Srinagar, July 31 -- By Tajamul Farooqi

Tajudin taught me how to ride a bicycle on a lane behind our grandfather's house, and Imtiyaz used to stand at the gate laughing at how many times I fell before I finally stayed upright.

I was younger than both of them, small enough that they seemed like grown men to me, though Tajudin was still finishing his engineering degree and Imtiyaz had not yet finished school.

Those two facts, so ordinary, are the only ones I want to begin with, because everything that came after tried to turn my cousins into something other than boys who were simply becoming men.

Summer of 1992 sits in my memory the way certain smells do, sudden and complete. I was not in the house on the afternoon it happened, and for ...