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26 April 2015

Kashmir’s War, on Drugs

APRIL 24, 2015 

SRINAGAR, India — A.N. was waiting for the school bus to take him home one day in 2005 when four masked men carrying AK-47s sprinted out from a white coupe and unloaded a storm of bullets. They tore apart a man, dropping him flat onto his back in front of a nearby pharmacy. A.N. remembers the blood spilling out of the victim’s torso onto the ground behind the bus stop. He remembers listening to the sound of the getaway car screeching away as onlookers from a market started to gather. And he remembers going home that night and crying to his father, harboring a sense of panic so intense that he felt feverish.

Ten years later, A.N., now 24, spends most of his day looking for jobs online and meditating on what he calls his “lost years” — from roughly 2006 until 2010 — when he dropped out of school and started abusing opiates. A polite, pensive man with a round face, jet-black hair, and delicate features, A.N. sips chai and chats with friends like M.M., 32, another ex-opiate user, and Yasir Arafat Zahgeer, 30, a social activist and counselor who advised both men in their recovery from addiction. In Srinagar one evening in December 2014, as they walk along the dimly lit pavement of the Habba Kadal bridge, known by many locals as the “suicide bridge” because of its attraction to jumpers, their conversation switches among politics, cricket, and news stories like those of the region’s slow recovery from the September 2014 flood. They also speak about trauma and the unanswerable question of what life could have been like had they been born in a less violent place with simpler politics — somewhere other than Kashmir.

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