This fall, Kashmir saw its worst floods in more than half a century. My family and I barely survived them. A Kashmiri Muslim man carries an electric transformer through floodwaters. Dar Yasin/AP When Kashmir’s uprising was at its peak in the late 1990s, I used to walk along the banks of the Jhelum River after school. Amid the fighting between India, which controls the part of Kashmir where I grew up, and armed groups battling for independence or union with Pakistan, the river was calm in a way that the rest of the region wasn’t. I moved away from my home in Srinagar, the summer capital of India-administered Kashmir, six years ago, but every time I come back, I try to walk on the bridge over the river, to watch the water flow with the same serenity that it had when I was a child. The same river submerged my family’s house this fall in Kashmir’s worst flooding in more than half a century, which ultimately killed more than 400 people on both the Indian and Pakistani sides of the region’s disputed border. But that river wasn’t the Jhelum of my childhood. It wasn’t the Jhelum I loved. When the river started to breach banks and burst levees on September 6, I was at my parents’ house in Srinagar, visiting my sister, who had just given birth to a daughter. By then, it had been raining for days. But that evening was almost completely ordinary. We heard the occasional sounds of cars rushing past. Loudspeakers in the nearby mosque broadcast periodic announcements that residents should move to higher floors of their houses in case of flooding, as well as requests for young men to help reinforce the river’s embankment with sandbags. Read the rest at The Atlantic. This article: “So Little Time Between Hope and Death”

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“So Little Time Between Hope and Death”