Srinagar, Sept. 16 -- By Mohammad Ilyas Bhat

I attend the same charity function year after year, and I keep spotting the same faces in the crowd.

The kits get handed out, someone takes a photograph, a list gets read aloud, and among the names called I recognise families from last year, and the year before that too.

There is a hotel that went up near my childhood home in Srinagar, and I still think about the man who built it.

He sat on a wooden chair through the whole construction, watching the fittings go in one by one, planning a future he could already picture.

He died before it opened.

I have watched this happen again since, in smaller ways: men spending decades building a house meant to hold their old age, and never living long ...