Srinagar, May 26 -- When Riyaz Ahmad Zargar talks about his childhood, he doesn't sugarcoat it. "We had nothing," he says, sitting on a wooden bench outside his small factory in Budgam. "Not even the home we were born in. We lost that too."

He was still a teenager when his father died. A sudden heart attack, right after the small street-food business his father started collapsed under mounting debt. The man who had cooked his way through hard times, who believed a little bit of spice and sweat could build a life, was gone.

Riyaz didn't have time to cry. "There was no space for grief. My mother and sister were looking at me. I had to do something."

After trying to rebuild their lives in Anantnag, they returned to their hometown Rainawar...