Caught in the crossfire

Maqbool Sheikh dreaded hearing a knock at the door of his home. For he was the most intimate witness to one of the world’s most enduring and forgotten conflicts, the struggle over Kashmir. As the only autopsy expert at the police hospital in Srinagar, it was his job to conduct post mortems on those shot, stabbed or blown to pieces — and the bodies arrived at the rate of around 1,000 a year.

Each time, as he drove back to the mortuary, he wondered whether he would be confronted with the corpse of a child, a woman or another young man. The law required him to determine how each one died, and his judgment could affect how their families were treated — were they a terrorist, a police informer or simply another innocent bystander? His scalpels sought answers in the destroyed bodies of the dead.

Maqbool gained some solace from knowing that when he stitched the bodies together he lessened the pain for the families who would see them.