On page five of an eight-page letter dated 3 September 2019, my friend – whom I will call Naaz – wrote to me:

I always pray that nothing in this world may ever blur your vision of your own self. Not people, not your circumstances. One must not be delusional, but one should also never lose the grip of one’s essence. Never forget who you are, what all you have achieved, how hard you worked to be where you are today.

Naaz had never written to me before – not a note, not a postcard. We were on each other’s speed dial for as long as I could remember. But that August, the Indian state had revoked Jammu and Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status and, anticipating blowback, had throttled internet broadband, cable TV, landlines and mobile networks. Even postal services were disrupted; Naaz planned to hand-deliver her letter. Another letter tells me that on 11 August she knocked on my door for a long time. But I had already left for New Delhi, and would soon be halfway across the world.

In Kashmir, we are used to uncertainty but, in those days, it was dialled all the way up. When I left, I did not know when I would be able to speak with my parents again. We seemed to have collectively tumbled back in time to the 1990s, when separatist conflict was at its peak and, with it, the Indian state’s iron-fist policy to counter it. I was leaving for a year-long journalism fellowship at Harvard, and wracked with guilt and self-doubt: guilt over leaving when so many others could not, self-doubt over whether I would live up to the opportunity. Perhaps Naaz sensed my ambivalence, which is why she wrote those lines. She knew I might need the reminder.

Naaz first knew me as a bushy-browed teenager, travelling 110 km each day to study journalism in Baramulla, a small town in Kashmir. We met on a bus, in the spring of 2005. She was in a three-seater near the middle, in a white crewneck sweater with a Fair Isle pattern around the neckline. I took the seat beside her. I remember what she wore because my mother knit sweaters for me in that pattern, too. Within minutes, we were exchanging names, then places, then families. My mother was from the same area as her. My naanu had taught Naaz’s father. Her father had taught mine. Our meeting felt both serendipitous and predetermined.

She was seven years older than me, a science teacher, a lover of poetry. In a society steeped in existential despair, she took her vocation seriously. ‘We are the builders of Kashmir,’ she’d say. Growing up, I’d seldom encountered older people who weren’t in survival mode, always braced for the next loss or threat, who were able to support those dreaming of lives larger than the ones they’d inherited. Perhaps that’s why Naaz – thoughtful, curious, never infantilising – was so easy to like.

My friendship with Naaz quickly deepened into something closer to sisterhood

I dreamed of being a reporter. A few years after meeting Naaz, I would join a workshop led by one of Kashmir’s finest journalists. Every Sunday, at 9 am, a group of us – the youngest in their teens, the oldest in their 40s – gathered in his tiny apartment in Srinagar, thick with the smell of old books and cigarettes. We read Ryszard Kapuściński’s dispatches and watched The Battle of Algiers.

‘If we don’t tell our story, someone else will,’ he would often remind us.

My friendship with Naaz quickly deepened into something closer to sisterhood. Even when I moved away, for further studies or for work, we spoke almost daily. We would fall asleep on the phone, only to wake when the phones slipped and knocked against our faces. When I visited, we would take boat rides on Dal Lake, stroll aimlessly through the Mughal Gardens, go on long drives around Srinagar, never running out of conversation. Two young men might be construed as a security threat and attract state surveillance; a young man and woman might be seen as romantically involved and draw social scrutiny. Female friendship, on the other hand, could occupy public space more freely, without constantly defending its right to exist.

Naaz and I often joked that our ‘halal:haram’ ratio was almost identical, a way of saying we drew a similar line between the permissible and the forbidden, with many of the same compromises and contradictions. And yet we were utterly different in other ways. She would not undo what she had already done. If she left the house with her hair tied, she would keep it tied, even if it no longer made sense to do so. Whereas I agonised over everything. Naaz was surprised I could put myself in all sorts of situations as a journalist – interviewing human traffickers, reporting from conflict zones – and yet be so internally unanchored. I was driven but also anxious: I wanted professional success but, when it came, I knew only how to move past it, towards the next milestone. Naaz would shake me lightly, yanking me back to the present.

‘Can you be proud of yourself? Can you accept that you are good?’

When I returned to Kashmir after my fellowship ended, we met at her wedding. The happiest bride I have ever seen, when she saw me, she held my hands and pulled me into a tight embrace. Within months, I too was married. Despite our age difference, it felt as if something larger was aligning our lives. We became pregnant within months of each other, our conversations turning to baby names, nausea, exhaustion.

‘What do you want,’ I asked her once, ‘a girl or a boy?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I just hope the baby survives. I hope I survive.’

I remember feeling a flicker of irritation when she said that. Doom-mongering was what I did. And why would anything go wrong? Yes, she was in her late 30s, but she was healthier than most 20-somethings. Meanwhile, I fretted over how motherhood would alter the life I’d carefully built for myself, the five-year plans that I worried would now be upended. It didn’t help that my partner and I would be moving to Germany soon.

Each time I visited Kashmir, my heart clenched – that unmistakable giggle was gone

Naaz gave birth in September. Days later, she suffered an intracerebral haemorrhage – a brain bleed caused by a ruptured blood vessel, the risk of which is three times higher among women during pregnancy and in the weeks following delivery. She was the one who messaged to tell me. I should keep a tab on my vitals, she added, and not stress out over small things while pregnant. Soon after, she slipped into a coma.

A month passed before Naaz regained consciousness. Even though there were times when she seemed to be improving, the things that distinguished her began slipping away. Among the first women in her village to drive, she could no longer hold the movement of a car. A poet, she could no longer read or write. Each time I visited Kashmir, my heart clenched – that unmistakable giggle was gone, as was the way she tucked loose strands of her hair, behind her right ear specifically. Once, when I went to see her, I noticed how her dupatta, which she typically flung around her neck, was spread out over her chest. She would never wear it that way, I kept thinking to myself. As terrifying as it was to witness her suffering, so was the dissipation of things that make a person: language, memory, skill.

For more than two years, Naaz fought bravely. She passed away in March 2024 – typically, a month of birthdays in my family. That year, all through March and April, my toddler played Zum Geburtstag viel Glück in an endless loop on her music box – Happy Birthday in German, the soundtrack to my grief.

It was early morning in Berlin when I received the news. When I read the message – N is no more – I collapsed onto the prayer rug, crying into my breath so I wouldn’t wake my two-year-old. Later, when my daughter stirred, expecting me beside her as always, I moved toward her, my body performing the choreography of care as if nothing had happened. As if the mountain hadn’t fallen over me.

In Kashmir, we are used to untimely death. But how to grieve the loss of your best friend, so young, so vividly alive? And how to grieve with a two-year-old at close hand, amid meals NOW, baths NOW, nappy change NOW, tantrums NOW?

Grief, in a sense, has become intertwined with motherhood

I had known motherhood would unsettle my sense of self – what I never imagined was that it would also take away the person who held my story alongside me. In narrative psychology, identity is theorised as what Dan P McAdams calls an ‘evolving story of the self’ – an integration of one’s reconstructed past, perceived present and imagined future. This story has multiple authors. We come to know who we are through conversation, through shared recollection, through being witnessed: by our parents, our siblings, our partners, our best friends. Each holds a fragment of us, reflecting the person we are and the person we once were. Those shared memories become the story we tell ourselves about our own life. That story is never fixed. It changes as we change, and as the people who hold pieces of it enter and leave our lives. With Naaz’s death, parts of my past lost their primary witness just as motherhood began shaking the very roots of who I was.

Kashmir – my home, my muse – has changed, too. Since 2019, dissent of any sort is promptly quashed. The graffiti proclaiming azadi, freedom, has disappeared from the walls as has any public expression of separatist sentiment. Local journalists are asked to sign pledges vowing not to ‘disturb the peace’. Most of our writing group has drifted into PR or fiction; one of the youngest members was recently released after two years in prison. Like people, places also need someone to hold on to their stories. In Kashmir, bearing witness now comes at a cost.

Two years ago, I became pregnant again. As I gave birth the second time, memories from the days after Naaz’s death started playing on a loop. Grief, in a sense, has become intertwined with motherhood. It is there when I lift my son, when I chase him down the hallway. I hear his laughter and think of Naaz’s. She should have lived to experience this: the chaos, the beauty, the bone-deep exhaustion that is now my everyday.

Occasionally, in a note jotted in the margin of a book, on a walk by myself in the park, in the sheaf of letters that eventually made their way into my hands, I catch a glimpse of my earlier self: the journalist, Naaz’s best girl. I have taken to telling my daughter stories from that time, as if piecing together a self she has never known. For now, the only one she remembers is about the time a jellyfish stung me on a beach in Miami. ‘Once more… only one,’ she says, asking me again and again to act out the moment the jellyfish stung me. I oblige every time.