Srinagar, May 18 -- The year I turned fourteen, winter arrived with the quietude of an old man breathing. In our village near Budgam, snow covered the almond groves and roofs with a kind of forgetfulness that made the world look holy, or at least clean.

My mother's fever had lasted three days. She needed medicine. I remember buttoning my pheran and slipping into the white air, the hill ahead cloaked in a silence that always came after the snowfall.

Halfway up the hill, a person stood like punctuation at the edge of my sentence. A shadow bent against the wind. He called out, not kindly. I hesitated. In that half-second pause, something ancient and irreversible happened. His hand met my cheek. My body staggered. My sense of being, too.

I...