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seekwrites · 6 years ago

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September: A letter of Loss, Healing, and Closure

We did not fight for marriage to see it cheapened. — Bishop Yvette Flunder

“But it's a long, long while, From May to December, And the days grow short, When you reach September”… - Kurt Weill

It could've been the way the blue buckets hung off the wall that housed the food coloring and cutting utensils. Or the glimpse of the frustration on your face as you moved balances from one credit card to the next. Maybe it was selling of a home, and the buying of another. It could’ve been the way my body took space in our already cramped kitchen, or maybe it was the pound cake I put in the oven to feed someone else when all you wanted to do was eat too. I'm not sure what it was, but it was the beginning of the end, and although I knew it, I also knew it couldn't be. Not like this. See, in my mind this was just some marital shit we were going through, and like we had done before, we would get through it.

It was September, the 9th month of the year. The third month in the trimester of what God was birthing. It was laid it out plain before us. The miraculous turn of event that happened in July was the beginning of what I thought would be our destiny, or at least a part of it. I mean how could I post one cake on social media, and it turn into a business almost overnight. Surely God's hand was at work.

August, you had given me a birthday dinner, invited friends and family to come and celebrate with us, me, my life. June had proven to be difficult. My heart and lungs were attacked by blood clots that crept up from my knee and lit up my chest like fireworks leaving the Pulmonologist befuddled wondering; how was I still alive? Emergency surgery was inevitable if my life was to be saved, and healing would come at a greater loss...you.

My knee had begun to bother me that day in September. I knew I should've been resting per doctor’s orders due to meniscus surgery, but I had orders to fill. Me “negating” my health was agitating you. You thought I should be lying down with my leg elevated, but my hard headedness wouldn’t allow it. I was simply excited that people liked my product, and that my clientele was growing. I was two months out of surgery, in rehab, and doing well. Yes I still had pain, but I was under pain management. Yes I was on blood thinners, but healing all the same.

There was a shift in energy happening in that moment. I needed your help in the kitchen. I wasn't asking for much just that you would help me by sifting the flour. I mean, you had sifted the flour before. What was different this time? I wasn’t sure, but asking you to help me somehow turned into an argument that had been brewing in you for some time seemed like. I can’t count on one hand the amount of arguments we had in the 15 years we’ve known each other, nor the 3 years we were together. And I remember thinking to myself...why is this an argument? Doesn't he see what I'm trying to do here? Doesn't he see the hand of God at work? Doesn’t he see not only the work I’m doing, but also my repentance? I wanted you to see how thankful and grateful I was for you. I needed you to let me make up for the pain I caused you six months prior. I was sorry, and I thought the only way I could make you see that was by putting in the work. But you had been seeing something different all along, and what had been lying dormant in you injected itself into the chamber of your throat, and shot out of your mouth like a full metal jacket.

“YOU ABOUT TO LOSE THIS MARRIAGE.” You said it boldly, and matter-of-factly. Everything went silent, and the feelings that had been festering in you rushed over me like a tsunami, my spirit swept away like debris. Truth is I had already lost my marriage. You were already gone.

“Summer has come and passed, the innocent can never last, wake me up when September ends”…-Greenday

I'd been constantly thinking about that day in September. Trying to figure what happened to us. I knew there was a crack in our foundation. I also knew that I contributed to it, but it wasn’t too deep where it couldn’t be mended. So when you said I was about to lose to my marriage I wanted to be the blame for it. I assumed all the responsibility. I bathed in the guilt of my wrongdoings, and questioned everything about me as a man, a husband, and a human being. Was it my passion, and creativity? Was it my interactions with people you thought I shouldn’t have interactions with? Was it the nude pictures you found on my iPad that wasn’t of you, but lead you to question your very existence in my life as you compared your body to his? Was it the text message conversations you found on messenger? It all had to be to much, right? It had to be something that I did to make you decide to leave our marriage. I mean, why else would you stand in my face and utter those words? You see, I can take complete responsibility for my faults and wrongdoings, and assume it was me that caused the deconstruction of our marriage, but we both know that would not be the truth. And it’s not for me to call you out, or to say nasty things about you. I will not drag your name through the mud, nor create stories about you that just are not true. I love you to much for that even now, but there are some things that still weigh heavily on me. I’ve been carrying them for way too long, and now I must bring closure to them. This letter will read like the 5 stages of grief. Some of things I will say here will leave me open for judgement. I don’t care. All of my feeling are still valid and must be released in order for healing to take place.

I’ve been reading a book called Rebuilding by Bruce Fisher. It’s a book of tools and assignments that are designed to help one accept, heal, forgive, and move on from the trauma they were left with post-divorce. I was looking for any and everything that would help me understand the pain you left me with. So this letter to you is a part of the work I had to do to push me towards my healing. And the work was important, because it allowed me to ask myself what was it all for? Why would we write marital vows and not keep them? And if a vow was broken due to errors in human behavior why should we ever commit to love only for love to be proven a lie? I know I am a man who is able to love beyond loves capacity. A man who learned over the years to hold himself accountable. A man who showed remorse, and pleaded for redemption for my wrong doings never to hurt you in that way again, yet to be turned away after you said you forgave me. Yes, a man who is able to forgive the bullshit, because my love ran much deeper than that for you. But where was the love for me? And what about men like you who would share how too’s and ways to stick to it with others but didn’t believe it for yourself - at least not for the marriage that you said you wanted with me. How dare you? Come on man! You got me out here in these streets looking like a god damn fool. Naysayers were lying in wait hoping we wouldn’t make it, and you proved them all right. Well done.

I poured the best of me into our marriage, into my creativity, into our home so that we built a foundation of love that was unbreakable, no matter what you did, no matter what I did, and no matter what anybody said could ever tear us apart. And FUCK me for thinking that our experiences being married to women taught us more about ourselves - gave us agency to explore what it means to live authentically, and fully in who we are as same gender loving men. Guess not.

December made a year since we’ve been divorced. I didn’t think I would make it. Suicidal demons danced around me, sat on my shoulders and spoke in my ear - “there’s a bottle pills over there.”, “you should jump off the 288 bridge.”, “a gun is quicker” - haunting me for months thereafter.

I stared at a bottle of OxyContin that was on the edge of the bar one night in October. The next day I found myself in a mental institution...on a bed as hard as a rock…in a room with a 16 y/o who cuts into his wrist because he too couldn’t find a place of peace. Four dreadful days I spent cramped over a toilet violently throwing up my soul. The counselor asked me if I wanted her to call you. I said yes. I needed you to see me. I needed you to see what your absence was doing to me. I needed you to see how badly I needed you, how badly I needed us, but you denied me your presence. And her call gave you the freedom to enter back into our cramped apartment only to get your clothes leaving empty drawers and bare hangers to meet me in silence upon my return.

What happened after that I could never believe that you, my husband, the man I loved and trusted could ever be capable of doing. The blatant disregard for my health, my life, and livelihood was beyond sinister. Imagine being told that you no longer have insurance coverage after handing the pharmacist the prescription for medications that was saving your life. Nigga, I left a job that I’d been with for 15 years – good ass benefits – vested in the company - believing that you believed enough in me and in us, and in what we were building together, and this is how you do me? I emptied my saving to clear debt, to build another home, to start a business because you said out of your mouth that we were in this together, and I believed you, but it was all a lie. You took the money, and told the builder that we were busting out of the deal. You never picked up the phone to call and say anything to me until I called you about it, nor did you give me the chance to try to save the home. I had to call the realtor myself and hear it from them. How could you just throw it all away? What was the reason? Here I was stuck in an apartment, jobless, in school, under doctor’s care, fearing for my health, and my life trying to manage a new business, provide income for myself, pay rent and utilities, and all you could say was that you were tired. Tired? Are you fucking kidding me!!! Nigga, I left that hospital on antipsychotics! Do you know how many times I felt tired, but never gave up on us? Do you know how tired I was of the insecurities stemming from your weight loss surgery, and childhood issues, but I never gave up on you? Do you know how tiring it was letting you know you were perfect just the way you were over and over again? Yes, it’s tiring pouring into a person their goodness when they don’t believe it for themselves, but I did it because I loved you. There were so many things I could’ve been tired of. Like your ass not having a thought or idea about almost anything. About your mental lackadaisicalness, or the fact that you had no goals or purpose. I lost everything…my money, my home, and you just because you were tired. Fuck outta here with that bullshit.

We had a plan, a mission statement, and a marriage, and leaving when one gets tired wasn’t apart of it. And here we are two years later I haven’t seen you, nor spoken with you, and all I got to hold on to is that you were tired. You are a joke, a runner, a liar, and a thief who lead folks to believe you were something you were not. Ok, let me take a deep breath, because I don’t want this letter to be about me calling you every pejorative I can think of that lessens you as a man. I’ve come too far for that. It’s just that rehashing this is difficult. Plus, this is just the beginning of the damage you left me with. Listing the others would make this letter much too long and trust me this is already too much.

I thought I was losing my mind. So much we’d work to build. So much we had shared with each other… with the world. I was devastated. Again questioning the very fiber of my being, who was I? What kind of karma had caught up with me? Who did I wrong to deserve this type of treatment from someone who said they loved me? I couldn’t grasp it. I paced the floors of the apartment crying out to God pleading for understanding. I was angry and infuriated. I made despicable choices by posting my discontentment on social media. It was a stupid mistake, but sometimes when a person is in tremendous pain they do stupid things. I couldn’t think straight. Depression suffocated me. I was heartbroken, and grief-stricken. If I was to live another day I knew that I had to let it all go, because I no longer knew you, and I didn’t want to be your victim. You made a decision, and I had to deal with it.

“It’s September, yeah, you’ve been gone so doggone long”…-Johnny Taylor

Letting go hasn’t been easy. Just when I think I’m there I realize — not yet. You see, no matter how many times I say fuck you the fact still remains that I loved you, deeply, and I’m not sorry it wasn’t good enough. I did the best that I could. Could I have done better? Probably. Could you have done better? Possibly. But isn’t that how relationships grow? There’s so much I want to pack in, and unpack as I scribe these words on these pages, so many untruths, guilt, hurt , pain, associations gone awry, people who I called friend, lies you told your attorney, all had to be let go too, no matter the magnitude. No matter the loss.

I want to say thank you again for coming home that day and finding me on the floor collapsed and gasping for air. You moved swiftly. I felt your presence. There was always something about your presence that gave me life, and drives to be on, and stay on top of my game. However, I needed you to venture out into the world and bring something back to the relationship that would grow us up as a couple (not to be attached to my hip all the time), and for you to find your identity in spaces that could offer the same beauty that I saw in you. Maybe I got what I asked for. Maybe I was so caught up in what I had going on that I left you to ask yourself the questions, “What about me? What about my dreams?” I ponder if this was the case, and if it really were the case, it was never my intention to make you feel neglected in anyway. But why in the fuck am I saying this now? You knew this then. Yet you created stories about me that were not true. And I thought the communication we established between one another would allow you space to voice your concerns, evidently not. You painted me as a villain, an abuser, you used my personality against me all to make yourself look like the victim. These allegations had me do some real deep down soul searching, and sit in the truths that have worked against me.

• I have a mind of an artist. Can be scatter brain at times.

• I can be argumentative, especially if it has anything to do with black people, politics or religion.

• I have an opinion on almost every damn thing.

• I know that childhood traumas show up sometimes in the way I associate with people.

• I know at times my facial expressions speak louder than my words. And this tongue of mine, lord have mercy. It’s been known to be venomous.

• I know my ego can get a bit out of control.

• I can be filled with passion for a thing, and my passion can sometimes be overwhelming to those around me, misconstrued for anger, or even self-centeredness.

• I can be abrasive, stern, stubborn, ornery, strong willed, adamant, and sensitive about my shit.

• I am a truth teller even if it hurts me, or you

Now this is not completely who I am. I have some amazing qualities that work for m. None need to be listed here, because you know what the are. Listen, I’m not for everybody. All of this you knew 10 plus years before I asked you to marry me. Why would you say yes, and did any of this really warrant the demise of our marriage? Redundant, I know. But we laughed, and we played, and we traveled, and we prayed, and we loved, and we forgave. I mean bro, are these not the making of a marriage? Oh I forgot one thing, trust - that thing that is the easiest to lose and the hardest to gain. If you didn’t trust me anymore why didn’t you just say it? Why make this situation so devastatingly difficult? I guess your actions spoke louder than those words ever could. My mind wouldn’t allow me to rationalize your behavior. That part was the hardest, but I know now I don’t need to.

“Ba de ya, say do you remember, Ba de ya, dancing in September, Ba de ya, golden dreams were shinny days”…- Earth, Wind and Fire

We were both grown abled bodied men with careers and independence. We didn’t need each other for nothing more than the love we shared, the camaraderie, the friendship. Somehow it all started slipping away, slowly vanishing into nothingness. And the questions I once had have been resolved within me, and my resolve is this; I can’t, nor will I ever be responsible for what you don’t say. That shit belongs to you! I will not carry it any longer. I will not let it depress me. I will not lose another minute of sleep over it. There was a time that the husband in me wished I had known. Maybe I could've done something different. At least tried to fix it, made it better, even listened a little more, offered you a hand to hold, and a cuddle when you needed it most, but not anymore. Wishful thinking for something that’s dead doesn’t benefit anyone. It took me awhile to get here, but I’m here now and it feels good to be done. Just as done as you were when you walked out never to return.

I want to make aware that there is another truth here - your experiences of me. Whatever they were, however they were should be acknowledged as well. I admitted earlier that I am a lot. Shit, everybody knows this. But it does not release you from your accountability, and your silence, and unwillingness to communicate speaks more of who you are rather than who I wished you to be. See, some folks think that being quiet is dignified, or signifies being “done” with a situation, but what they miss is silence is also guilt, and guilt is complicit, violent, culpable and shameful. So, it doesn’t matter how cute you are in the reflection of your camera phone, or how sweet your disposition is to others, in the end your actions spoke truly of who you really are��good, bad, and indifferent.

I never told you what happen to me one morning after class. I had a moment that shook me. I was sitting quietly on the train when I heard a voice say “he doesn’t want to be here”. It was soft as if someone was sitting next to me whispering in my ear. There were very few people on the train. Most scatted throughout. This was months before the argument that was the catalyst for our divorce. I ignored it. But those same exact words I remember repeating to Kia that night you said I was going to lose my marriage. I was warned. That still small voice warned me. My subconsciousness was preparing me for that day but I ignored it, because I loved you. I was filled with the desire to make you proud to be my husband, and to be a good husband to you. Yes, you showed me signs of your fragility, timidity, and insecurities, but you also showed me your strength, and endurance, and that’s what I held on to. That’s what I believed in for us.

You weren’t strong enough to deal with me. You thought you were, but time showed us differently. I’ve finally come to grips with it. I’m not bitter, or angry. Disappointed? Yes, but grateful, because I hold no vacancy for anyone who chooses not to share space with me, even if I offered space to them at some point in their lives. I am clear that if it had not been for my light you would still be in the darkness. I say this not in a braggadocios way, but in what I know I bring to the table. You knew it too. That’s why you attached yourself to me. I’m not stupid. Neither are you. Everything is becoming so much clearer. You offered me light as well, in your own way. You taught me many things. Many lessons I have learned with you, and since you.

“Put away the old September blues”…-My Morning Jacket

The other day in therapy I was asked how would I respond if I found out you were dating someone else? I sat there for a moment, took a deep breath in, released it and said – he hurt me just as well as I may have hurt him. I wish him the best, and much success on his journey through life. As I drove home I ruminated over my response to that question. It was the truth. I do wish you the best, but it’s difficult for me not to think… here we are again with another hurt, broken, black homosexual man moving from relationship to relationship hoping to find what he’s missing within himself. God I hope this is not true. For the sake of all the single black men looking for love I hope you were responsible enough to do some self-work. But if not know there’s no judgement here just awareness. We all have our own crosses to bear, paths to tread, journeys to walk. I’m only speaking from my experiences with you. So, if there is someone else I hope you’re able to share with him the things you couldn’t share with me. I hope you stand firmly in your truth, and tell him who you really are and what you are capable of doing. I hope you tell him that there’s still a 400lb damaged insecure little boy trapped in your now 200Ib insecure grown ass man body. I hope you tell him that the gastric sleeve only took the weight off your body not the weight off your heart. And I hope you tell him about the childhood pains, pangs, and abandonment issues that show up in the way you abandon other people. In the way you abandoned your ex-wife, and in the way you abandoned me, your ex-husband. You owe him that. And I hope he offers you grace, and not shame you, or give himself an excuse to leave when he gets tired. I hope he loves you much more than that.

So as difficult as it has been for me to write this as closure, I have, and now I can truly be thankful for the experience. It was hard, but worth every tear, every pain, and every ache my heart once felt for you. I get it, you know, having to release yourself out of a relationship that you were not happy in to ultimately find your happiness. However, I will never fully understand the will to hurt someone that you said you loved as if I was nothing to you. But just like the old cliché says – hurt people hurt people. We are no different. My responsibility is accepting the fact that I chose you, and in choosing you I chose this experience, and I walk away knowing that I am not in control of the outcome. All things are lessons that God would have us learn.

I now I look forward to the many Septembers to come. The leaves will change colors. The wind will blow cooler. People will come, and they will go leaving us with lessons. My life’s work is to always get the lesson, and once I get it, try my best to do better, apologize if I hurt you, forgive, move on, and help someone along the way. This is also my prayer for you, because one thing I know for sure when a black man dares to loves another black man in any capacity this is still a revolutionary act.

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alamante · 6 years ago

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QASBAYAR, Kashmir — It was 9:30 p.m. when Sameer Tiger came to the door, a rifle slung over his shoulder.

Most of the village of Qasbayar, a tucked-away hamlet surrounded by apple orchards and framed by Kashmir’s mountain peaks, was getting ready for sleep. A few yellowish lights burned in windows, but otherwise the village was dark.

“Is Bashir home?” Sameer Tiger asked. “Can we talk to him?”

Bashir Ahmad’s family didn’t know what to do. Mr. Ahmad wasn’t a fighter; he was a 55-year-old pharmacist. And Sameer Tiger was a bit of mystery. He had grown up a skinny kid just down the road and used to lift weights with Mr. Ahmad’s sons at the neighborhood gym; they’d spot each other with the barbells, all friends.

But Sameer Tiger had disappeared for a while and then resurfaced as a bushy-haired militant, a member of an outlawed Kashmiri separatist group that had killed many people, the vast majority of them fellow Kashmiris.

Kashmir’s war, a territorial dispute between India and neighboring Pakistan, has smoldered for decades. Now it is collapsing into itself. The violence is becoming smaller, more intimate and harder to escape.

Years ago, Pakistan pushed thousands of militants across the border as a proxy army to wreak havoc in the Indian-controlled parts of Kashmir. Now, the resistance inside the Indian areas is overwhelmingly homegrown.

The conflict today is probably driven less by geopolitics than by internal Indian politics, which have increasingly taken an anti-Muslim direction. Most of the fighters are young men like Sameer Tiger from quiet brick-walled villages like Qasbayar, who draw support from a population deeply resentful of India’s governing party and years of occupation.

Anyone even remotely associated with politics is in danger. That included Mr. Ahmad, who, when he wasn’t sitting behind the counter of the village pharmacy, was known to host events for a local Kashmiri political party.

“Don’t worry,” Sameer Tiger said, standing at Mr. Ahmad’s door, seeming to sense the family’s anxiety.

He looked Mr. Ahmad’s son right in the eye.

“We don’t mean any harm,” he said. “Your father is like our father.”

Mr. Ahmad rushed home from work and invited Sameer Tiger in for tea. They sat on the living room carpet talking quietly, then Mr. Ahmad nodded goodbye to his wife and son and left with the visitor.

He didn’t have much choice. Sameer Tiger was armed, and insistent, and had arrived with three others who were waiting in the road. The group moved slowly down the unlit lane.

At a bend in the road, in front of a shuttered shop, Sameer Tiger and Mr. Ahmad started arguing, a witness said. Four gun blasts rang out. Mr. Ahmad screamed. The few remaining lights in the neighborhood were suddenly extinguished.

JUST THE NAME KASHMIR conjures a set of very opposing images: snowy mountain peaks and chaotic protests, fields of wildflowers and endless deaths. It is a staggeringly beautiful place that lives up to all its fabled charm, yet even the quietest moments here feel ominous.

Kashmir sits on the frontier of India and Pakistan, and both countries have spilled rivers of blood over it. Three times, they have gone to war, and tens of thousands of people have been killed in the conflict. It is one of Asia’s most dangerous flash points, where a million troops have squared off along the disputed border. Both sides now wield nuclear arms. And the two sides are divided by religion, with Kashmir stuck in the middle.

India, which has controlled most of the Kashmir Valley for the past 70 years, is predominantly Hindu. The valley itself is predominantly Muslim, as is Pakistan. But as the days pass, the conflict has become less of a religiously driven proxy war.

The rebellion, says Imran Khan, Pakistan’s presumed new leader, is now “indigenous.” Mr. Khan, who clearly has a Pakistani perspective on the conflict, says he is determined to negotiate an end to it. His persuasive election victory last month — and the fact that India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, made a friendly phone call to congratulate him — suggests a breakthrough is possible.

But India still loves to blame Pakistan for all its Kashmir problems, and Pakistan, according to Western intelligence agents, continues to send some money and weapons to militants in Kashmir. Many Indian politicians seem in denial that their own politics and policies might be a factor.

India’s swerve to the right in recent years, with the rise of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, has deeply alienated its Muslim minority. Many top members of the ruling party have a very questionable record when it comes to treating Muslims fairly. This has emboldened Hindu supremacists across India, and in recent years, Hindu lynch mobs have targeted and killed Muslims, often based on false rumors. Many of the culprits are lightly punished, if at all, leaving India’s Muslims feeling exposed.

In the Indian-administered parts of Kashmir, where there was already a history of bitter conflict, the new politics have spurred more people to turn against the government. Some pick up guns, others rocks, but the root emotion is the same: Many Kashmiris now hate India.

“This is what’s different,’’ said Siddiq Wahid, a Kashmiri historian who earned his Ph.D from Harvard. “Before, in the 1990s, many Kashmiris felt we can negotiate this, we can talk.’’

“But nobody wants to be part of India now,” he said. “Every Kashmiri is resisting today, in different ways.’’

The latest are children and grandmothers. At almost every recent security operation, as Indian officers closed in on houses where militants were believed to be hiding, they have had to reckon with seething crowds of residents of all ages acting as human shields.

Walk through Kashmiri villages, where little apples are ripening on the trees and the air tastes clean and crisp, and ask people what they want. The most common response is independence. Some say they want to join Pakistan. None say anything good about India, at least not in public.

India’s steely response has pushed away even moderates. Soldiers manhandle residents, cut off roads and barge into homes, saying they are looking for militants, who often hide among ordinary residents. When violent protests erupt, the Indian security services blast live ammunition and buckshot into the crowds, killing or blinding many people, including schoolchildren who are simply bystanders, despite cries from human rights groups to stop.

But while protests against Indian rule have grown in number and size, the armed militancy has become surprisingly small, partly because Pakistan is not providing as much support as it used to. Security officials say there are only around 250 armed militants operating in the Kashmir Valley, down from thousands two decades ago. Most of them are poorly trained and militarily lost. But still, the Indians can’t stomp them out.

“I’ll be honest,” said Mohammad Aslam, a seemingly forthright police commander in southern Kashmir. “For every militant we kill, more are joining.”

THE HUNT FOR SAMEER TIGER began the night he killed Mr. Ahmad, on April 15, 2017.

Back then, he wasn’t widely known as Sameer Tiger. To most, he was still Sameer Bhat, a 17-year-old high school dropout who had worked in a local bakery. The Indian security forces give all the known militants a grade: A through C, with A being the most wanted. Sameer Tiger was a C.

The first place the police searched was Drabgam, his village. The shops are small, tucked into old brick buildings. The jobs are few. Like much of southern Kashmir, Drabgam hangs on the apple business. After the last of the apples have been picked in October and until the new crop is tended in the spring, there is little to do.

Sameer Tiger’s house is one of the more modest: one and a half stories of crudely finished brick, a couple of naked electrical bulbs dangling in the living room, some wet shawls flapping on a line outside. His father is a laborer and farmer who tends just a few acres of orchards. His mother, Gulshan, is chatty and welcoming. They live on a dirt road.

“Sameer loves these,” she said, pressing a handful of coconut candies into my palm and tugging me into their bare living room. The candies were exceptionally sweet and left a milky taste on the tongue.

Sameer Tiger’s parents said their son was a reluctant militant. One afternoon in early 2016, he was accused of throwing rocks at police officers. Sameer Tiger was working in the bakery at the time, his parents said, and they insisted he was innocent.

But the police didn’t listen and dragged him into a truck by his hair, they said. He spent a few days in jail. After he was let out, he disappeared.

Soon his face popped up on separatist websites, his piercing eyes staring at the camera, his bushy hair now down to his shoulders, a Kalashnikov in his hands.

“When we saw that,” said Maqbool, his father, “we said goodbye.”

More than 250,000 Indian Army soldiers, border guards, police officers and police reservists are stationed in the valley, outnumbering the militants 1,000 to one. Most militants don’t last two years. One fighter, a former college sociology professor, was killed in May just two days after he joined.

Their attacks tend to be quixotic and they usually die in a hail of automatic weapon fire. Their assassinations and killings are not militarily significant, more acts of protest against Indian rule. Of the approximately 250 known militants, police officials said, only 50 or so came from Pakistan, and most of the rest, the locals, have never left the valley.

Sameer Tiger’s parents said he changed his last name from Bhat to Tiger in honor of a brawny uncle with that nickname who was known for his immense strength.

When I asked about the killing of Bashir Ahmad, his father looked down at the carpet. For the first time, he seemed embarrassed about his son.

“Bashir was a good man,” he mumbled. “Sameer wasn’t there to kill him. It was an accident.”

It might have been. On this point, Sameer Tiger’s family and a survivor of the shooting seem to agree.

The night Mr. Ahmad was killed, the militants had also pulled another village elder from his home, Mohamad Altaf, a first cousin of Mr. Ahmad. Both were among Qasbayar’s elite, landowners who supported the Peoples Democratic Party, Kashmir’s dominant political organization.

The party used to sympathize with separatism, but to win control of the state parliament, it joined hands with the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party three years ago. Many Kashmiris accused it of selling out to Indian rule.

In June, the alliance suddenly broke apart, leaving a vacuum in the State Assembly. India’s central government took over running the state. Kashmiris are now terrified that the government will escalate military operations; the sense of hopelessness is rising.

According to Mr. Altaf, as they walked through the unlit lanes of Qasbayar with the militants, Sameer Tiger urged him and Mr. Ahmad to renounce their party affiliation. When Mr. Ahmad started arguing, Sameer Tiger ordered both men to lie facedown and close their eyes.

Mr. Altaf was shot once in the back of his right knee and not critically hurt. He thinks the intent was to send a message.

But Mr. Ahmad was shot three times in his legs, the bullets moving upward toward his waist, Mr. Altaf said. His cousin, a lifelong friend, bled to death on the spot. Maybe the Kalashnikov jumped in Sameer Tiger’s hands. Maybe he squeezed a split second too long.

Mr. Altaf can’t stop thinking about it. The betrayal haunts him.

“Bashir invited Sameer Tiger in for tea, tea,” he said.

His cousin’s death seems so pointless. He wonders if Sameer Tiger didn’t set out that night to kill. Maybe, Mr. Altaf thinks, he just didn’t know how to use his gun.

These days, the Kashmiri militants don’t have many opportunities to practice shooting, police officials said. It is not like the 1990s, when thousands of young Kashmiri men slipped across the border to training camps on the Pakistani side. The Indians have sealed much of the contested frontier, which runs about 450 miles.

The Israelis have been surreptitiously helping them, providing security cameras, night vision gear, drones and other surveillance equipment along the border to stop big infiltrations. All this, coupled with the fact that Pakistan has closed most of its militant camps under pressure from the United States, has pushed the fighting away from the border, and deeper into the villages.

Kashmiris speak of a psychological tension that divides communities, individual families and sometimes even the same person. On one hand, people want to support a functioning society — to have their children go to school, get jobs, see some economic development — and Indian control represents that. On the other, they feel real sympathy for a cause, Kashmiri independence, that they consider just.

“Let’s be realistic: India’s never going to give up this land,” said one young Kashmiri who asked that his identity not be revealed because he could be labeled a collaborator.

“I can say such things in my house. But as soon as I step outside, even into my own street, I can’t say that. It has to be ‘Azadi! Azadi! Azadi!’ ” he said, using the word for freedom. “It’s like you have to be two different people, all the time.”

He sighed.

“It’s exhausting.”

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE IN KILLING MILITANTS, Officer Ashiq Tak explained, isn’t finding them.

“Information is coming in all the time,” he said. “We know their friends, their girlfriends, which houses they’re using.

“The trick,” he said, “is laying the cordon.”

Officer Tak is another example of how this war is shrinking. He grew up in Qasbayar, a couple of miles from Sameer Tiger. Mr. Ahmad was his mother’s brother. This winter he found himself, as the commanding officer of a tactical police unit in southern Kashmir, hunting the man who killed his uncle.

Sameer Tiger was emerging as a militant’s militant. He was increasingly active — and not just on social media.

He attacked police stations, he recruited new fighters and he supplied pistols to young men to carry out assassinations, Officer Tak said. The police often discovered where he was hiding, and set up their security cordons, but he was slippery.

“We almost had him,” Officer Tak said in February. “But he escaped, dressed like a girl.”

Officer Tak seemed dispirited by all the support for Sameer Tiger, and the fact that many Kashmiris consider police officers like himself to be traitors. Unlike soldiers in the Indian Army, which is recruited from across the country, police officers in the region come from within the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and dozens have been killed.

Many Kashmiris see them as collaborators and call them “Modi’s dogs,” a reference to India’s prime minister, who rose to power as part of the Hindu right-wing movement.

Officer Tak said that Kashmiris had so little faith in the security services that when a police officer or soldier killed a civilian, people didn’t even bother demanding justice.

“Anywhere else, they’d ask for an investigation,” he said. “Here, they just take the body and go away.”

“That’s a bad sign,” he said. “That’s total alienation.”

SAMEER TIGER RESURFACED in late April, a year after Mr. Ahmad’s death. A few miles from his house, witnesses said, he stopped a car carrying a local politician and shot him dead. The attack, conducted in the daytime and on a busy road, was unusually audacious. India’s national news media seized upon it, and for the first time Sameer Tiger was front-page news.

The hunt for him intensified but more civilians were rallying to the defense of militants, often barricading the roads as the police closed in and pelting officers with rocks.

“It’s getting very hard to do operations,” Officer Tak grumbled.

Around this time a mysterious video appeared on Facebook in which Sameer Tiger issued a threat to Maj. Rohit Shukla, one of the area’s commanding army officers: “Tell Shukla to come and face me.”

A few days later, on April 30, the army got a tip that Sameer Tiger was hiding in a house in the center of Drabgam. Though he was now a highly wanted militant, upgraded to an A rating, it seemed he had never strayed far from home.

This time, the Indian Army didn’t arrive en masse. They used mud-smeared dump trucks packed with soldiers wearing traditional pheran cloaks, guns hidden. The villagers thought they were laborers. The soldiers quietly surrounded the house and called for backup.

The soldiers sent in two rounds of emissaries, including village elders, to persuade Sameer Tiger to surrender. He replied with a burst of bullets, hitting Major Shukla in the shoulder.

The sound of gunfire served as an alarm, setting off an eruption. The village mobilized. Boys, girls, men and women scampered out of their houses and rushed into the road with stones in their hands. Mosque loudspeakers blared: “Sameer Tiger is trapped! Go help him!” The whole town, quite openly, was rallying to an outlaw’s side.

As additional army trucks rumbled in, packed with troops, more civilians rushed forward, trying to insert themselves between the troops and Sameer Tiger. One young man was shot dead; the crowd kept coming.

But the cordon had been well laid, growing to nearly 300 soldiers and police officers. The civilians, however determined, couldn’t break it.

Several police commanders said security officers then moved in, firing a rocket at the house. Flames burst out. Sameer Tiger scampered onto a rooftop. The soldiers opened up with automatic weapons from four directions. He was hit several times.

A CULTURE OF DEATH IS SPREADING across Kashmir. The militants have become the biggest heroes. People paint their names on walls. They wear T-shirts showing their bearded faces. They speak of them affectionately, as if they are close friends. The militants are especially revered after they are dead.

On a Tuesday morning, May 1, Sameer Tiger’s lifeless body, riddled with holes and soaked in blood, was hoisted onto a makeshift wooden platform in the yard of one of Drabgam’s mosques. Thousands poured in from across the valley. For hours they chanted his name: “Tiger! Tiger! Sameer Tiger!”

Boys scrambled up trees and scurried across tin roofs, the light metal popping beneath their gym shoes, to find any vantage point. Others fought through the nearly impenetrable crowd to the funeral pyre, just to gently stroke Sameer Tiger’s beard or to kiss his pale face goodbye. Many vowed to join the militants.

One woman who identified herself as a separatist leader looked out at the sea of mourners and gravely smiled.

“We are winning,” she said. “These bodies are our assets.”

A few hundred yards away, on the rooftop where Sameer Tiger had been cornered, a team of boys wearing religious skullcaps scrubbed a rust-colored splotch. A crowd pressed in to watch.

“Young ones, tell me: What does the spilling of this blood mean?” one man shouted.

“Azadi!” the crowd roared back.

The boys worked fast, heads down, sweat trickling off their temples. They used wet rags to mop up the splotch. They squeezed the blood-water mixture into a copper urn, to be saved. An imam watching closely told them to capture every last drop of blood.

Hari Kumar and Sameer Yasir contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on of the New York edition with the headline: ‘These Bodies Are Our Assets’: Blood and Grief in an Intimate War. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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