| On a frigid January afternoon, I traveled through the narrow lanes of downtown Srinagar in Kashmir to meet Shaista Bano. As I crossed tiny lanes filled with dirt, I asked people to direct me to her house. After following the flurry of instructions, I reached her house and knocked on the door. Bano peeped out of a small kitchen window, then stepped out to talk to me. Sitting on a parapet on the banks of the Jhelum River, the woman in her late 30s started speaking slowly about having suddenly lost her husband a few months earlier after he suffered a cardiac arrest. | 