Who Speaks for Children?

Emotional suppression in Kashmiri homes is often cloaked in religious virtue. But children are bearing the cost.

- Hirra Sultan

I've spent too many Fridays listening to sermons that begin with paradise and end with guilt.

The voice from the pulpit always reminds me to honour my parents, to treat them as divine, to seek their approval as if it were a key to heaven. And for the longest time, I believed it. I swallowed it like medicine, bitter but necessary.

They never tell you, though, how heavy that medicine can be.

In our homes, parents are not just guardians. They are myths in motion. Their word is law, even when it wounds. Their dreams are scripts for their children to act out, never to revise. And if a child dares to edit even a line chooses a different career, questions a custom, loves someone unexpected the script is torn up, and the child becomes a sinner.