The first news of a killing has a way of changing the air in a room. 

Someone reads the headline aloud, a name becomes a face, and questions follow about the life that has ended and the circumstances that brought it there. 

When such news returns often enough, the mind begins to place it somewhere else, perhaps at the edge of consciousness, where it can be seen without being fully felt.

This is one of the strange accommodations of living with violence. The heart does not necessarily become harder. It may simply learn to close a door that once stood open.

Kashmir has lived for decades with this difficult architecture of memory. 

Violence has entered homes through photographs, names, absences and stories told by parents to children who were born after the events themselves. 

An older sibling remembers someone a younger one knows only through a family story. Someone who never came home remains present in the space left behind.

The event belongs to another time, but memory has its own calendar. It can place the past inside the present without announcing that it has done so.

This is why Kashmir should be understood as a society that has lived in the presence of killing, rather than through the actions of those who kill. The distinction is more than semantic. 

A person who witnesses violence does not become violent by witnessing it. Trauma does not write a fixed script for the life that follows. 

The same wound can lead one person toward anger and another........

© Kashmir Observer