In Peer Bagh, Srinagar, B.L. Misri was known as a quiet, disciplined man, the kind of person who carried the rhythm of family life with steady devotion. As a government employee, his days were marked by the routine of office work and the ordinary joys of returning home in the evenings to family conversation, meals, and small neighborhood gatherings. He represented a generation of Kashmiri Pandits who believed in education, service, and the dignity of hard work.

That world collapsed on 23 March 1990, when Misri was assassinated. His killing, recorded in community documentation of those dark years, was one among many targeted acts of terror that spread panic among Pandit families. Peer Bagh, with its orchards and reputation for quiet, was not spared the violence that was sweeping Srinagar. For Misri, the ordinary had become perilous; simply living in his own home had become an act of risk.

The manner of his death left his family broken. A wife suddenly widowed, children left fatherless, elders staring into the emptiness of exile, these were the silent consequences that official records never capture. His absence reverberated beyond his household, affecting neighbors, colleagues, and relatives who had long looked to him for support and companionship.

The tragedy of Misri’s loss lies in how brutally it severed the threads of everyday life. His chair at the dining table stood empty, his footsteps no longer echoed in the courtyard, and the ordinary routines he embodied, so easily taken for granted, became an aching void for those left behind. For his children, the memory of a protective hand, a father’s voice guiding them, was cut short by violence. For his community, his death reinforced the chilling message that no Pandit family in Kashmir was safe.

To remember B.L. Misri today is to recall more than just the date of his killing. It is to restore him as a man who lived with dignity, who worked with honesty, and who deserved the simple peace of growing old in his homeland. His life, like that of so many others, was taken not for anything he did, but simply for who he was. That injustice, and the grief it created, remain etched in the memory of Kashmir’s Pandits.