Plea to Stay Human

A guilt etched into my soul by a narrative that reduces Kashmiris to thieves, cheats, and violent monsters. A narrative that insists we are complicit in the blood spilled on our soil, even when that blood belongs to our own loved ones, our neighbors, or strangers who arrived as guests.

Last night, as I cancelled a dinner for friends visiting from Goa—friends who had come to Kashmir to celebrate life, not death—I felt that familiar, suffocating shame return. The same shame I felt as a child when I watched neighbours vanish, teachers flee, and friends become refugees. The same shame that has haunted me since the day my mother took bullets in her back to save my father.

The news of the Pahalgam massacre, which claimed 27 lives, tourists, did not shock me. It only confirmed what Kashmiris have known since 1990: that peace here is a myth, a fleeting illusion shattered by the next headline.

For decades, we have lived in a warzone disguised as a paradise. Our schools have been closed, our streets militarized, our homes raided, and our loved ones buried in unmarked graves. Over a lakh killed. Thousands disappeared. Generations raised in the shadow of fear. Yet, when violence erupts, it is we who are put on trial. Our faith, our identity, our humanity questioned.

Guilt is a cruel weapon. It strips you of your right to grieve, to protest, to exist as anything but a villain in someone else’s story. When armed conflict began in the 1990s, I was a child. I did not choose this war. My parents did not choose it. My neighbors—Hindu, Muslim, Sikh—did not choose it. Yet, overnight, we became suspects. Friends were hounded out of their homes. Teachers, doctors, artists—anyone who dared speak—were labeled “anti-national.” Our mohallas emptied. Our cities fractured. Our collective memory became a graveyard of unspeakable loss.

In 1995, my mother was traveling with my father in a government ambulance from Srinagar to Kupwara when security forces opened fire. She threw herself over him. Two bullets lodged in her back, millimeters from her spine. She survived, but the splinters remain. So do the scars—not just on her body, but on her spirit. For months, she lay in a hospital bed, whispering prayers for the men who shot her. “They didn’t know us,” she would say. “They were afraid too.” Her forgiveness humbled me. But it also confused me. Why must victims absolve their oppressors? Why must Kashmiris bear the burden of empathy when ours is so rarely acknowledged?

This week, my family planned a dinner for 12 adults and two children from Goa—friends who had stayed in Pahalgam. They wanted to taste Kashmiri cuisine, exchange stories, and invite us to visit their home.

For days, my mother prepared spices, ordered gifts: saffron, walnuts. It was supposed to be a night of laughter, a small rebellion against the despair that defines our lives.

Then the news broke. Tourists killed. Families shattered. Another “incident” to be dissected on TV panels, another hashtag to trend. We cancelled the dinner. Our guests understood. “Stay safe,” they messaged. But safety is a luxury Kashmir lost long ago. My friends are alive, but what of Vinay Narwal? A man from Kochi, married on April 16, celebrated at his reception on April 19, and killed in Kashmir days later. His crime? Being a tourist in the wrong place at the wrong time. His widow’s crime? In the photo of her clutching his lifeless body, I see a reflection of every Kashmiri woman who has cradled a corpse. Her face is numb, her eyes hollow. She is alive, but she has already died.

Every tragedy in Kashmir follows the same script. First, the outrage: “How dare militants kill pilgrims/tourists/innocents!” (As if Kashmiris are not also pilgrims, tourists, innocents.) Then, the backlash: calls for collective punishment, crackdowns, and curfews. Finally, the erasure: our grief is filtered through the prism of geopolitics, our dead reduced to statistics in someone else’s propaganda.

But what of our dead? The 15-year-old shot at a checkpoint. The old man beaten for resisting a search. The journalist arrested for reporting a protest. Do their lives matter less because they were born here? Because they prayed in a different direction? When a tourist is killed, the nation mourns. When a Kashmiri is killed, the nation debates “collateral damage.”

For decades, we have been told to “normalize” the presence of soldiers in our orchards, checkpoints on our bridges, and guns in our schools. We are told to “move on” from mass graves, enforced disappearances, and half-widows.

The hardest part of living in Kashmir is not the fear of death. It is the fear of forgetting. Forgetting the names of the disappeared. Forgetting the sound of a mother’s wail. Forgetting that before 1990, our mohallas were mixed, our festivals shared, our marriages interwoven. My teacher, my neighbor, my best friend—we were a family. Now, our diversity is a relic, our harmony a casualty of war. Memory is our resistance.

To those outside Kashmir: I ask for your humanity. When you see a Kashmiri, do not see a terrorist, a victim, or a statistic. See a mother who fears for her son. A father who misses his exiled friend. A child who draws flowers on a bunker wall. See Vinay Narwal’s widow, who could be your sister. See my mother, who could be yours.

We are not thieves. We are not monsters. We are a people shattered by a war, trapped in a cycle of violence we cannot stop. All we have left are prayers: for the tourists killed, for the 100,000 souls buried in graves. And for ourselves—that one day, we may live without fear, without shame, without apology.

Kashmir does not need more weapons, more checkpoints, or more hashtags. It needs the world to see us as we are: human. Broken, but still breathing.

— A Kashmiri Who Still Believes in Hope