Lost At The Bridge

As grief flows beneath Kashmir's iconic bridges, urgent calls grow to break the silence around mental health.

- Peerzada Aarif

Each time someone jumps from a bridge in Kashmir, the same questions echo in the wind that skims across the Jhelum: Did anyone notice? Did anyone try to stop them?

Most often, no one does. The people keep walking, and the river keeps moving.

Over the past few years, the river, once a lifeline of Kashmir’s trade, poetry, and romance, has become a site of recurring grief.

The bridges that span its long spine have turned into launch points for the hopeless.

These pathways have become portals of exit, places where pain silently spills into the current.

The numbers are difficult to track. Suicide is still steeped in stigma, and many cases are never officially recorded. But local police stations, hospitals, and eyewitnesses tell the story plainly.

A growing stream of young people, especially in their teens and twenties, are choosing the river when they feel they have nowhere else to go.

The reasons are varied, including academic pressure, relationship fallout, addiction, joblessness, domestic abuse, but the end is the same.

A body is pulled from the water, a family is shattered, and a community mourns without knowing what to do next.

Some jump at night. Others in broad daylight. Sometimes, there’s a scribbled note. Often, there’s nothing at all.

In Baramulla, a tea seller near the bridge recalls seeing three such attempts in the last year alone. In each case, it happened in seconds. "By the time you understand what's happening," he said, "they're gone."