The Death of Innocents

The conflict in Kashmir has cost the lives of thousands. Some of the latest: four children and teenagers on holiday with their parents.

Note — this dispatch contains graphic content that some readers may find disturbing. Reader discretion is advised. 

SRINAGAR, Indian-controlled

The answer is none. Well, one. Fanal Hamant Zariwala is now on this stainless steel gurney in the morgue of Sheri-i-Kashmir Hospital, because, simply, he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The aftermath of a ruthless attack on tourists » View

He was on a tourist bus with his family in Indian-controlled Kashmir when an explosive, some say a grenade, was tossed inside. That is his trespass. His violation. Being alive in a place where daily violence is as certain as the sunrise.

Mountainous Kashmir has been a flashpoint for conflict between India and Pakistan for the last 50 years — the location of two of the three wars fought between the two nations.

Around 1989, Muslim separatists began their own campaign against India's control of the region. Human rights groups estimate as many as 50,000 people have died from an average of 2,500 incidents of terror every year and the Indian security forces' response to them.

But this day's toll, although not unprecedented, was uncommon. It was a direct attack, although police cannot say for certain by whom, on civilian tourists who flock by the thousands every day to what is considered one of the world's most beautiful — and most dangerous — places on earth.

Fanal is just one of the latest casualties, along with three others killed — all children and teenagers. Seven others were wounded. The other dead include a ten-year-old boy named Robin Rakesh, his sister, 15-year-old Krishna, and 18-year-old Kushvu Nirider.

All on the same bus, now all in this same morgue, their young bodies absorbing the blast force and the shrapnel of the explosive.

It is incongruous to see them lying here together. Youth and death. The vestiges of their lives — a dangling earring, sandals, embroidered jeans — adorn broken, lifeless bodies. But outside this room, the heartbreak has voice: the sobbing, screaming, mumbling disbelief of their parents.

At the morgue, chaos and pain » View

"I told him not to sit in the front of the bus," says Hemant Zariwala, Fanal's father, his shirt and jeans covered in his son's blood. "I told him to sit in the back with me but he didn't want to."

When the blast went off, Hemant says he made his way through the smoke to the front, picked up his son, who was unconscious but still breathing, and carried him outside. Police rushed him to the hospital, where he died.

"Why do this to the tourists," he asks no one in particular, his face expressionless from shock. "What have we done?"

In the hospital lobby, Kashmir Tourist Police, used to such scenes, help Hemant remove his bloody shirt and gently slip a clean, black t-shirt over his head.

Vipin Bai, another tourist on the bus, his white undershirt crimson with the blood of the victims, describes the scene to reporters. An unidentified woman, who was also on the bus, embraces him and begins sobbing uncontrollably, her tears mixing with the dried blood on his shirt as he consoles her.

"It's painful when a child dies," says Dr. Ahmad Shah from the hospital's trauma staff. "But we are used to it. This has been going on for 16 years. We've seen this a thousand times over."

But it can hardly make it easier, especially if you arrived to Kashmir with your child seated next to you but must return home with him in a coffin in a plane's cargo hold.

The fact it happened on the last day of widely publicized peace talks between India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, and separatist leaders from the region makes all of this even more poignant.

When he left, the prime minister was upbeat that the promise of peace would come to Kashmir soon — though it didn't come soon enough for the four small, shattered and blackened bodies lying in one of its hospital morgues.

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