The Mother I Lost As a Child

A Kashmiri son remembers the mother he lost as a child, and how her silence has shaped every season of his life.

- Umair Ul Umar

I was a boy with a four-line notebook on the window sill, drawing crooked letters as the sun poured across the page. Outside, the day looked like any other. Inside, the air thickened with whispers, sobs, the shuffling of too many feet.

I could not name it then, but my life was breaking. That was the afternoon my mother left.

The memory is fractured: half sharp, half fading. I can still feel her lap, hear the trace of her voice. Everything else slips through my hands.

I grew up counting memories of her on my fingers, guarding them as if they were relics. The most important presence in a child’s world was taken before I had the words to call it loss.