To her, war means rushing to the cellar for cover

Choman Hardi could pass off as a young collegiate backpacking through Delhi. But this 29-year-old is an important Kurdish poet, who''s been in exile in the UK since 1993. She''s part of the UK-South Asian Women Writers'' Conference, 2003.
For most young Indian women of her age, war is just a newspaper headline, celluloid poetry by Spielberg or simply the opposite of peace.But for Choman, war means rushing down to the cellar to survive Iraqi bombings.
Running endlessly to avoid being killed by Iraqi chemicals in the genocide of ''88 (when 200,000 Kurds perished). And faces of babies frozen to death in the mountains, where Kurdish families took shelter.
"My earliest memories were happy though, with my seven brothers and sisters crowding up on each other in our home," she says. "Of sharing rice and stew from a plate, sitting crossed-legged on the floor." Two of her brothers and their families are still in Kurdistan, bordering Iraq. Any talk of war clouds over Iraq casts a shadow on her attractive face. "My father wants to go back, but I can''t let him." Born in Iraq, Choman''s family fled constantly, but remained together.
Choman remembers sad songs sung during bombing blackouts by her father, Ahmad Hardi, a frontrunner in the Kurdish resistance and a poet.
He sang about the quest for a homeland for his people, stuck between Iran, Iraq, Turkey and Syria. "His recital of poetry during moments of anger, sadness and laughter had the greatest effect on me," she says. Choman took to poetry very young. Her parents fled to the UK in 1991. When Choman arrived in London in 1993, she was an outsider. She learnt English, took her A-levels and strove to belong.
Today, she is comfortably ''in-between''. "I fit in easily on either side of my culture," she says. She did not acquire her nearly clipped English accent in a day though. She studied philosophy and psychology at Queen''s College, Oxford and got a masters in philosophy from University College, London.
By 24 years, Choman had published two collections of Kurdish poems. She now works as an interpreter at the British Home Office and is a PhD student at the University of Kent, researching the impact of migration on women.
She''s a member of the Exiled Writers'' Ink and writes and fights for their causes, with her English husband as fellow traveller. Choman is waiting for her first collection of poetry to be published in English next year.
India is like coming home. But even for the war-scarred Choman, the faces of starving children at Delhi''s traffic lights are deeply disturbing.