When the mothers of the Valley’s missing gather for their monthly mourning assembly this time, they will also be mourning a mother, who died waiting for her son to come back. 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 — died on Sunday without closure.

“Maine Nazira, aave kha (My Nazir, have you come), she said and closed her eyes,” said Parveena Ahangar, the president of the mothers’ union. “For the last 19 years, she had been craving to see her son, to know of his fate. She was always full of hope.” Ahangar said Mughli’s death was 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 into a large family. Now we are losing 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. For years, Mughli lived alone in her large family house deep inside Srinagar’s Habba Kadal where narrow streets snake through a cluster of housing blocks. Old age had turned her nearly deaf but the hope that her son may return saw her spending 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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