The farmer's wife carefully opened a small wooden case containing her most valuable possessions - a silver necklace, bangles, a pair of earrings and some cosmetics.
She took a small pouch from the chest and spread the contents on a rug - spent bullets gouged from the walls of her home."They all came from there," said Soma Devi, pointing to the Pakistani frontier 600 yards away.
India's border patrol says fighting is on the rise along the frontier even as India and Pakistan prepare for their first summit in four years. The prime ministers of the two nations are to meet Monday in Male, capital of the Maldives archipelago in the Indian Ocean. It will be their first summit in four years.
Both governments have portrayed the summit as a turn in relations. India and Pakistan have fought three wars in the 50 years since their independence from Britain.
Pakistan denies any serious increase in cross-border firing. But India reports shots fired on 742 occasions the first four months of this year, compared with 618 for all of 1996.
At first glance, Ratham looks like a peaceful cluster of tidy homes amid wheat and mustard fields and scattered mango and berry trees. Children graze cattle, teenagers play cricket, elders smoke clay pipes.
But the bullet holes in the walls of this village of 500 people testify to the tension that periodically shatters the peace. Military trucks rumble along a dirt road.
Villagers curse their fate at being caught in the middle of the dispute over Kashmir, a once-independent region of the Himalaya Mountains claimed by both countries and split between them since their first war in 1948.
Since 1989, Muslim militants on the Indian side have been fighting for Kashmir's secession from India, which is overwhelmingly Hindu. The rebellion has claimed 16,000 lives.
The border in Kashmir runs 745 miles through fertile valleys and rugged mountains up to the snowy Karakoram range of the Hima-lay-as.
The armies are at full battle preparedness with tens of thousands of soldiers, artillery units and air support systems ready to move in an hour's notice.
"This is nothing less than a war," said Baldev Singh, a deputy commander of India's 185,000-member Border Security Force, which is deployed along the Indian side of the border as the first line of defense.
On Jan. 20 near Ratham, a gunbattle erupted that continued off and on for three months, finally ending on April 25 after local commanders of India and Pakistan worked out a truce.
Pakistani bullets pierced nine-inch walls of some Indian border outposts and slammed into Soma Devi's house, among dozens of others.
Villagers painstakingly retrieve the spent ammunition in the hope of getting compensation for damages. But they refuse to leave their fertile land, where they grow Basmati rice for export.
"They start firing at the slightest excuse and sometime with no excuse at all," said J.S. Moudgil, commander of Pindi, a border outpost about 40 miles from Ratham that saw an exchange of fire on Feb. 23.
The shooting there began when Indian engineers started repairing an irrigation canal. Pakistan says that since the status of Kashmir is disputed, India should not construct anything in the border areas.
"Practically every day there is firing," said Maj. Gen. Ravinder Singh Mehta at the Border Security Force headquarters in Jammu, the winter capital of Kashmir.