On a recent spring afternoon I took one of my usual weekday walks along the high, grassy banks of the Jhelum River, near my home in Srinagar, the summer capital of Jammu and Kashmir. A fisherman stood in a narrow boat in the middle of the river and cast a net into the jade waters. Sitting down, he grabbed his hookah and took a drag. Nearby a few workmen shoveled out scoops of wet sand from a shallow patch and dumped them on an old barge. In the distance behind them were the Himalayas, their peaks gleaming with snow, and a vast Indian military camp—a turreted fortress of barracks, machine guns, and concertina wire.
Fed by snowmelt and ample spring and summer rains, the Jhelum has sustained life in Kashmir for millennia, furnishing its people with drinking water and fish, irrigating agricultural land, providing sand that is used as a construction material, and fueling the hydropower projects that power the region’s homes. Tens of thousands of people live along its banks. Periodically it becomes a source of tragedy: when I was a child our neighborhood would go into mourning each time a boy drowned in its waters.
I knew some of those boys. My cousins, my brother, and I grew up on the river’s edge at my parents’ home in Baramulla, some thirty miles downstream from Srinagar, but never dared venture too close. I could only cross in a boat if accompanied by my mother, who would clutch my forearm tightly as we climbed in and pull me back whenever I dipped a hand in the current.
In 1989 Kashmiris—with Pakistan’s encouragement—launched an armed insurgency against India’s deeply resented rule. In the years that followed, the Indian military snatched young men from their homes, tortured and killed thousands of them, and dumped some of the bodies in the Jhelum. I was still in school; from our house we watched bodies float downstream and neighbors pull them out, the water red with blood. “Shaheed kee jo maut hain woh kaum kee hayaat hain,” crowds chanted at the funeral processions: “the death of a martyr is the life of a nation.”
Sometimes the Jhelum has been the source of larger-scale disasters. In September 2014 melting glaciers and persistent rains caused the river to overflow its dykes, drowning Srinagar and nine other districts. At some points the floodwaters reached up to twenty feet high. Around three hundred people in India-controlled Kashmir died; the disaster caused billions of dollars in damage as homes, businesses, roads, and bridges were washed away.