Srinagar, June 25 -- A young volunteer stands beside a steel container on a Srinagar roadside and fills paper cups with water. He repeats the motion hundreds of times during Muharram.

A hand reaches out, he passes a cup. Another hand appears, and another cup follows.

Most people walking past him know the story behind the gesture.

Water is the defining presence, and absence, of Karbala.

Fourteen centuries separate Kashmir from that desert, though distance loses its authority during Muharram.

The Euphrates feels strangely near. A child asking for water in seventh-century Iraq enters the imagination of a volunteer standing beneath a Kashmiri sky. History ceases to function as a sequence of dates. It becomes a habit, a practice, a way of...