The walls stand. The rooms remain. But it is no longer his. The house has been inhabited by Muslim neighbours. Through their windows, the same light falls on the same walls. The hearth that once warmed Misri children now warms different hands. Yet somewhere, in the silence between the stones, the old life lingers. The laughter of children, the rustle of pages, the soft murmur of lessons, the warmth of a shared lunch. The house remembers, even if it can no longer speak.

Sham writes not to reclaim what is lost, but to honour what remains. Although the Misris are gone from that house, the house itself has not been silenced. It lives in memory, in family, in the thousands of minds his father taught, in the names still spoken, and in the stories that refuse to fade.

A home may be lost, but a family’s story is never truly gone. It passes from one generation to the next, from one heart to another, like a quiet, unbroken flame. And so, though the Misris no longer live in Misri Nivas, the house still lives in them.-Sham Misri, 19-6-2026