“He is fine during the days,” Suzzaine’s father Shakeel Ahmad Ahangar says. “Nights are a nightmare. He doesn’t stop crying and keeps on asking for his mother. I don’t know what to tell him.”

On May 29, when Shakeel’s wife Neelofar, 22, and his younger sister Asiya, 17, left for the family’s newly acquired apple orchard, Suzzaine had not accompanied them. He had not even seen his mother leave. That evening, the two women walked four km from their Bonigam neighbourhood across the Rambiyar stream to get to their orchard. They never returned. Their bodies were found dumped in the stream at separate spots.

“My life has suddenly come to an end. There is nothing left,” Shakeel says. Suzzaine starts pulling his collar, asking him to take him out on a drive. “Gadi, gadi (car, car),” he insists. His aunt Romi takes him out. The mood in the room is somber again.

Shakeel and Neelofar had a love marriage. Neelofar used to travel six km from home in Tukuru village to Shopian every day for college. Shakeel ran a furniture shop. The two fell in love but soon saw a big hurdle. Neelofar belonged to Syed clan and her parents were against the marriage as Shakeel was from another caste. But Neelofar married Shakeel against her parents’ wishes. Both families never met. But the couple was happy, and hoped that Neelofar’s parents would soon come around. Meanwhile, Shakeel had started working hard to take care of his family. He had purchased a car and bought a small apple orchard.

But the couple’s dreams soon crashed.

The police had initially termed the deaths as “drowning incident” — a cause nobody accepted. The waters in Rambiyar stream are shallow and it is impossible that two young women would drown trying to cross it. On May 30, the bodies were finally taken to hospital for postmortem, as hundreds of agitated people gathered outside. “The police started insisting that they died by drowning as soon as we found the bodies,” says Shakeel. “How could anybody believe them after seeing the bodies?”

The crowd got restive soon and started hurling stones. The doctors didn’t complete the postmortem and were taken out from a rear exit. The administration called another team of doctors. “We made them swear by the Quran to tell the truth,” Neelofar’s father Syed Abdul Hai says. “That was the only way to ensure they (doctors) didn’t hide anything.” Some time later, a woman doctor walked out and started crying. “She told us that they had been raped,” Hai recalls. And hell broke loose. Since then the town has remained on the boil with the suspicion pointing at two security camps on the banks of Rambiyar, overlooking the spot where Neelofar’s body was found. The news travelled 55 km to Srinagar, snowballing into a major issue.

The family has no doubt that the two women were raped and murdered. “We want names. We want to see who did it,” Shakeel says. The Judicial Commission probing the case, in its interim report submitted on Sunday, confirmed that the two women had been raped and murdered and not drowned as the police claimed.

For Shakeel, it means a lot. It means getting closer to the truth.