Taken

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              "text": "“He was very young and had severe torture marks on his body. We took off his clothes before burying him, hoping that his family might turn up one day,” said Ghulam Rasoon Mir, a Kitchama local. Nearly 135 unidentified bodies lie buried in this mass grave.",
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              "text": "Indian Border Security Force personnel arrested Khadeeja’s 18-year-old son Riyaz Ahmad Dar in September 1994. Riyaz’s father, Ghulam Mohammad Dar, had served in the Indian Army in the 1980s and tried to exert his influence there to trace his son, but he was unable to do so. Khadeeja, who lives in Baramulla, scoured nearly every jail and torture centre in the area looking for him; but in 2002, after Ghulam Mohammad died, she lost patience and stopped searching. “My heart says he is alive. I hope he comes back before I die,” she said.",
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              "text": "Hussain Bibi lives with her children in Zamoor Pattan, a village near the Line of Control. On 15 August 1997, soldiers from the JAK Rifles—a regiment of the Indian armed forces— picked up her husband, Ahmad Hussain Shah, 45 years old at the time, and son Nazir Hussain, 18 years old at the time, from their home. They worked as porters. “When I visited the camp where the soldiers that arrested them were stationed, they denied it. I was sent back after being threatened with dire consequences if I continued searching for them,” Bibi said.",
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              "text": "Hajra, a 74-year-old woman, sits in her home in Boniyar, Uri, and runs her fingers through soil from her son’s grave. She learnt, after 18 years, that her son had died near Uri in 1997. The soil was brought to her in 2015, as she was too weak to trek into the mountains and visit the spot where he was buried.",
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              "text": "Sixty-seven-year-old Raja Begum’s son, Abdul Majeed Lone, disappeared in the winter of 1998, during a trip to buy vegetables from a village called Chandoosa. He was 23 years old at the time. Eyewitnesses said that they saw him being arrested by Indian soldiers and taken away. Raja’s younger son, Abdul Qayoon, who worked as a labourer, was found dead in a nearby forest three years later. Raja lives with her husband and 17-year-old daughter in Tangwari, a village in the district of Baramulla, where this image was taken.",
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              "text": "Abdul Majeed, Raja’s missing son, was seen for the last time taking this route to Chandoosa, a small hilly village in northern Kashmir. Raja fainted on the same road after walking almost eight miles to track down her son, a month after he went missing in 1998. She was found lying unconscious on the ground with mud in her mouth. A year later, she was diagnosed with a serious heart ailment.",
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              "text": "Rafiqa, who suffers from schizophrenia, is pacified by her son, Nisar, during a psychotic episode in her home in the village of Hudpora. Her husband, Abdul Hamid Shah, was 24 years old when he was picked up from their home on 9 April 1990. Rafiqa spends whole nights shouting and wandering around the neighbourhood in Hudpora. Nisar told me that she thinks her husband still lives with them.",
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              "text": "An ambulance stands at a hospital near Rafiqa’s home. Nisar explained that the vehicle has carted many dead bodies around the town, and that every time it passes through the area, she starts screaming, “Nisar’s father has come.”",
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              "text": "Children play near one of the most famous mass graveyards in Kashmir’s Kitchama village. In 2009, the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice, in collaboration with local human-rights groups, found nearly 2,700 graves in northern Kashmir and conjectured that the graves contained the bodies of disappeared people. People in the area say that the bodies were brought by the security agencies in the middle of the night and locals were asked to bury them.",
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              "text": "Seventy-six-year-old Taja Begum spends most of her time perched at the window of her small mud house in the town of Handwara. She lives alone. Her sons Ghulam Nabi Dar and Mushtaq Ahmad Dar went missing on the eve of Eid in 2002. They were 28 and 14 at the time.She does not remember the exact date, but recalls that it happened only a few months after the Indian forces had killed her oldest son, Mohammad Amin Dar, 32 years old at the time. Taja’s husband died of a brain haemorrhage three years later. Though locals offered to help her build a new house, she refused. “I will live here till I die because if my sons return, they will come straight to the house where I brought them up.”",
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              "text": "A veiled woman, who did not want to be named, sits on a platform beside her younger brother’s grave in the “Martyrs’ graveyard” in Baramulla. He was killed by Indian forces in 2008. Her older brother disappeared in 1990. The family searched everywhere but was unable to trace him.",
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              "text": "Twenty-year-old Mohammad Iqbal Taas and 18-year-old Mohammad Ismail Taas were two brothers who disappeared, three years apart, after being arrested by the Indian army. Their house lies abandoned, since their parents, Alif Deen Tass and Khazooran Begum, have died as well. This image shows the shadows of two locals as they walk past the house.",
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              "text": "Indian soldiers picked up Saja Begum’s sons Ghulam Mohiuddin, 30 years old at the time, and Abdul Rashid, 27 years old at the time, during a crackdown in Fatehgarh, Baramulla district, on 12 May 1991. Saja Begum, who is pictured near her home in Fatehgarh, was shot in the thigh while trying to prevent their arrests. “I have searched for them in many jails and torture centres, but couldn’t find them,” she said. “In 1992, I lost another son, Ghulam Hassan Lone, who was killed by Indian forces. Now I am very old, but I pray to God to keep me alive till my sons return.”",
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              "text": "A woman named Sakina sits beside a poster of a Kashmiri “half-widow” designed by Rollie Mukherjee—an Indian artist. Sakina, herself a half-widow, has been struggling to track down her husband, Ajaz Ahmad, who went missing on 2 February 2002. Sakina’s in-laws asked her to leave the house. She now lives with her parents in Bandipora, where this image was taken. They are keen that she marries again, but she intends to wait for her husband until she dies.",
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              "text": "Haleema sits in a neighbour’s car in the village of Kulangam on the way to a sit-in against enforced disappearances. Haleema’s husband, Abdul Rashid Ganaie, was arrested by soldiers from the 131st battalion of the Indian Border Security Force, on 5 January 1998. For three years, she attempted to trace her husband and got involved with the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, to assist other women whose family members had disappeared.",
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              "text": "Besides the emotional impact of disappearances, family members often have to grapple with their their socioeconomic rights being threatened. Shaista, pictured on the left, was two months old when unknown gunmen abducted her father, Bilal Ahmad Peer, on 23 August 1993. Soon after Peer’s disappearance, Shaista and her mother were denied the right to the property they would otherwise have inherited from her father. Since 2011, Shaista, who lives in the village of Chakloo, has been fighting a legal battle for the property. Her cousin Shameema, pictured on the right, also lost her father to unknown gunmen in June 1995.",
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              "text": "Altaf Ahmad Chichi, of northern Kashmir’s Katiayanwali village, disappeared after the Indian army arrested him on 16 November 2002. He was 22 years old at the time. His brother Bashir Ahmad said the only picture they had left of Altaf was a print-out, because human-rights activists had taken all the photographs. It remains on the wall of their home in Katiayanwali.",
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              "text": "On 28 December 1999, soldiers from the Indian army took Sarwar Jan’s son Jalal Din from his home in the village of Zamoor Pattan. She searched for him in army camps, jails and torture centres, but could not find him. A few weeks after Jalal’s arrest, a local told the family that he had heard Jalal’s screams in a nearby forest the night after he was picked up. Sarwar said that she suspects her son was tortured to death.",
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IN AN IMAGE CAPTURED by the documentary photographer Showkat Nanda, a faded Khan dress—a type of salwar kameez commonly worn by Kashmiri men—is shown tied to a tree trunk next to a mass grave in the desolate village of Kitchama, northern Kashmir. The garment is weather-beaten and covered with moss. According to Nanda, locals in the area said that it belonged to a very young boy, whose dead body the police had handed over to them in 2004. They buried the body and left the clothes outside, hoping that someone would eventually recognise them and identify the boy. When Nanda took the photograph, 12 years after the boy’s death, no one had yet come forward to do so.

The photo appears in The Endless Wait, an ongoing documentary project that Nanda began in 2014. Much of the series consisted of portraits of Kashmiri women whose male family members went missing after being arrested by Indian armed forces. Thousands of Kashmiri men have vanished after such encounters—the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, which documents disappearances in Kashmir, estimates that there have been between 8,000 and 10,000 disappearances since the insurgency began, in 1989. The relatives of disappeared men often frequent graveyards, camps and jails, searching for snippets of information. Some wives have waited for decades for their husbands to return, and have had to raise children on their own, unable to marry again because of their uneasy limbo as half-widows.

Nanda was born, and still lives, in Baramulla: a large garrison city near the Line of Control, close to the sub-district of Uri and the district of Kupwara, both places with prominent mass graves. The streets of Baramulla teem with soldiers and informers, who keep the town under strict surveillance. In December 1989, when Nanda was a young boy, his cousin Parvaiz was among a crowd of peaceful protestors who were fired upon and killed by the police at Cement Bridge. A Baramulla landmark, this has a long history of protests, and just a day earlier, a massive gathering in the same spot had celebrated the release of five militants from prison. A few months later, Nanda’s brother Sajad died after slipping from a steep ridge while attempting to cross a mountain pass into Pakistan-controlled territory. According to Nanda, Sajad was on his way to receive arms training beyond the Line of Control, as part of a wave of young Kashmiris who did so at the time before returning to join an ongoing anti-India uprising. The family only found out what had happened to him when the people accompanying him returned to Kashmir after two years. “We didn’t know if he was dead or alive,” Nanda said. “I have seen my own mother suffering with the pain of losing a son. We didn’t even have a chance to see his grave.” While coming to terms with the death of a loved one gets easier over time, Nanda said, confronting a disappearance is perpetually nerve-racking—“The disappearance of a loved one immortalises a person’s pain.”

Although Nanda initially wanted to be a surgeon, the violence he witnessed pushed him to become a storyteller, and to illustrate the suffering and resilience of those around him. He was raised primarily by women, since the men in his neighbourhood fled in droves whenever government forces came searching for suspected militants, afraid that they would be picked up as well. “So in a way we kids were able to initially see this conflict through the pain and misery reflected on the faces of women—mothers, grandmothers, aunts, friends’ mothers, neighbours,” he said. “A woman’s face was the most immediate and prominent symbol of suffering in Kashmir.”

At the same time, Nanda added, he was intent on challenging this one-dimensional portrayal of Kashmiri women. “They become the poster-ladies of victimhood. My motive was to go beyond the routine photo-ops and front-page pictures of protesting women. I wanted to know how they live their lives, earn their livelihood, spend time with their families and raise and educate their children.” He also recognised the shadow that his brother could cast over his work. “I don’t want people to look at my work and say, ‘You can’t expect a credible story from someone who is the brother of a person who aspired to be a militant,’” Nanda said.

The long list of disappearances points to one thing, Nanda believes—that Kashmiris have been subjected to an unmatched oppression and that justice has been consistently denied. “It’s also true that, for some, time has changed nothing,” he said. “The long and endless wait for their loved ones might have taken away so many years of their lives, but they still think that they are at the same point where they started. They missed their loves ones then. They miss them now.”

This project was produced with support from the Magnum Emergency Fund.