Baramulla, a city on the Jhelum River, thirty miles northwest of Srinagar, Kashmir. All photographs from Kashmir, August 2019 © Abid Bhat. Bhat’s work was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
One winter’s night in the Kashmir Valley, the power went out. A bone-piercing cold swept through my hotel room in Srinagar. The next morning, the radiator, the water heater, and all the light switches were useless things. I knew that I would feel isolated in the Valley, given that India had imposed a communications blockade three months earlier, snapping internet, cellular, and landline connections for seven million people. Nevertheless, I was unprepared for the feeling of total solitude that the absence of connectivity—and now power—provoked in me, mere hours after arriving. I was unmoored, like I belonged to nothing.
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