Srinagar, Aug. 7 -- By Dr. Akhtar Purvez

Twenty years fell away the moment my cousin's car turned onto the road where I grew up. Then, just as fast, I saw how much had changed.

The lane that once held a bicycle and two neighbours' cars now filled with motorbikes and sedans, bumper to bumper, horns layered into one long complaint.

Fields I remembered as orchards had become rows of concrete houses. A hill station whose slopes I had once thought incapable of disappointing me wore litter along its ridgelines.

I catalogued all this the way any visitor does, tallying loss in the physical world.

The deeper loss, the one that actually explained what had happened to my family, took longer to surface.

I was staying, again, with the cousin who...