The night of 12 October 1990 in Khonmuha, Pulwama, should have been an ordinary one. Families were winding down, lamps glowing in courtyards, conversations dimming into sleep. But for the Razdan household, the night shattered into horror when masked men forced their way in. They came with intent, and there was no time for words. Pushker Nath Razdan, son of Tika Lal Razdan, was struck down and dragged outside, the panic in his family’s cries echoing through the village. His wife, only forty-three at the time, clutched at her children two young sons, twenty-three and twenty, and a sixteen-year-old daughter, powerless as terror unfolded in front of their eyes.

The bullet tore into the left side of Pushker Nath’s chest. For the family, minutes became endless hours. Neighbors remained indoors, paralyzed by fear. No one came. The silence of those who might once have shared bread or blessings was as wounding as the gunfire.

It was not the state but his own loved ones who struggled to carry him, desperate to keep hope alive. He was taken to the Army Hospital at Badami Bagh, Srinagar, where surgeons fought to save him. The family clung to the fragile thread that perhaps, even after the cruelty of the night, life would hold on. But the wounds were fatal. Surgery could not undo what the masked men had chosen to do.

Pushker Nath’s funeral took place before the police from Pantachauk station even arrived. By then, the rituals of mourning had already passed, and what remained was a household altered forever. His wife stood bereft, her children at ages when guidance was most needed, suddenly left without the steadying hand of their father.

The killers were believed to be members of Hizbul Mujahideen, part of the terror that swept through Kashmir in those years, choosing targets not for what they had done but for who they were. In Pushker Nath’s case, it was not just a man killed but a family broken, a community driven deeper into fear, and a silence imposed on those who stayed behind.

The story of Pushker Nath Razdan is not remembered in statistics alone. It is remembered in the unanswered cries of his family that night, in the daughter who lost her father too soon, and in the absence that still hangs heavy in the air of Khonmuha.