A rusty chain shuts the mite-eaten wooden door. The knock is not answered. “She won’t,” a neighbour says, pointing towards the pale candlelight flickering from a windowpane. “But she is there. It’s already evening and she has nowhere else to go”. He asks us to follow him and shouts loudly several times as he takes us into the backyard. She peeps through a window, and silently comes to the door.

The door opens into a tiny room, its mud walls painted blue like a Sufi shrine. A tiny room in a large rundown three-storey house.

Deep inside Habba Kadal, where streets run like snakes through a cluster of concrete blocks, even the buzz of Srinagar’s dense downtown does not break the silence in Mughli’s lonely world. She is nearly deaf and never hears the knocking on her door. For years, there have been no visitors, particularly after sundown.

One morning—she thinks it was in September of the first tehreek (militant struggle) several years ago—her teacher son Nazir Ahmad Teli left for work. She never saw him again. And Mughli became one of the first of the several thousand women whose young sons or husbands disappeared, a majority of them after being picked up by the police or security forces. A group of people sharing the same pain—the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons (APDP)—says 10,000 men have vanished since a counter-insurgency assault began in the Valley in the 1990s.

Mughli, who doesn’t remember her age, says the shock of her son’s disappearance broke her. “He was born after my husband divorced me. I had no one in the family. I didn’t marry again and brought him up. He was the only reason for my life,” she says. “He had never stayed away from home, not even for a single night. Each day he would return from school and give me a hug. I am still waiting. I want to hug him once. If they tell me he is dead, I would hug his grave. I don’t know what happened to him and this pain, this uncertainty is unbearable”.

... contd.