To The Martyrs Of Pahalgam: ‘You Are Not Forgotten. You Will Not Be Forgotten.’

• RK Special Desk
• Comments 0
• 22 Apr 2026

There are no words adequate to what you have endured. There never are. Language, for all its power, was not built to carry the specific weight of a grief like yours, the grief of a door that no longer opens the way it used to, a chair at the table that nobody moves, a phone still carrying unread messages from someone the world took too soon. We write these words knowing they cannot reach the depth of your loss. We write them anyway, because silence in the face of your pain would be its own kind of abandonment.

Your loved ones came to Pahalgam in the spirit of peace. They came because they believed that beauty is a reason to travel, that mountains are an invitation, that a meadow in spring in Kashmir is among the most generous offerings this earth makes to those who walk upon it. They came without armour, without suspicion, without the slightest expectation that a morning of ordinary happiness would be their last. They carried cameras and laughter and the small, irreplaceable plans of people who intend to return home. They deserved to return home. They did not.

And you who waited, you who received the call no family should ever receive, you who had to find the words to tell a child, a mother, a brother, that the person they were expecting would not be coming back, you have been living inside that moment ever since. The world outside your grief has moved. Seasons have turned. News cycles have filled and emptied. Governments have made statements, committees have convened, and reports have been written. But you have remained, as all bereaved families remain, in that singular frozen hour when everything you knew about your life is divided into before and after.

We want you to know that Kashmir weeps with you. Not as a formality. Not as a phrase constructed for the occasion. Kashmir weeps with you because this Valley knows grief in its bones, knows what it is to lose someone to violence that arrives without warning and leaves without answers, to stand at a grave and understand that no explanation will ever be sufficient, that no justice, however delivered, restores what has been taken.

The fathers who died in Baisaran that April afternoon were carrying their families on their shoulders, as fathers do. They were the voices that called home from the road, the hands that would have returned with small gifts, the presences that made a house feel inhabited. Your homes feel different now. We know this. That difference does not diminish with time; it changes shape. It becomes the particular silence of a Sunday morning, the unbearable normalcy of a birthday that arrives without them, the way their name rises involuntarily in conversation before memory intervenes. These are not signs that your grief is too large. They are signs that your love was real, and love of that quality does not evaporate. It transforms into the long, quiet labour of carrying someone with you after they are gone.

To the children who lost their fathers: you were robbed of something that cannot be quantified, not merely a parent, but the specific texture of being known and loved by that person. Years from now, when you accomplish things they would have celebrated, you will feel their absence most acutely in the very moments that should bring only joy. That ache is not weakness. It is the shape love takes when it has nowhere left to go. Your fathers saw the world in you. That does not end with them.

To the mothers, wives, and siblings who now carry the weight of their absence every day: you are not alone, even when the world makes you feel otherwise. The people of this Valley, the people of this country, hold your loss with you imperfectly, inadequately, but genuinely.

Pahalgam took twenty-six lives on a day that should have been unremarkable. It made twenty-six ordinary human stories into symbols, and symbols into policy, and policy into argument. But before all of that, before the geopolitics and the security briefings and the diplomatic statements, there were simply twenty-six people who were loved by name, by voice, by presence, by the specific and irreplaceable way they moved through the lives of those around them.

They are not forgotten. They will not be forgotten.

Kashmir remembers them by name.