Over a decade ago, when I received the picture of my ancestral house in Kashmir for the first time since the forced displacement in 1990, I showed it to my grandfather. He stared at the picture with absolute stillness, did not utter a single word, and retired to his room. It was the year 2012. A year later, my grandfather passed away in Jammu. Several years ago, he had declined to sell the ancestral house and land when a couple of Muslim neighbours visited him. His wife, my grandmother, had already departed from this world in 2001. Nobody from our...