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In the stillness of the night of May 29, in 2009, two women stepped out in Shopian, Kashmir, unaware they were walking into the dark mouth of history. Asiya Jan, only 17, and her sister-in-law Neelofar Jan, 22, never came home. The next morning, they were found: lifeless, violated, discarded…by the banks of a shallow stream. The meadow, once blooming with spring, now held the silence of horror. Their clothes were torn, their bodies bore signs too brutal to be spoken of. The valley didn’t just lose two daughters that day: it lost its breath. But the crime didn’t end with their death. The real horror began after. The state called it drowning. As if the waters had hands. As if the bruises and blood could lie. As if Kashmir had forgotten how to mourn. They told us they slipped and fell. But the people knew: rivers do not rape. The autopsy was tampered. Doctors silenced. Witnesses threatened. And those who cried out for justice were beaten into quiet. But how do you silence a mother whose child was torn from her arms? How do you bury truth when the land itself weeps? Asiya wanted to be a teacher. Neelofar had a baby she’d left asleep at home that night. Their dreams didn’t end in that stream, but were drowned in courts, headlines, and cover-ups. Their story is not an exception in Kashmir: it is a pattern. A pattern of how the state weaponizes silence, how it turns mothers into mourners, rivers into graves, and justice into a cruel joke. But we remember. We remember Asiya’s youth, her laughter, her notebooks. We remember Neelofar’s gentleness, her child who grew up without a mother. We remember because forgetting is betrayal. We remember because our memory is resistance. And when we say their names: Asiya, Neelofar, we are not mourning. We are testifying. Let the world hear it loud and clear: They did not drown. They were raped. They were murdered. And they were Kashmiri.