The Long Line of Hope

Book excerpt: Stories of love, loss and longing lie buried under a thin and worn out sheet of hope in Kashmir. Every human heart breathes hope, every human soul pumps hope in and out of its heart. It is hope alone which gives to Kashmir and its people a reason for existence, every new sunrise, the warmth of a fireplace, the smell of its saffron fields. With hope indeed is bound up the legendary tale of the resilience of its people. This long story chronicles four distinct, inter-related yet somewhat contradictory tales of hope and shows how hope is not always an accompaniment of love, peace, and justice but can also be a function of agony, deprivation, anguish, and inter-generational seething rage.