When the mothers of valley’s missing gather this time for their monthly mourning assembly, their despair will be doubled by a tragic hopelessness. Mughli – the elderly mother whose relentless fight to trace her only son had become the epitome of the struggle of the parents of disappeared in Kashmir – has died without a closure.

“Maine Nazira, aave kha (My Nazir, have you come) – she said and closed her eyes,” said Parveena Ahangar, the president of the mother’s union. “For last nineteen years, she was been craving to see her son – to know about his fate. She was always full of hope.”

Ahangar said that Mughli’s death is especially tragic for the group. “We feel that we will die one by one, looking for our children,” she said. “Over the years, we had developed such a strong attachment with each other. This bond of mutual pain and hope has turned us like a large family. Now we are losing our hope.”

Mughli’s son – Nazir Ahmad Teli – was a school teacher, who disappeared in 1990 after he was picked up by security forces, never to return back. Separated from her husband before the birth of her son, Mughli began a lonely search and a life that was filled with silence and solitude.

For years, Mughli lived alone in her large family house deep inside Srinagar’s Habba Kadal where narrow streets run like a crawling snake through a cluster of housing blocks. Old age had turned her nearly deaf but the hope that her son may return was so much alive that she would spend days at the window, looking out at the door. Today, the rusty chain link that would shut the mite eaten door of her house is locked.

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