The hope isn’t so much that you don’t suffer—Kashmiris appreciate, nay, love suffering—but just that you never have to do it alone. It’s a nice gesture. I believed, once, that our families could protect us from forthcoming harm just by walking us to the altar. I believed we were building a new framework where we would be partnered in our tragedies and in our successes. It was true for my mother, so I wanted it to be true for me, too.
